Touched By Magic - Greg Prato

JS-NYC likes themselves some Greg Prato. His oral history of the grunge era and Eric Carr bio have received high marks from our discriminating scribes here. I knew of Tommy Bolin through magazine subscriptions and general obscurist guitar nerdery, but hadn't heard too much of his material and didn't have too much conception of him beyond the fact that he died pretty young and played with Deep Purple. Given my other alternative was a Prato book on the Blind Melon dude, Touched By Magic was an easy choice to make. Prato does his usual excellent job of recounting the Bolin story through the people that were closest to him personally and musically. It's ridiculous to think that he could have played on seminal works by Billy Cobham, The James Gang and Deep Purple and still died at age 25. It's a compelling, albeit tragic story. Pick it up here from Prato.

R

The Eric Carr Story by Greg Prato

Kiss Alive II was one of the first albums I got when I was a kid. I got it for Christmas, along with a Cowsills record. Oddly enough I never really took, to it, even after I brought it to my third-grade class and was told never to bring it to school again. That certainly seems odd, but the point of it is that when I did get into Kiss, it was the Animalize record, specifically Heaven's On Fire, that won me over. Nerds can attest to the anomalous nature of that record, as it featured the only recorded appearance of Mark St. John on guitar, as well as the first credited Kiss appearance by Bruce Kulick, who formally replaced St. John after he was stricken with Reiters Syndrome.

Eric Carr was the drummer for Kiss at that time, having replaced the increasingly besotted Peter Criss. His drum solos were one of the highlights of the shows of that time, to the point where the more jealous proprietors of the Kiss franchise excised it outright. Carr died of heart cancer in 1991 and remains one of the best-loved replacement Kiss members. Greg Prato does a great job of telling the Carr story while offering unique insight into life as a hired hand at Kiss Inc. Probably not the most exciting proposition for those that aren't Kiss obsessed, but another great effort from one of this generation's best new rock scribes. Get it from Lulu.com.

R