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Kent Hartman is a longtime music industry entrepreneur who has worked with dozens of well-known artists. He is also a nationally syndicated radio show producer and has written for American Heritage, The Oregonian, and the Portland Tribune. Hartman lives in Portland, Oregon.

Werken van Kent Hartman

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Geslacht
male
Woonplaatsen
Portland, Oregon, USA

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Great stories of the musicians behind hits of the 60's and 70's.
 
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roguelike | 13 andere besprekingen | Feb 4, 2024 |
Great backstory connectedto nearly all 60’s- 90’s -amazing how well connected the musicians and the bands were
 
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Fashion | 13 andere besprekingen | Jul 5, 2023 |
Let's get this out of the way, right off the bat: Kent Hartman is a pedestrian writer at best.

That being said, he does an obviously good job at researching, and recreating certain events—if from more of a high-level view—during that phenomenal period of time when the Wrecking Crew could truly do no wrong, and were blasting out of our speakers on so many of the songs I loved, and still love, back in the Sixties and Seventies.

Along the way, he also does give a glimpse into the timeline of some of those songs (god, what I wouldn't give for a song-by-song breakdown of who played and what happened).

So, lots of stars for the subject matter and giving us some glimpses into key events, but dismally few stars for the banal attempts at suspense (the songs he hints at before revealing are hilariously obvious) and workmanlike prose.
… (meer)
 
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TobinElliott | 13 andere besprekingen | Sep 3, 2021 |
This was a fun ride through the rock music of the Seventies and into the early Eighties. I've read some complaints that the author needed to highlight who the various names were, but it's really designed for those who lived it, and obsessively read the liner notes. Casual fans will be left behind.

So, while it was fun and often insightful, it's not without its flaws, starting right in the first chapter with the sentence, It was early 1969, over six months before the grizzly Tate-LaBianca murders for which Manson and his "family" would forever be associated...

"Grizzly"? Really? They were murdered by bears? The word, of course, is "grisly" and any competent writer (and editor) would have caught that.

Sigh.

Anyway.

This book feels very much like he's got three friends in Keith Olsen, Waddy Wachtel, and, to a lesser degree, John Kosh. It feels like he wanted to pay back some debt on by writing a book starring the three of them.

Granted Olsen and Wachtel cover a lot of ground through the Seventies, and Kosh designed a lot of great album covers throughout the same period, but some of the stories are so jarringly anecdotal (Kosh's run ins with Rod Stewart, for example) that they almost feel like filler.

At the same time, while focusing solely on American rock artists and bands (except for Rod Stewart's non-musical hijinks), he also seems to miss a broad swath of music that occurred at the time, but didn't cross over the Olsen/Wachtel territory, so was never mentioned. Where's the chapters on Steely Dan? Billy Joel? Aerosmith? Blue Öyster Cult? Where's Meat Loaf, for chrissakes? Or Bowie, if only for his Philly soul period with Young Americans>?

So, while it's a fun little ride, it's nowhere near the full story, and while Olsen's and Wachtel's accomplishments were great and interesting, there's a hell of a lot more stories out there that Hartman missed.
… (meer)
 
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TobinElliott | Sep 3, 2021 |

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Statistieken

Werken
2
Leden
191
Populariteit
#114,255
Waardering
4.0
Besprekingen
15
ISBNs
9

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