Rock Star Babylon: Outrageous Rumors, Legends, and Raucous True Tales of Rock and Roll Icons

by Jon Holmes

Overview

Fun, shocking, and compulsively readable, Rock Star Babylon is a guilty pleasure for fans everywhere who want to know more about rock stars behaving badly.

From Ozzy Osbourne to Chuck Berry, Courtney Love to Keith Moon, Rock Star Babylon has gathered together the most outrageous antics and diva-esque misbehavior in the annals of rock. Here in a single volume are the most wickedly entertaining stories of over-the-top parties, crazy divorces, hidden cameras, trashed hotel rooms, misapplied epileptic interventions, and innocent headless bats. Running the gamut from the rude to the ridiculous, these reports of rock-and-rollers at their worst come straight from the mouths of those who were there—or those who were there but left early and heard about it afterward.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780452289413
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/24/2008
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jon Holmes is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and comedian whose writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Times, and Time Out (London). He proudly holds the record for the largest-ever fine for taste and decency offenses in British broadcasting history.

Editorial Reviews

Clever but warped.

Sunday Times (London)

Jon Holmes is a genius.

Heat

This compilation of wild, salacious rock 'n' roll debauchery stories, most of which may or may not be true, probably seemed like a good idea at the time. But in the hands of British writer and comedian Holmes, it's a self-aggrandizing mess that's to be endured more than enjoyed. With smug self-satisfaction, Holmes blithely relates tales of rock excess, many of which have already made the rounds: the infamous Van Halen rider that stipulated no brown M&Ms backstage, Stevie Nicks's bottoms-up delivery system for cocaine and a fair number of non-events like KISS's inclusion of band members' blood in the ink of their 1970s comic book. Holmes goes from bad to worse by padding the book with pointless footnotes that lean heavily on U.K. references and add nothing to the narrative. Perhaps worst of all, most of the stories (except for the most famous, which were already verified by others-i.e., "As Ozzy told Rolling Stone") have not been fact-checked, leaving it up to the reader to determine their veracity. The result is frustrating, unfunny and often pointless.
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