Customer Reviews

Tommy Tedesco - Confessions of a Guitar Player

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

..great book. I teach / play guitar for a living, and if you're serious about the guitar as a career - this book provides endless inspiration - it did for me anyway! Tommy's matter-of-fact story telling style is refreshing - and he certainly cuts straight to the chase. The thing I realised most when reading this book (and it made me re-evaluate my career)was that professional guitarists are in this bus. to make money..and what's wrong with that? He has so many great stories of studio goings-on - but this book isn't a tell-all about celebrities - just a no-bull**** account of what it's like to be studio guitarist, from someone who worked thru the 'golden' age of pop / rock. Awesome stuff, and thanks for sharing, Tommy!! Ken Cooke.

Lots of spelling errors mar this otherwise interesting collection of studio stories. Lenny Bruce's name is spelled Lennie and then once sentence later it's spelled properly. Mike Nesmith of the Monkees is constantly referred to as "Nesbett". Maybe that's what Tedesco remember's his name as, yet it would be better if there was a 'sic' after the name.

If you're a guitar player, it's an excellent book about a very interesting guy.

Never really got to know my husbands cousin, the book gave us alot of information on his life. Enjoyed it.

This book should have been ghost-written or AT LEAST massively edited -- 'cause the guy himself was obviously incapable of producing publishable text. What you get here is a rambling collection of frequently pointless "war stories" -- disjointed, generously sprinkled with spelling errors, with an overall lowbrow feel to it. I can't see what an aspiring young musician could get out of this, other than a dislike of the social milieu described.

The only section that's of any value at all is the transcribed question-and-answer session from Musician's Institute of Hollywood (where he was teaching something) where he gives specific musical advice (of a very particular nature though -- tailored to the studio work; to a large degree on how to be a musical hack). There's some reality here that may be valuable to someone with no experience of this kind of work. This section is but seven pages long though (in a 103-page book).

Also, thin as it is, the book is seriously padded with a megaton of gushing blurbs from colleagues and family members. Why is this included? What interest can a general reader have in this sort of hagiography? Looks like self-glorification and name-dropping.

Then there's a multipage list of film titles where Mr Tedesco participated in the recording of the soundtrack. Is it very interesting? Perhaps. Or maybe it's just one more way to pad the book.

A few examples: Here's the kind of war story you get here (off the top of my head, paraphrased but not invented): oh once my buddy Joey Buttafucci said, it's gonna rain in 15 mins, so I bet him $50 that it won't -- and I won. So you can see I'm a gambler. And then once I said to my buddy Guido Jinglemeister that if he gives me a 20-yard handicap I'll beat him in a 100-yard race. And I lost. And then, once we were recording something for a movie and someone hired a hooker for our producer as a "job-well-done" present. So we go to a motel, and then our sax player Sonny Cirambubi is such a viril young man he wants to get into the action but the lady was paid for only one client so she refuses to service him in addition to the producer, but Sonny insists, takes his clothes off and so on, oh you shoulda known Sonny he was something else. And then in 1950-something I move to California and look for work, as a music teacher among other things, so I go to a music store and find out there's no great demand for guitar but there _is_ for accordion. So I tell them I'm an accordion player (though I'm not, ha-ha) and they send a bunch of eager students my way. Then I take a crash course in accordion playing from my friend Jimmy Babolino so that I could keep maybe one lesson ahead of my students, and I go ahead and teach and if they ask me to play the piece they're studying, which I can't do coz I can't play the damn thing, I just tell them to shut up and sit down, haha what a great hustler I am.

An example of the laudatory burbs this book is padded with (this one I'll quote exactly):
"Tommy's the guy that most people that play guitar in this town have gone threw. Once you've worked with Tommy and have gone threw that experience and if he give's you the thumbs up, your happening. He's a really serious musician, he helps out everybody. and it's just great [...]
Steve Lukather"

Get it? :-) This kind of stuff, grammar and all; edifying to the max. No, seriously -- it is, just not in the intended way.

More than once I stopped, thinking to myself, why am I reading this? I have a lot of things to do, and there are in my room stacks of books from floor to ceiling that I'd like to read -- and here I am, wasting my time on this semi-literate piffle. I did finish the book for some reason (probably because I paid for it :-).

So, all right, I can easily accept that Tommy Tedesco was a nice enough chap (he comes across as kindly and friendly), well respected and loved by his musical colleagues and family, an accomplished session guitarist and so on. So enjoy his music. But being a good player and even a decent guy in general doesn't make one a deep thinker or an expressive writer. For the most part this book is very poorly put together; its disjointedness, pointlessness, and a lack of basic proofreading are simply disrespectful of the reader (it's been published by something called Centerstream: this is the first and the last book I bought from them).

Bottom line: unworthy; don't waste your time.