Review: Killing Yourself to Live

Killing Yourself to Live, by Chuck Klosterman.
[rating:4/5]

Klosterman is always a good read. He’s kind of a dork, but he has a way with words. For this book he travels the country stopping at sites where rockstars died. After reading the book, you realize that the trip was a near total waste of time. There’s not much to write about when you’ve driven your car through middle America to stop in a field where some junkie guitarist’s plane went down. We’re left staring at the ground with Klosterman, wondering why we came all this way for so little. Other than that, there is some good stuff here, like when he goes to the Station, where 100 Great White fans… well 100 people at a Great White concert… burned to death:

James is 34; his dead uncle, tommy, was just four years older, so they were actually more like brothers. The year before, James had come up to West Warwick to see an AC/DC tribute band with Tommy, a longtime regular at the Station. Somewhat ironically (or I suppose just tragically), his uncle didn’t even want to see Great White the night they played in Rhode Island: He referred to them as “Not-So-Great White” and only went because someone gave him free tickets.

Here’s some more from some other nowhere town where some loser rocker died. I don’t even remember who it was:

Coleman is one of those charming “rebel types” you sometimes meet in small towns (I knew loads of them in rural North Dakota, and they usually sold fireworks). His father was a minister. He tells me that the whole town hates him because of his long hair, but I can tell he doesn’t seriously believe that. As I start to exit the store, the bald guy stops me. “Hey,” he says. “Do you wanna meet someone who used to shoot up the Doobie Brothers?” He proceeds to tell me that his next-door neighbor is a former Marine Corps nurse who used to inject the Doobie Brothers with heroin while they were on tour; he swears she has pictures of this. I consider the idea of interviewing this woman but (before I can say yes) the bald guy smiles and says good-bye, and he tells me to have a nice trip. My meeting with the Doobie nurse never happens. So maybe he never actually intended to introduce me to this woman; maybe that was all a lie. But these are good Americans. I could live in China Grove. Or at least that’s what I think to myself as I drive away, never to return again.

A lot of the book is spent riffing on the women of Klosterman’s life. It’s somewhat not interesting, even as he tries to compare the four important ones to the four members of KISS. Here’s a bit of that, but not much:

When people discuss the 1978 KISS solo records (and granted, this does not happen often), they are usually being employed as a metaphor for everything stupid about KISS, and/or what was stupid about the late ’70s, and/or what was stupid about people who bought KISS records in the late ’70s. At the time, KISS were working under tyhe premise that they were the Beatles of their generation, but that they could do something the Beatles never even considered: They would make individual solo albums while still remaining in KISS> Their logic was as follows: If (a) a normal KISS record sold three million copies, then (b) making four solo records would allow them to sell 12 million records, and (c) this would allow them to work independent of each other, since (d) they never really liked each other to begin with.

I’m stopping now. Not really much of a KISS fan. The book’s good for music fans, with tons of references you might not get (Shannon Hoon, or King Missile, stuff like that).

Killing Yourself to Live, by Chuck Klosterman.
[rating:4/5]