The Band’s Barnacle Man

The recent spate of rock memoirs has proved one of the less rewarding sub-
genres in the post-digital Gutenberg galaxy. Obeying few rules of a good read, they usually suggest a variant on Frank Zappa’s biting assessment of rock journalists: ‘People who can’t write, ghosting for people who can’t talk, targeting people who can’t read.’

So it’s refreshing to find that Bruce Springsteen and Robbie Robertson, the two notable rock memoirists this festive season, have both dispensed with the ghostly intermediary, dusted off their PCs, loaded a thesaurus programme and writ large. Doorstop large.

In Robbie Robertson’s case, we are assured that every word of Testimony is his own, even if there are signs of an ongoing battle with his long-suffering American editor. The decision to intercut childhood memories with risqué anecdotes of time spent in Ronnie Hawkins’s Hawks — Canada’s early Sixties answer to the British blues boom — certainly chances a literary arm.