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Shell Shocked: My Life With The Turtles, Flo & Eddie, And Frank Zappa, Etc. (2013)

by Howard Kaylan(Favorite Author)

3.88 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1617808466 (ISBN13: 9781617808463)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Backbeat Books

review 1: Enjoyable, breezy memoir by the former lead singer of the Turtles, who wound up with Frank Zappa as part of the duo Flo and Eddie. As a native of LA, Kaylan's Turtles and their first big hit when he was about 19, and that sent him into rock history, as maybe a minor player with some big hits. A bunch of the fun is his incessant name dropping -- and what names they are. The bit set piece is the evening the Turtles meet Graham Nash, Eric Clapton, The Beatles, Brian Jones, and at the close of which he vomits all over Jimi Hendrix. Kaylan is pretty open about how he treated his wives, the girls on the road, and career lows. Entertainng stuff, though as with most celeb autobios, it does get a bit perfunctory and repetitive towards the end.
review 2: What a crazy lif... moree Howard Kaylan has had. Starting in the early 60s through the present playing in garage bands, then The Turtles, Frank Zappa, Flo and Eddie all while being surrounded by some of the most legendary and iconic musicians of all time. Kaylan's tales rival any tale of Led Zeppelin's debauchery or worse. But it's not all Sex, Drugs and Rock n' Roll, Howard Kaylan readily admits when he has made mistakes and how he learned from them along the way.This is not yet another overly romanticized tale of how great the old days were, this rocker/crooner/dude's life seems to be an accelerated version of what most of us experience for Howard Kaylan's story has amazingly high highs and astonishingly low lows. Kaylan's writing style is frenetic and cuts straight to the bone with his editorializing on his old dairy entries, that he has apparently judiciously recorded since 1968. This book is not for everybody, for there are some old tropes of seemingly misogynistic tales with his objectification of some ladies, but it was a different era and famous people seem to have a very different romantic life than most of us, but that point provides a lot of the entertainment. Also, drugs are pretty consistently referred to so that may also turn some people off. less

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