Customer Reviews

Miss O'Dell: My Hard Days and Long Nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved

5 star:		(50)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Given all the rock memoirs that have emerged over the past twenty years or so, it's hard to pick up another without thinking wearily, "Now what?" After all, Chris O'Dell was not a star herself, but a friend, employee, helper, and lover of a few you might have heard of. It's easy to be cynical, but I fell in love with this twenty pages in. Guilelessly, like Alice down the rabbit hole, Miss O'Dell stumbled upon a life even she could not have dreamed. Looking back, she paints a living portrait of the Beatles, the Stones, her friend Patti Boyd Harrison Clapton, and many others. At the same time, however, she manages to tell an engaging tale of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll with a loving, caring eye and a warm, forgiving heart. After all, she reminds us, even the highest (literally or figuratively) among them had also stumbled onto that 60s Mount Olympus unprepared for what fame, money, and position could do for--or against--friendship, love, artistry, and happiness. An unusually insightful and loving account of an amazing time.

This book, once picked up, is difficult to put down. I have read almost every book on the Beatles, and there were first hand accounts of stories just hinted in other books. Great insights into the Beatles and the women in their lives, and the goings on at Apple. Interesting accounts of how musicians feel about their peers. There were loads of surprises too.
Miss O'Dell's voice is instantly likable. her honest and wide-eyed approach is refreshing. She is practically sitting on the couch with you telling you about all her mostly wonderful adventures. I simply did not want the book to end. I hope there are more stories she hasn't shared yet......Can I pre-order her next one?

Miss O'Dell: My Hard Days and Long Nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved

Many of us grew up not just listening to the Beatles, but LOVING them...feeling something different...maybe female, no..no...it transcended that, but definitely stronger than admiration...it felt intimate. It felt as if you were family...well, okay, distant family, but still a like a cousin who couldn't wait to see and hear the updates about each step in their music and lives...waiting for the post cards. Rather than from your mother, however, you got your updates from the radio, t.v., Rolling Stone and Circus and 16 and Tiger Beat...or the drum beats of friends.

Because every single thing you wanted to learn and emulate and remember about this amazing, reverberating time in your life seem to somehow generate directly from these four magical men, you also came to greatly admire their insiders...the wives, the friends, the staff, the scruffs. They seemed like they were family too. Their lives were so appealing since they experienced the magic firsthand. I remember distinctly wanting to know more about Chris O'Dell...I had seen her photo on albums, and there she was on the rooftop for Let It Be! And, just why did George Harrison write a song about her? I thought she must be someone very special. Chris O'Dell was just exactly where I wanted to be. And, as it turns out, she was not only there, but everywhere and led an even more amazing life than any of us could ever imagine.

Whether you shared that kind of experience or not, this is the book that music fans have been waiting to read since the 60's. Clearly it is not a repeat of any other biographer or insider's account. It is a true, fresh view...an extraordinary account by Chris O'Dell, who was there...who can truly say she was family. Bravo, Chris and thank you.

I'm not usually a devotee of tell-all celebrity exposes. But because "Miss O'Dell" reportedly was pulling back the curtain on the stars who made the music of my era, I was intrigued. As an adolescent, I read every issue of 16 magazine and Tiger Beat for a few years, and I was and remain a huge fan of the Beatles. So this book potentially fell into the "guilty pleasures" category.

Initially it didn't disappoint. Parts of it, particularly early on, were really interesting, especially about her time with Apple. But the problem with "Miss O'Dell" is that it reads a bit too much like an extended teen fanzine, only unsanitized for an older audience, with all the sex, drugs, booze and dysfunction intact along with the rock and roll. That's okay, as far as it went--it wasn't billed as a work of music history. But I'm not a teenager anymore, and after the first 100 pages or so, it largely devolved into tedious variants of the same story over and over again, with well-known song lyrics coyly (and cloyingly) woven into the narrative. Although it could have been a kind of coming-of-age story, set during a time of tremendous social upheaval and featuring some of the most famous people of a generation, I started to wonder why Chris O'Dell wasn't learning and growing as a person, which is what propels all good character-driven stories, fact or fiction. She mentioned several times having deep conversations with George Harrison, yet if this book is any indication, she seemed incapable of depth or introspection herself. Instead, her life reads like Garp reworked for Tiger Beat--a not very interesting person who drifted through a life of reflected glory that brought her into contact with some of the most iconic figures of a generation. Underneath the affairs and friendships lurked a perpetual adolescent, a resolutely shallow woman whose only interest seemed to be getting drunk or high, having sex, hanging out with the in crowd and searching for Mr. Right.

Another problem with the book is one of context--as in there was none. On a societal level, there was a sea change taking place, which was strongly influencing the music of the era, but she seemed to have been oblivious to it, other than a passing mention of staying in the Watergate Hotel and noting that it had played a key role in bringing down a presidency. What about Vietnam and the antiwar protests? Kent State? The Civil Rights movement? The women's movement? Our generation's spiritual quest? While she spent much of her time in England, she also lived in the U.S. for extended periods, and those events shaped our generation. Was she just so drunk or stoned all the time that they didn't register at all? She claims to have been one of the only female tour managers, but why was that significant? Had the women's movement not started opening doors for women yet, or had it made her position possible?

Another reviewer noted that O'Dell doesn't even address John Lennon's murder. She describes him as a friend, albeit an arm's-length friend, yet although his killing rocked our generation, she only alludes to it in an afterword where she gives a "where are they now?" summary. All of this seems of a piece. The book manages to remain superficial and narcissistic throughout most of its 380+ pages, never really inviting emotional involvement with anyone (least of all O'Dell herself), and I don't know if that's because that's who she really was or if it's because she worked with a ghost writer who didn't think to probe deeper or because her editor didn't think it was necessary to bring any context into the narrative.

I'm glad that Chris O'Dell managed to pull herself out of her cycle of drug and alcohol addiction and has built a new, meaningful life for herself (which she described in the last three pages or so). It was pretty clear that it was either that or die. But it still amazes me that she could have had the remarkable experiences she describes without gaining any more insight into herself or her friends. That's why in the end, "Miss O'Dell" was unsatisfying, and finishing it was something of a chore.

Read it for voyeuristic pleasures about the rich and famous, if you want, but don't expect the kind of insight that would have made it truly compelling. Three stars only because of the early pages, which were interesting.

Imagine being swept back into the world of Rock and Roll during the late 1960s through the 1970s and becoming close to the best musicians of the time.... The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, CSNY and others. Chris O'Dell lived a life most people could only imagine in their wildest dreams. A down-to-earth American girl, who finds herself in a world full of bright lights and big stars. She has had songs written about her by Leon Russell and George Harrison. The B-side of his single "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)" is a song called "Miss O'Dell", a catchy little giggly country number George wrote when she kept blowing him off when they were supposed to meet up while he was in town. At the time she was having some difficulty keeping it all together due to constantly trying to find the right combination of drinking, coke and pills. That is but one of the stories in the facinating new rock memoir: "Miss O'Dell: My Hard Days and Long Nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved."

Miss O'Dell tells her story starting with meeting and befriending Derek Taylor of Apple Records and taking a chance and going to London on a whim and making herself a place as a valued employee at Apple, working her way up from scrapbooking and running for lunch to becoming an assistant to various executives there, until mean old Mr. Klein (booooo! hisssss!) dismantles it. She is present for some pretty big moments of rock-n-roll history such as the Beatles rooftop concert, singing the na-nas in Hey Jude, being part of the historic first benefit rock show, The Concert for Bangladesh, witnessing the George/Patti/Eric go-round, and being at Eric and Pattie's wedding. She became close friends with Maureen Starkey and Patti Boyd and lived with the Harrisons at Friar Park for a spell, along with the Hare Krishnas at one point. She tells how she fell hard for Leon Russell and followed him back to the States where she lived with him during a roller coaster romance before going back to London.

Chris O'Dell became one of the first, if not the first, female rock tour managers and toured with The Rolling Stones, Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour, CSNY, John Denver, Linda Ronstadt, Queen, and others. She was the mysterious girl pictured on the back of the Stones Exile on Main Street. She played gopher a lot, whether it was for drugs for the Stones or Bob Dylan's harmonicas, and lived the tough life on the road with several bands and catered to their every whim. She even participated in a couple love triangles, being cast as the one down the hall in the Joni Mitchell song, "Coyote" which was about their affair with Sam Shepherd during a Dylan tour. Chris may even have helped destroy Ringo's marriage to Maureen, one of her best friends.

As someone who has befriended and partied with so many famous people, Chris O'Dell shares her adventures in the madcap world of sex, drugs and rock and roll without being too raunchy or disrespectful of our idols. There are, however, times where you wish she would dig deeper and tell you more. I probably need to read Pattie Boyd's book "Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me" to get a fuller picture. One thing that kinda struck me as odd was that Chris had to pretty much pinky swear not to sleep with George before Pattie would let her come close.... But I guess in that world, it made perfect sense, and once she was in, she was really in as a BFF.

Chris O'Dell lets us look over her shoulder at the people behind the music we know and love. She gives us a glimpse inside the world of rock during a very historic era. You see her as an insider, not a groupie out to bed the biggest names in rock and roll. She is likable and seems to be both the luckiest and unluckiest gal in the world. You find that rock stars aren't the only ones who struggle with keeping their addiction demons in check or make terrible messes of their love lives. She was right there doing it too, while on her seemingly endless cycle of self-destruction. The storytelling in the book is neither braggy nor preachy, and you find yourself rooting for the girl to find a nice man and live happily ever after. When she finally meets and marries a man who appears to be Prince Charming, an English aristocrat, he turns out to be an addict too... so that was a false start to her happy ending. She does eventually end up cleaning herself up for good and finding herself. Read the book and see if she ever meets her prince and ends up happily ever after. Chris O'Dell is now a licensed substance abuse counselor in Arizona.

Chris O'Dell certainly has an interesting story to tell and this book should be required reading for any Beatle-fan or student of rock and roll history.

Reviewed by Kathy Wheeler, [...]

Most people have no idea of how much tire spinning it takes to not only get to the top echelon of the entertainment business, but if their is never any traction whatever dreams you may have of doing so will remain just that: Dreams. I know thousands of people that I grew up with that hoped one day to realize their ambition to be associated with the biggest names in the music business. 99% of them never made it. They went off to somewhat fulfilling lives, but always had that nagging "what if" lurking in their fantasy thoughts.

Chris O'Dell was one of the ones that made it. She had that traction. Was it what she thought it would be on the other side? Probably not, but she found out and dealt with it in probably the only way she could. Rock and Roll was continuously being reinvented in the late '60s-early '70s. It was one of the most sexist industries on the planet. The PC crowd of today would be appalled with the rampant carnality and indulgences that were everyday occurrences back then. Which is why it was so interesting.

What? You think someone hallucinated "Spinal Tap"? Grow up. That was the everyday reality to those whose job it was to travel from arena to stadium to psychedelic dungeon and back to provide the audiences of the day with a little bit of popular entertainment. Chris O'Dell got closer to the inside world more than anyone I know. She became friends with those trapped inside lives that none of us would ever be able to understand. These stars had to chose their friends, lovers, shoulder's to cry on and try to survive the day to day of being famous. Not easy.

Chris got to to on that ride. She was the one that all the players understood. She was loyal, truthful and mixed in with the whirlpool of famous egos and insecurities. She was "permitted" to be part of that tight knit scene. You can make mistakes, but they were the 'team's" mistakes. Nobody was supposed to know. And they didn't. I found it interesting that she had the good taste to hold her tongue until many of the protagonists had either departed or were in such a state to no longer care.

Much of what she has written is very, very truthful. The fall off the cliff when your life comes crashing back into you at the end of a long concert tour, is exactly what happens. The infant like egos maneuvering to score the point of the day, or nano-second can make life miserable for the point person who needs the diplomatic skills of an ambassador to hold it all together. And all of it being propelled along by the incredibly talented artists who's creations spawned this way of life.

Like Chris, I was "there" for some of what she describes. It is all true. It was how it was. Once you were on this course it is both awkward and difficult to adjust to the "real" world after living in the kind of family bubble that moved from city to town. It is a hard life. Most of you could never take it. And for a woman, back then to do what she did, was unheard of. There were no women doing that. Just Chris, a true pioneer. It was all guys who probably tried to hit on her constantly. Try dealing with that. It too must have taken its toll and added to the pressure.

So, in summary I'd like to congratulate Chris for a forthright re-telling of how it was, when it was and what it took to survive at the top, in the wilds of rock and roll in the real world. For those of you who might like to pontificate about how you thought it should have been, or would like to see a different story to tell: Well, trust me you'd have your plane ticket home within hours of starting any of the jobs she had. You wouldn't be able to hack it. And besides, not only does Sex sell. But Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll sells even better. Ask the late Ian Dury!

Chris O'Dell's memoirs have the ring of Henry James to them, for at the behest of Derek Taylor, Chris became uprooted from an aimless LA life and was thrust right into 95 Wigmore Street, the original offices of Apple. At first you wonder what she is going to do with herself--she didn't even have a job, Derek just kept her around like a toy. But finally she made herself useful as the lunch girl. Chris never seems to have any pride in this book, and perhaps that's what raised the ire of other reviewers who call her a leech, etc. From the photos, you can't even tell if she was pretty looking, or if she was just the plain girl that fabulous beauties like Pattie Boyd and Maureen Starkey liked to pal around with to make themselves look better.

But I found myself rooting for her throughout, and clapping at her triumphs (like when she was invited to Friar Park) and cringing at her disappointments (like when Jim Gordon tried to strangle her and she was saved by Robert Stigwood's knock). She was there when the Beatles recorded "Hey Jude" and the Stones made "Exile at Main Street," and she gives the reader a sense of what it might have been like. Unlike other memoirists of the period, she has nothing but nice things to say about Yoko, which is refreshing, though Chris' new journalism techniques give us a picture nevertheless of a Yoko who was never easy to talk to or be with.

The whole set up between George Harrison, Pattie Boyd, Ringo and Maureen was a headscratcher! No wonder Chris came to think she had the right to sleep with whatever married man she wanted, even if she was best friends with the man's wife! By the time Joni Mitchell steals Sam Shepard away from her during Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour, right around then one begins thinking, Chris, it's time to get off the road and settle down a bit, and get off the drugs! Which she promptly proceeds to do. I liked being reminded of many bands and musicians that were right under the radar--like Leon Russell, with whom Chris fell passionately in love, and I've been playing "Delta Lady" ever since--sort of a stupid song, but catchy, catchy, catchy, like a snake twisting in the Andalusian heat.

It's about time! As an enormous Beatles fan it's wonderful to read something fresh for a change! The last Beatles book to come out with any kind of new slant was Bob Spitz's "The Beatles"--which was packed full of early memories, but if you watched or read the entire "Anthology" series you realized that much of his research was done from an arm chair. Miss O'Dell is not only beautifully written by Chris O'Dell and Kathy Ketcham, you get to know the Beatles as people, as well as the Stones & many others, and from an entirely different perspective. We all know how the Beatles broke up, but what was it like to be at George's house when Lennon came over to discuss that McCartney quit? What was going on minutes before the Beatles decided to climb up to the Apple roof? What's it like to be standing in front of a mic at a Beatles recording session? Amazing stories and a very hard book to put down. I especially enjoyed the soft, human side of the book. There's some wonderfully bizarre observations that only someone who's lived in Miss O's shoes could come up with--like how incredibly decadent it seemed that Linda Ronstadt would order one of each dessert from a small menu--but that it seemed normal to snort hundreds of dollars of coke with Keith Richards in one night. I have an the great fortune (in my past, not anymore) of being in contact with many celebrities (real ones with talent--not reality show people), some of whom became close acquaintances. It was fun reliving that very human emotion of being friendly with someone whom you had posters of on your wall years earlier. That feeling of wanting to act normal enough to let them feel non-threatened in your company, but still occasionally having a "holy S**t" pang of emotion while you're standing in their house. It was interesting to hear Miss O float in and out of feeling like an insider and then an outsider, and at remarkable regularity. It seems that in the world or rock and roll self-importance and decadence, it must be a very raw, emotional roller coaster if you're in the middle of the storm, but not the person with the guitar strapped to your back. My girlfriend loves that musical era as well, but only to listen to the music. She's not one to enjoy rock stories, know any music trivia, or read a musician's bio. She is currently enraptured by the book simply as a woman. There are many edgy, dirty, crazy stories in this book--but the beauty of living a life with the other women married to rock legends is incredible, profound, sad, and at times, surreal. This book can be enjoyed by anyone. Oh, and just HAVE to add that I've pretty much hated Eric Clapton's music after the 70's and I always imagined (for no particular reason) that he was probably a self-important, narcissistic jerk. Glad to know I was right all these years...WELL DONE MISS O'DELL!

This book puts you right in the heart of the Beatles and the Stones inner circle. It provides closeup intimate insight into the personal lives of George Harrison, Ringo, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell, Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, David Bowie, and Bob Dylan. Honestly, I'm only about 3/4 of the way through the book so there may be even more to come. But this book really immerses you into the whole lifestyle of the highest royalty of rock in the late 60's and early 70's with more personal detail than you probably ever even dreamed you'd ever be privy to. If you ever wondered what it was like to BE a Beatle or a Stone at home, or a Beatle or Stone's wife or girlfriend, this book will answer all your questions and many more you never even thought to ask.

To call it a "pageturner" doesn't even begin to describe how fascinating this book really is. My only criticism is that, because Miss O'Dell is not a musician, you're not going to hear a whole lot about the music itself, except as it relates to her personally (as in the songs written about her by Leon Russell and George Harrison or her singing in the chorus of "Hey Jude" or adding sound effects to "Revolution #9" or helping to collate lyrics for "All Things Must Pass" and "Exile on Main Street"!) But that's okay, because if she had been a musician, she probably would never have gotten so close to the stars on a personal level.

Bottom line, this book tells it like it was and like it never will be again. You couldn't hope for more of an intimate insider's look into this rarified world.

The readers who take this book as an entertaining look at the music business, fame, and sex, drugs & rock n' roll are going to find a feast of great stories, behind-the-scenes glimpses of some remarkable people, and palpable sense of the times it describes. The author's honesty has alienated some reviewers, but she appears to understand that her life was mostly about courting the rich and glamorous, flirting with rock stars and attending the right parties. Her account of her troubles along the way keeps the story from being as gossipy and shallow as it might sound. If you'd like to attend some of those parties and slip into a few of those limos yourself, you won't find a more charming guide than Miss O'Dell.

Is it largely celebrity gossip? Yeah. Some great stories, though, and a sensitive portrait of George Harrison, in particular, make the ride worthwhile. Lots of fun and hard to put down - up there with the best accounts of rock and roll life.