Let It Bleed: How to Write a Rockin' Memoir - Softcover

Des Barres, Pamela

 
9780399174209: Let It Bleed: How to Write a Rockin' Memoir
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0399174206 ISBN 13: 9780399174209
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Author of the international bestseller I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, Pamela Des Barres shares with women the art of memoir writing.

For the last fourteen years, Pamela Des Barres has been teaching an eight-week women's "femoir" writing workshop. She found that the music-loving ladies who showed up at her door had pent-up stories to tell. Many of them had read her two memoirs, which were wildly personal and deeply confessional, and felt comfortable opening up and experiencing that same freedom of expression.
     In this book, Des Barres guides women through the process of writing their memoirs. She has developed exercises to help her "dolls" recall, remember, relive, and reveal their memories, transgressions, temptations, their sleepless nights and brilliant afternoons, loves and losses, fears and regrets, secrets, sins, and sorrows. The assignments in Femoir have proven incredibly cathartic for her students. Just as intimate as one of her in-person workshops, this book includes some of Des Barres's own stories, as well as those of the women she's taught.
     Every person has an incredible story to tell—they just need to figure out how to tell it. By understanding themselves better through these writing exercises, women learn to be more fearless, free-spirited, and willing to try something new.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Pamela Des Barres is the bestselling author of I'm with the Band and three other books. She's also a journalist, writing teacher, and media personality, but is most famous for being a rock & roll "groupie" before the word even existed. Des Barres started the first-ever girl band (the GTOs) and dated Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones, Jim Morrison of The Doors, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Keith Moon of The Who, Chris Hillman of The Byrds, and Noel Redding of Jimi Hendrix Experience, to name a few.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

I

Dare to Write

Besides my bursting-at-the-seams diaries and school compositions, my first foray into creative writing began in earnest when, along with my Beatle birds, I began conjuring up weekly chapters about our romances with John, Paul, George and Ringo. Oh, how I wish I had those impassioned blue-lined missives I scribbled for Kathy, Linda and Stevie as I lay in my twin bed (always under many watchful photos of the long-lashed, bedroom-eyed Paul McC, of course), inventing tales about how the Quiet Beatle proposed to Kathy in a song, while gently playing his guitar, or how John tearfully left his wife, Cynthia, because my bubbly Reseda neighbor, Linda Oaks, had melted his gruff, ironic heart.

Yes, I could enthrall my Beatle buddies with the written word, but having seen Patty Duke accept the Academy Award for her stunning portrayal of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, I had decided at age twelve to become an actress. This declaration led to a long and mostly fruitless pursuit of Glamorous Hollywood Fame. As I slogged through commercial interviews and embarrassing theatrical auditions, helped along by a series of B-minus or C-plus acting agents, I never stopped babbling into my trusty diary.

At Cleveland High I was an English devotee and pled allegiance to a tough-minded creative-writing teacher, Mr. Constantine Thomas, who most everyone else despised due to his scathing attention to detail. I enjoyed it so much, I planned on taking some college writing courses after graduation, but-oops!-the Sunset Strip got in the way. From my sophomore year on, Cleveland High became an afterthought as the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Captain Beefheart and long-haired Hollywood weirdos became my main focus. On graduation day, Mr. Thomas looked me up and down in my white ruffled dolly bird dress, lace stockings and red patent flats, and sadly shook his head. This one had gotten away from him. Still, when I asked him to sign my yearbook, he screamed at me in a ferocious hand, "Dare to write!!!!"

Mr. Thomas didn't know that I had already begun writing tortuous teenage poetry, teeming with indignation and self-discovery, railing against authority and rampant with clichŽs. I suddenly felt an overwhelming need to express myself. Some of the poems were wild with love for an unattainable rock star, some described the ethereal beauty of Laurel Canyon, "God's Golden Backyard," and some pitted the new Us against the old Them.

All the Evidence

June 1966

Evening has started abruptly

The circus has come to town

"These teenagers are invading the city!

They're turning it upside down!"

The owners of the restaurants

Are ranting and raving about

Trying to clear the hippies away

And let their customers out

The police drive into the parking lots

And climb out of their cars

They stomp and storm and carry on

And start a few minor wars

The older people driving by

Turn to gawk and stare

"My God, Harold, what is that?

You can't really tell with that hair!"

Then there are others who try to pretend

That they belong with you and I

But they scratch their crew-cuts, fix the crease in their pants

They'll never make it but they try

They call us insane, and try to figure us out

For loving, being loved and having fun

For letting our hair grow, dressing the way we please

Yet they come, hypocrites each one

To say "non-conformist" isn't quite true

We come to love each other and try . . .

To become better people, inside instead of out

To learn the truth instead of living a lie

I carried my book of verses everywhere I went and when struck by that lofty desire to pronounce, I pulled out my pen and oh, what a relief it was! I was daring to write whatever heaviosity came oozing out of my heart.

At Wil Wright's Ice Cream Parlor on Sunset Blvd.

October 1967

Alone-searching

Quite unaware of what it is I'm seeking

Asking the same question

To each passing answer

But not one turns to greet me

Perhaps I am not really here

Perhaps I am the answer to every unanswered question

In conclusion I've discovered

Answers come not at all

Or in great abundance

Either I thirst

Or I drown

Why is there a "w" in Answer anyway?

In the late '80s, poetry readings were de rigueur in L.A., and after many of my hipster cohorts expressed their distressed couplets, I'd open to a page of solemn sincerity I'd written long before about David Crosby's magical elf-infested cabin, or the mysterious majesty of Mick Jagger's slippery unavailability, and soon the groovers would stop wincing and laugh heartily at my dippy bygone prose.

Dear Mr. Jagger

December 1969

You took me under

Your wild wings

Of untamed freedom

And let me experience life's joys

Through your eyes

Peering into your secret world

of abandon

and I found myself

Entirely free

Open to all of you

At least the part

That you gave me

And what part was that? Hmmm? These poems still crack people up whenever I pull out my shredded ledger and take them back to a place and time when revolution thrummed in the air, incense burned, music changed lives and flowers wilted in our long, wavy locks.

II

Butt in the Chair

Despite my early forays into dopey moonstruck poetics, during one of the many creative writing workshops I attended in the '80s I realized I might actually be a writer. I sat in a schoolroom in the San Fernando Valley, along with a dozen other determined souls, at Everywoman's Village, following instructions from the hippieish gray-haired teacher to "write about a memorable incident in your past." I wrote intently about my teenage obsession with the Rolling Stones, and Mick Jagger in particular, giggling at my own antics as my goofy memories poured out onto the page. I found I was looking back at this particular "memorable incident" with a humorous understanding that surprised me.

The following week, the teacher took me aside and said she'd enjoyed my writing and had shown my work to her agent husband, who suggested I continue this "exploration." That same week I was interviewed by Stephen Davis for his breakthrough book, Hammer of the Gods, about Led Zeppelin, and after our hours-long exchange, he said, "You should write your own book." Hmmmmm.

It was a pretty unusual idea for that time. Nowadays on Amazon you can scroll through tales about a drunk, a stripper, a teacher, a prisoner, a fashionista, a brawler, a bouncer, a preacher, a panhandler, an alcoholic, a mom, a minstrel and a bipolar hypochondriac! But back then-a couple decades ago-only celebrities told their tales and got into print. I was actually one of the first "unknowns" to come out with a memoir.

I knew I had lived wildly and well, and imagined that one day I'd pore through my dusty diaries and jam-packed journals and tell my tale, but it seemed the universe was announcing that now might be a good time to begin. My five-year-old boy, Nick, had just started first grade and was right down the street from our leafy Laurel Canyon pad, ensconced at the Wonderland Avenue school, so several hours a day had suddenly freed up. I had no excuse...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0399174206
ISBN 13 
9780399174209
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Tarcher
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/search/tarcher?page=1&q=TARCHER

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