Read Me
DMC on His New Children’s Book Darryl’s Dream and Run-DMC Classics
Darryl “DMC” McDaniels is 57, but he still speaks with the boundless energy and commanding voice that he changed the music world with as a teenager. Whether he’s talking about the MCs that made him want to rap in the early ‘80s, his youth outreach work, or his upcoming single with Sebastian Bach, Travis Barker, Duff McKagan, and Mick Mars, DMC’s enthusiasm is infectious. McDaniels founded Run-DMC in 1983 with his friends Joseph “Run” Simmons and Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell. Over the next few years, the trio became hip hop trailblazers, the first rap group with a gold album, then the first with a platinum album, and then a multi-platinum album. Run-DMC, who we named the 7th most influential artist of the last 35 years, has been largely inactive since Mizell’s tragic 2002 death, but DMC ha...
Read Me: Will Sergeant’s Bunnyman
Will Sergeant never considered himself a writer. “I was rubbish at school. I wasn’t interested in English at all or anything like that. I’m rubbish at writing. When at school, I used to just write any old crap just to get through. It would just be scribble. They’d be like, ‘What the hell’s this?’” he says with a laugh, on the irony of writing one of the year’s most lauded rock ‘n roll memoirs. The Echo & the Bunnymen guitarist seems awed by the book’s glowing reception: “It’s been in all kinds of books of the year lists and stuff in papers and websites and podcasts of people, and stuff like that,” he smiles. Bunnyman is the history lesson we didn’t know we needed. Born in 1958 in a post-war Britain, Sergeant strings together vivid and often distressing snippets of growing up in an ordi...
Read Me: Raekwon’s From Staircase to Stage: The Story of Raekwon and the Wu-Tang Clan
Thirty years ago, Raekwon (or Corey Woods, as the government knows him) was just a young man from Staten Island with a passion for rapping. A year later, he and his childhood friend, now known as Ghostface Killah, joined seven other kids from New York City’s fifth borough to form Wu-Tang Clan. The rest is well-documented hip-hop history. In his new memoir, From Staircase to Stage: The Story of Raekwon and the Wu-Tang Clan, Raekwon and co-author Anthony Bozza take readers on a journey from the very beginning to the present. It peels back the curtain on the ups and downs of life not only within one of the most successful rap groups of all time but also for one of the most prolific and influential solo artists of his time. With Raekwon’s raw and unfiltered memoir out now via Gallery Books, SP...
Read Me: Bob Spitz’s Led Zeppelin: The Biography
Sparked by the 50th anniversary of Led Zeppelin IV and “Stairway to Heaven,” seasoned, deep-dive journalist and book author Bob Spitz set out to write the ultimate account of one of the most legendary bands of rock ‘n roll. The author of previous bestsellers The Beatles: The Biography, and Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child, Spitz was undeterred by the more than 100 books already out there on the band. And he took his time to get things right. “I spent five years tracking people down and writing this book, following every lead, and there are 35 pages of source notes at the back of the book, so the reader will know exactly where every quote and detail comes from.” I spoke with Bob about the reason his is the essential Zep biography, why they’re not “golden gods”, and why he was, as ...
Read Me: Rickie Lee Jones’s Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour
Read Me is a new SPIN interview feature devoted to books by and about our favorites artists. She can’t help it: Rickie Lee Jones creates poetry wherever she goes. Her memoir, Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour, released in April, was written in the same rich, entrancing, dusty language as her songs. From all of her beginnings to endings, there’s a Rickie Lee Jones romance to it all. As she tells me: “This is a story generations have written, one that has been the living human experience of my family and, told through my experience, you get to see how mythological it has become for me. These are my…Hades, my Penelope, my Homer. This guy over here is my one-eyed monster.” Rickie Lee took a break from the end of a several-month-long music and book tour to tell us all abo...
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