Customer Reviews

Gene Vincent: There's One in Every Town

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This author simply recaps that which has already been written about Gene Vincent. There does not appear to be any original material.

Also, this seems to be more of a gossip fest about a dead artist.

That Gene Vincent had a major impact in the UK out of all proportion to his record success here in the late 1950s/1960s comes across very early in this book with Farren's description of attending a live show in 1961 when Gene had virtually made Europe his home, having no future career prospects in the US.

The personal image reconfigured by Jack Good for the UK and powerful live performances matched by great 1950s recordings (unique voice and great luck in choice of sidemen) and variable 1960s recordings are well covered but this short tome ends up being simply a paean to a doomed hero. While still revered by the many people who saw him live in their formative years such as Jeff Beck, the story is ultimately one of success too early for a great voice with unique early true rock 'n' roll credentials, a naive personality undermined by continual bad management, and the initial personal tragedy of a leg accident that was nearly amputated then becoming an albatross that helped fuel his personal demons and leading to a downward slide via alcoholism to an early death at 36 years of age.

By its brevity the book is a quick read but does not compare in terms of insight or coverage with either the Britt Hegarty factual bio or the more recent John Collis book based around the origial UK tour by Gene and Eddie Cochran.

Also bad marks for the sheer number of typo errors - I have never noticed so many in a recent book.

Gene Vincent was the legendary bad-boy of rock: his early records were banned and censored, his shows incited riots, he wrecked hotel rooms, and he was a boozer and drug addict before these conditions were popular among musicians. Author and biographer Mick Farren was an underground newspaper correspondent and is in the perfect place to write up Vincent's life. A full discography and recording session information accompanies Mick Farren's impressive biographical sketch, Gene Vincent: There's One In Every Town, and makes it "must reading" for Gene Vincent fans.

I picked up a copy of this book in the second-hand book stall of the local village fair. It's very short - excluding the discography, shy of 200 pages, and they're small and scantily populated with text.

Author Mick Farren is clearly a fan and he can certainly string an attractive sentence together. He writes well - I dare say he would count Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs among his influences, although his voice isn't quite as consistent, strident, or compelling - but he has been edited poorly (there are spelling mistakes, malapropisms and typographical errors through out the book).

You have to laud Farren's attempt to mythologise Gene Vincent by sourcing rock's bad-boy genome in Vincent and tracing its heredity directly to Jim Morrison, Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten. Indeed Farren's assertion that Vincent's motorcycle-injury-prescribed singing stance - hunched over, a leg thrust forward, a leg thrust back - has been adopted to such brooding effect by able-bodied successors as Morrison, Rotten, and Bono and has now become part of the rock idiom - is a fascinating and credible one.

Gene Vincent was a rockabilly pioneer about whom I knew little outside the Stray Cats' "Gene and Eddie" and for a total ingénue, this little book did a job - I know more now, and I'm certainly interested to find out more. But you may (as I did) find yourself impelled to look at Wikipedia to get some fuller, more coherently organised précis of the man's actual biography.

Olly Buxton