It's all about Jerry Weintraub, and . . . . . it's kind of b o r i n g. ( )

Motivational story about a music industry legend that has toured Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. ( )

Fantastic book, fantastic man. This book goes over many of the same stories told in the HBO special on Weintraub but they are still fascinating to read. Weintraub's story is one of a true dealmaker It is easy to read and a very impressive story. I for one, would have liked to have met Mr. Weintraub. ( )

Jerry Weintraub is the man who packaged and marketed John Denver. Depending on your preference, this is either the best thing in the world or unforgivable. Me: I like John Denver. A lot.

What's weird is that about a year ago I delved rather deeply into Denver's music, life, etc., and was surprised to find out that (a) his real name is John Deutschendorf, Jr. (b), that he grew up in just about anywhere but the country (i.e., in a lot of cities -- which makes him a city slicker), (c) that both of his parents were German. The German ancestry thing figures prominently in Denver's music. If you know anything about Germans, you know that they love their "volkmusik" -- folk music. If you know anything about John Denver, you're thinking to yourself, "What's he talking about? There aren't accordions in Denver's music; he doesn't yodel." Correct. But what Denver does is sing a lot about home and mountains, the spirit of home and mountains, the near-attainment of an idealized woman, the "eternal-feminine" (das Ewig-Weibliche) whose mere presence suffices to draw upward to heaven the debased (and singing) male, grasping at her hem. These are also the themes of many if not most German folk songs, and thus the point of the comparison. (Of course, an idealized woman -- an idealized anyone, for that matter -- is also an objectified woman [or anyone:]; but that's a discussion for another Goodreads review.)

My point: it's not too gross a simplification, I believe, to say that John Denver's music is nothing but Americanized German folk music. Weintraubs genius was, I think, to recognize this fact, and to know how to market John Denver's volkmusik to a patriotic American mass audience. Which he did. To great acclaim. And it's not just marketing, Weintraub is quick to point out.

Moreover, it was Weintraub's connections with Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley/Colonel Parker (so close they were almost the same person) that helped get John Denver's career off the (musical) ground and up and soaring into the resplendent blue sunshine of American pop stardom -- rather unlike the short and tragic and barely-airborne, drunken-hummingbird flight of the technically-deficient experimental plane that Denver piloted to his gruesome death.

Which is a sad note to end this review on. But a similar note to the one Mr. Weintraub ends his own memoirs on. Writing of his mother's death, which happened a few years ago, Weintraub says, "A man without a mother is a man without a country, an exile.... You never recover from it.... The world should come to an end but it doesn't; it goes on, carries you with it."

Weintraub pauses and then adds this: "But death is necessary. It makes the rope taut. Without it we would have no stories, no meaning."

Splash. ( )

An entertaining read. Weintraub is ridiculous, but also charming. Everyone is his friend whom he loves like a family member. When I say everyone I mean everyone. The list of people he considers like a brother or father or son goes from John Denver to the Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, from George Bush the elder to Bob Dylan, from Colonel Tom Parker to George Clooney. There is Forest Gump quality to some of this, but Weintraub verifiably had close relationships with all of these people and presumably at least a healthy percentage of this is true.

Most everyone is portrayed as being wonderful, Weitraub does talk about Bobby Fisher not being particularly lovable, but he also makes clear that the man was truly mentally ill. He professes neither love nor hate for Zepplin, but its clear he did not adore them, in part because the word love is thrown around so much and never in regards to anyone in that band. He says negative things about no one except his own children, (nothing super nasty, just oblique references to them having had "troubles) which is a little odd. It would have been easy to have left that out since he leaves out everyone else's skeletons. Weintraub glosses over the fact that he is married (to a woman for whom he professes true love) and has a very long term girlfriend, a successful producer in her own right,(for whom he professes real love.) In all things that went wrong he holds himself largely blameless with some two-bit rationalization. But we all rationalize away a pretty good sized chunk of our lives so I can't get upset about that. All in all he is has some great stories to tell, really wonderful and interesting, and he tells those stories well. ( )