he was hallucinating on LSD, running through the market with a knife

pdf (249 pages / 45 MB), with thanks to the original sharer

Craig in a gauzy white Nehru outfit, love beads, bell bottoms and sandals, jabbering excitedly amidst clouds of pot smoke about going to India to seek enlightenment with the Maharishi. Like, yeah, oh wow, everyone’s in India, it looked real nice with the Beatles and the Maharishi and stuff, but India wasn’t like that. I had seen pictures of them throwing dead bodies in the Ganges, and I just thought, man, I never wanna go there. He seemed a little nutty, but I didn’t think he was that crazy. He would meditate and chant at the little altar and stuff. He went from being the golden boy to all of a sudden becoming a Buddhist and becoming totally obsessed with it — not that that was unusual in the ’60s, but he was forcing me to chant with him. ‘You’ve gotta chant with me!’ ‘Wait! I don’t really want to chant.’ ‘No, you have to, you have to...’

In the late ’60s many young Westerners headed out on what became known as the Hippie Trail, in search of adventure, enlightenment, and access to inexpensive, high-quality hashish. The trail began in Istanbul, Turkey. From there travelers headed east through Iran to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and on to India. From India, travelers could head north to Kashmir, south to Bombay, Ceylon or the beaches of Goa, or northeast to the furthest outpost of the trail in Kathmandu, Nepal.

irresponsible, reckless, adolescent shenanigans of rock ‘n’ roll artists

epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer 

By 1958, her persona as a smoky, smoldering jazz dame had hardened into cliché. The Lee arrangement of “Fever” is stripped down to just upright bass and drums, but it also involves a husky, heavy breathing vocal, massively overdubbed finger snaps and newly written (by Lee), cutesy lyrics about Captain Smith and Pocahontas. Was she “hipping it up with Beatspeak,” or laying it on a little thick, like a “square” actor gluing on a goatee to play a beatnik on television?

“Peggy Lee couldn’t sing like Little Willie John. Everybody in the (Hotel) Theresa and all over Harlem were talking about how those white producers who came uptown sneaking around the Apollo Theater recording black material and then you’d hear a white singer on the radio singing the same song. That would put anyone on junk.” Faye Pridgon says she laughed when she heard Lee’s version, and she claims Willie did too. “That song had gotten a hell of a play in the ’hood long before that girl came along. When Pat Boone or whoever covered a song, it was a joke to us.”

Peggy puts more sex into a song than most girls could into a strip tease

epub, with thanks to the original sharer

Leiber considered Peggy Lee “the funkiest white woman alive”; and it was no surprise that a woman whose style had sprung out of the blues would connect with his and Stoller’s work. Lee had included their very first collaboration, “Kansas City,” on Blues Cross Country. The partners had sent her their songs ever since, to no response. In the autumn of 1962, they were startled to read in the paper that “I’m a Woman” had found its way into Lee’s act at Basin Street East. They made a reservation. There at the club, their song, arranged by Benny Carter, stopped the show. Lee growled and purred it like a tough mama who ruled the bedroom and the kitchen. Lee didn’t know that “I’m a Woman” was Leiber and Stoller’s response to Bo Diddley’s aggressively macho number-one R&B hit, “I’m a Man.” The low-down vamp that ran through “I’m a Woman” had been lifted straight from Diddley’s record.

Everybody hated everybody. It was nothing personal.

                                                   pdf (275 pages/1MB) with thanks to the original sharer

While we're on the subject of ole blue and red rimmed eyes, one of my all-time favorite celebrity tell-alls might have slipped by your radar, in which case I suggest you search out Mr. S. Jacobs was Sinatra's butler for fifteen years and his tales of encounters with Joe Kennedy (who berated Sinatra for hiring a black man), Ava Gardner, Swifty Lazar, Peter Lawford, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, and nearly every one who was anyone in Hollywood and Palm Springs makes this an orb popping read from beginning to end. The Chairman of the Board, his toupee and rat pack may be gone, but those of us still here can still laugh at him. -The Hound

"He couldn't sit still, and he couldn't be alone. Thus he always needed a girl, and she didn't have to be famous. First he'd go for his leading lady. If she wasn't free, he'd try some famous ex, like Lana Turner, whom he'd dated in the forties, for old times. Then he'd work his way down the food chain, starting with the starlets, then the hookers, and, if all else failed, he'd call Peggy Lee, who lived down the block."