Nobody said it was easy being a rock star. Actually, people do say that, perhaps most unforgettably Dire Straits in their 1985 hit “Money for Nothing.” But musicians have become much more open about their challenges, as a recent spate of memoirs can attest.
“I’ve never been good at getting in touch with my innermost feelings,” Michael McDonald says in WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES: A Memoir (HarperAudio, 10 hours, 57 minutes), and yet the best sections in the book see the singer wrestling with his demons. A living link to a lost era of pop, McDonald worked his way up the industry ladder with a series of local ensembles in and around his native St. Louis, moved to Los Angeles in 1970 and got a gig touring with Steely Dan. After the band dissolved in 1974, he joined the Doobie Brothers.
His vocal work with these groups and with the likes of Christopher Cross and Kenny Loggins earned McDonald his status as the godfather of yacht rock. Here he adds new depth to his avuncular public image with a husky, slightly mumbling account of his substance abuse, including nights in jail and some “colossally stupid” attempts at low-level drug dealing.
After he gets sober, so does the audiobook: chronicling his son’s learning difficulties, his wife’s breast cancer, his acid reflux. The book was written with the comedian Paul Reiser, but McDonald’s humor tends toward the dry and the dad joke (one chapter is titled “Doobie or Not Doobie, That Is the Question”). And no, he still does not explain what “Yah Mo B There” means.
Drugs also take center stage in Darius Rucker’s LIFE’S TOO SHORT: A Memoir (HarperAudio, 6 hours, 12 minutes). During his glory days as the frontman of Hootie & the Blowfish, the band “reigned supreme in two not altogether unrelated areas,” he says: “selling records and doing drugs.”
Rucker is an amiable host, sometimes animated but other times rushing through material. He has a mostly happy coming-of-age, despite an absent father and an addict brother, until Hootie’s 1994 debut album, “Cracked Rear View,” becomes one of the best-selling records of all time. Subjected to constant racism as a Black singer in a Southern rock band, Rucker is forced to “deal with it by hardening myself,” he says: “I hear it, I hear you, I get it, you hate me. But you can’t beat me.”
Before Hootie disbands in 2008 and Rucker goes on to enjoy a second act as a successful country singer, his wife lays down the law: “Stop partying, or I will make your life hell.” Rucker says that he “quit cocaine and Ecstasy that night,” but doesn’t address an arrest on misdemeanor drug charges earlier this year.
For Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill, Julie Ruin and Le Tigre and a pioneer of the 1990s riot grrrl movement, the fundamental conflict of success isn’t chemical, but existential. She begins REBEL GIRL: My Life as a Feminist Punk (HarperAudio, 9 hours, 48 minutes) with the intention that “I don’t want this book to be a list of traumas,” and her delivery remains steady through painful incidents of rape and violence.
But she loosens up as the book goes along, leaning into obscenities and even giggling in odd places as she recounts her marriage to the Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, her struggle with Lyme disease and her creative journey through visual art, zines, political activism and music. If she at times feels herself becoming a character (“Queen Riot Grrrl”) and then a caricature (“Feminist Barney”), Hanna seems at peace with her work and her legacy by the end.
Ghostface Killah shares his own inner battles — with depression, panic attacks and diabetes — in RISE OF A KILLAH: My Life in the Wu-Tang (Macmillan Audio, 5 hours, 49 minutes). Raised in the Staten Island projects, he recalls leaving behind a life of crime (“I wasn’t a New York Scarface or anything,” but he did shoot somebody “over not much at all”) when his fellow Wu-Tang member RZA told him, “You can’t mix pork with beef, man. You gotta do one or the other.” The path he chose landed him in the hip-hop hall of fame.
The Wu-Tang industrial complex has spun off multiple books, and “Rise of a Killah” doesn’t add much to our understanding of the group’s elaborate history. Read by an appropriately amped-up Landon Woodson, the audiobook is also conversational to a fault, and the author’s otherwise admirable spiritual journey can go off the rails.
“Each time somebody is born, a baby got to die, somebody’s got to die,” he opines in a section on karma that devolves into a rant about overpopulation. “To maintain anything more might tilt the Earth or whatever.” Um, OK, Ghost.
Like all of these musicians, Ghostface relies on his work to get him through even the roughest patches. “I know I’m going to be throwing rhymes around until I’m an old man,” he says. “If I got to talk about my cane, my false teeth, health care, grandchildren, I’m ready to do all that.”
