Success of books by Keith Richards and others sparks publishing scramble for big five stars without book deals
Call them the Big Five. Game hunters have their wish-list of trophy animals, and rock music has its own – the elite group of rock stars yet to be bagged for publishing deals. This month, after HarperCollins snapped up the autobiography of Pete Townshend of the Who after a bidding war, publishers' sights are firmly set on the few remaining major talents to have held back from a book deal. Paul McCartney, Elton John, Robert Plant and Bruce Springsteen are on that list, but at the top for many in the book industry is David Bowie.
Over the last year, memoirs by members of the Rolling Stones, Mötley Crüe and Guns N' Roses have reached the bestseller lists. As a result, a further series of stadium names – all now in their fifties and sixties, some against the odds – have decided to chronicle their lives and times, turning 2011 into the year of the rock memoir. Turning the volume up well beyond 11 with tales of fast living and hard drinking, rockers Patti Smith, Steve Tyler and Sammy Hagar of Van Halen have all been vying for space in the book shops. In Britain, the autobiography of the slightly younger Shaun Ryder is due to be published later this summer.
The really big prizes, like Bowie – recently described as the "big white whale" by Touchstone publisher Stacy Creamer – are the most tantalising prospects of all. "I will retire if I can get David Bowie," Creamer said.
Bowie has already signed a book deal with Penguin, but it is for a typically idiosyncratic kind of memoir. The planned book Bowie: Object has no confirmed publication date, but is billed as the first in a series to feature 100 items taken from the 63-year-old musician's archive to "give an insight into the life of one of the most unique music and fashion icons in history". The design-led first volume will be "annotated with insightful, witty and personal text written by Bowie himself". The musician was due to deliver the manuscript to his New York literary agent, Andrew Wylie, in December but there has been no further word.
According to Weidenfeld and Nicolson's Alan Samson, the British publisher behind Keith Richards's hit memoir, Life, it is no surprise if the trail has gone a little cold.
"The number of wild goose chases I have been on over the years, whether it was Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan or Sting, is incredible. Of course, they have all done books by now, and Bob Dylan's Chronicles were huge, but Sting has still only done his early life," said Samson, who was narrowly beaten to the rights to the Townshend book this month.
"At every book fair in the last 20 years there has always been an A-list rock star on the schedules. But to pin one down is probably harder than pinning down a Hollywood actor."
For Samson, the key element is to find the band member who writes the music. "That is what the market seems to want most. It can't just be a book about drinking a bottle of whisky a day, because lots of people do that. What lots of people don't do, is stand in front of a stadium full of people and sing their songs."
A good lyricist is also a useful thing, Samson thinks. Steven Tyler's book Roll 'Em, published this spring, let the writer off the leash. "I've been mythicised, Mick-icised, eulogised and fooligised, I've been Cole-Portered and farmer's-daughtered, I've been Led Zepped and 12-stepped. I'm a rhyming fool and so cool that me, Fritz the Cat, and Mohair Sam are the baddest cats that am," teased the Aerosmith frontman in promotional material. The book went back to the presses for a new print run six times before publication based on the number of advance orders.
"The nature of celebrity memoirs has changed," said Samson. "What used to be a series of well-polished anecdotes about dancing with Frank Sinatra, or the part that Sammy Davis Jnr played in changing a life, is now all about obstacles and about overcoming them. Whether it is a bad haircut, a painful divorce or drug and alcohol abuse, people want to know how they got over it."
Samson is shortly to publish the memoir of Duff McKagan, the former Guns N' Roses bassist. It is titled It's So Easy (And Other Lies) and the omens look good: the author's drink habit was once prodigious enough to give rise to the name of the beer in The Simpsons and a recent book by his fellow band member, Slash, sold unexpectedly well.
With a former drinker, simply recalling the crucial landmarks over the decades can prove a problem. Samson said Keith Richards's memory was "amazingly good", which helped the book to stay on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list for 22 weeks, but the veteran music promoter Harvey Goldsmith concedes some of the stars he has worked with could have trouble remembering the details.
"At times Led Zeppelin didn't know whether it was Dortmund or Dusseldorf or Denmark," said Goldsmith, who is planning to get around to his own autobiography some day. "But with established acts like that it is a great story and so is worth waiting for. There is 35 years of music history there and the income from selling records has fallen away, so they can either make money from touring, or from a book."
Music writer Luke Bainbridge says the appetite for these books is enormous. "It is because you have got a set of rock stars and of fans who have reached the right age. These are the bands doing the classic album tours, whether it is Primal Scream or Suede."
Bainbridge suspects that the unpredicted success of Mötley Crüe's book The Dirt has now persuaded publishers that this is an increasingly lucrative area. "Lots of people read The Dirt who would never have bought a Mötley Crüe album," he said.
As the HarperCollins editor who scooped Townshend's memoir told the New York Times: "It appears the entire Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is now sitting in front of the computer." And the same is true of Britain's ageing rockers.
