Don't Try This at Home: A Year in the Life of Dave Navarro [Paperback]

Dave Navarro (Author), Neil Strauss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 18, 2005

Step into the booth. Check your judgments at the curtain. Close your eyes. Listen: you can hear the voices of the visitors who sat here before you: some of the most twisted, drug-addled, deviant, lonely, lost, brilliant characters ever to be caught on film. What do you have to offer the booth?

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Andy Warhol was so enamored with Polaroids that he made special arrangements with the company to purchase all the overstock film of a discontinued model of camera. A similar photographic fetish is the organizing principle of Don't Try This at Home. For kicks, rocker and author Dave Navarro installed a carnival-grade photo booth in his L.A. home. The book documents a year's worth of visitors to Navarro's pad who all stepped into the booth to get their mug shots snapped.

The resulting dispatch from Hell is as hard to draw one's eyes from as a twelve car pile-up. Intermingled with a parade of rock stars, models, prostitutes, drug dealers, pizza delivery guys, and housecleaners are a series of observations and interviews with Dave and his co-author Neil Strauss. Strauss, co-author of other tomes for Jenna Jameson, Marilyn Manson, and Motley Crue, operates less as an editor than as a ringmaster to this debauched thing rock stars call a lifestyle.

Don't Try This At Home is one rollicking contact high of a memoir. Just set it on the coffee table at your home and watch how quickly it snares its readers. -–Ryan Boudinot --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In a book originally scheduled for publication in 2001, rock guitarist Navarro (Jane's Addiction; Red Hot Chili Peppers) and rock journalist Strauss (coauthor of bestselling celeb autobios including Mötley Crüe's thrillingly crude The Dirt, Marilyn Manson's The Long Hard Road Out of Hell and Jenna Jameson's How to Make Love Like a Porn Star) chronicle the year Navarro turned his house into "a cross between a crack den, an after-hours club, a halfway house and Andy Warhol's Factory" to test his theory that "[t]he only people who stay in your life are the ones you pay." Navarro had had messy breakups with his girlfriend and his record label, and he'd decided to start using drugs again. He installs a photo booth and low-tech surveillance equipment to record every rock star, sycophant, drug dealer and prostitute who stops by his house. The book's 57 episodic chapters (some of which are simply transcripts) relate the demise of a relationship, drug overdoses and detoxes; they include Navarro's jokes about a "committed three-way relationship" and his pseudo-philosophical ruminations about the impossibility of romantic love for the emotionally challenged. Drug-addled chapters such as "Ten Ways to Tie Off" and photo strips of wacked-out, cosmetically enhanced women speak to a sort of quasi-glamorous, semisick, half-desperate pathos. Navarro's experiences turn out to be a lesson in accepting the "rainbow of emotions that come along with life," and there's even a happy ending, as he sobers up, restarts his career and gets married. Weirdly fascinating for a while, but ultimately for the fans.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: It Books (October 18, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060988533
• ISBN-13: 978-0060988531
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 8.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #838,580 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Snoresville, July 30, 2005

By 

Judge1 "Judge1" (Oh Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Don't Try This at Home: A Year in the Life of Dave Navarro (Hardcover)

Okay, besides the trippy pictures from Dave's home photo booth, this book is as interesting as dry toast. Just brutal. Scattered, boring, egocentric at most times, I just didn't enjoy it all, nor finish it. As a fellow addict with 5 years clean, I enjoy reading peoples personal stories and their battles/successes with addiction. This was just not worthy of any more than a library rental, and even then it's over-rated. I recommend Star Tissue by Anthony Kiedis or The Dirt by Motley Crue, and pass over this el-garbagio.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In A Word....WOW, October 22, 2004

By 

Tricia (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Don't Try This at Home: A Year in the Life of Dave Navarro (Hardcover)

This is an amazing book, full of details you would never, ever expect. It is candid, open and extremely honest-to a fault. It is an extremely personal autobiography.
Also recommending: Nightmares Echo, If I Knew Then and My Fractured Life

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's what Scar Tissue should have been, September 17, 2005

By 

Vivian (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Don't Try This At Home (Hardcover)

SCAR TISSUE was the pity party, this book was just plain entertaining. I've been a fan of Dave Navarro's for quite some time (in interviews he was always so witty), so I was waiting for this book to get published. I think it has an awesome formula- a look into a year out of the life of a heroin addict/musician. We don't need their entire self-absorbed life story, documenting just a year was so much better. Though it does bring up Navarro's past a little bit to give you some insight as to who he is and the roads he has taken. Many things in this book made me laugh out loud, Dave has a f*cked up sense of humor! This book was very addicting and I read it in a day. Cheers to Neil Strauss for putting up with him!