Just found a paperback version in a local bookshop and started reading. Summers demonstrates himself to be lucid if somewhat dry writer - and I don't believe this is ghosted - but met approval from Mojo's readers as the rock biography of 2006.

 

I won't offer a review as yet, since I'm only 80 pages in. However, to indicate the amount of detail given so far,  Summers has only got as far as telling:

a) once he chased Hank B Marvin through Bournemouth and to obtain an autograph

b) in his mid-teens he worked in a local dance band, but fired for snogging a customer only to be replaced by a certain Robert Fripp 

c) he was yet another young musician taken under the wing of blues godfather Alexis Korner, when he and Zoot Money left Bournemouth to seek fame and fortune in London - telling me that Bournemouth was home of even more rock musicans than I thought

d) he sold Eric Clapton the  Les Paul guitar, which Clapton was soon to be called "God"

e) his musical heroes are the major American jazz players of the late 50's.

 

One Train Later is written from the view point of Andy Summers having plenty of time to kill before the last Police performance, prior to the band folding (for the first time). Therefore having long timebetween waking in the morning and the evening show, to contemplate the past and what brought  him to that point of success, thoughts tempered by certain frustrations. There are good insights into the exhilaration and excesses of the mid to late 60's London music scene, and Summers reminding (or in many instances revealing to me) the number of bands he passed through: Zoot Money's Big Roll Band, Dantelion's Chariot, Soft Machine, the New Animals, Kevin Ayers Band, with all of whom he was trying to play more than just an average lead guitar. The 3 year break from the performing music scene in LA in the early 70's, but eventually getting back to the cold, bleak, 3 day week Britain with wife and soon a family. Meeting with Sting and Copeland (still with Curved Air, and about to marry the band's lead singer) and the early days of Police.  The appearance of punk and the trio's enthusiams for throwing over the staid and stale musical order. Their gradual discovery of reggatta de blanc through a fuller exposure to Bob Marley records. The fame that slowly grew but then snowballed with the Police - the grind of world tours that would kill three marriages, the related excesses, the drugs, the unfaithfulness - unsurprisingly echoing Kevin Gilbert's libretto to Shaming Of The True. Summers doing lots of  indulging but at the same time still trying be a better guitarist, practising and putting the jazz and the modern classical (e.g. of Bartok) into the punk and reggae. And somehow finding some time to record with fellow, former Bournemouth resident, Robert Fripp. Then the slow but inevitable falling apart of Police.

 

I must admit  the book was difficult to start, into but  whether Summers modified his rather arty farty language after  the first 100 pages, or I became tolerant to it, rperhaps needs another read of the book. from me However, there was a point when the book became a page turner  e.g.  for the last 300 pages, rather than annoyed with somewhat precious wordage. He is candid about his relationships with his wife, (who he married, divorced and remarried), Sting and Copeland, and his beliefs. In all, Summers has the language and vocabuary to give a real sense of what is to be a jobbing pop/rock man, trying to break into the fame and fortune. Then having done it, being a caged and frustrated superstar interminably on the road still required to find new fans in new countries, although already selling truck loads of albums - and on those short breaks coming too slowly back to reality whilst being pressurised about the next LP.

 

Check it out.

 

Bob? (As in Blackadder?)

 

A goodly chunk. Approx the first 150 pages are devoted to pre-Police activities, with reasonable to long sections devoted each to the several bands Summers was in. I feel I'm getting  a good sense of what these bands brought to his development as a musician and a person.

 

Sounds good! I think I'll order it from Brussel's Watersones bookshop!

 

Thanks !

 

If you enjoyed A Cure For Gravity you'll like this one as well.

 

Summers had quite a career before The Police, much of it with George Bruno AKA Zoot Money

 

Alexis Korner, Steampacket (with LJ Baldry)

Big Roll Band,

Dantalion's Chariot,

Soft Machine (without GB)

and  finally Eric Burdon & the Animals......

 

But past that last gig, it looks like the man had missed the train to fortune, when most ofhis peers meant to at least achieve some sort of permanent job in a band, he couldn't. His errance in the states and return to England sounded like complete defeat.

 

It's rather funny that the man that got Summers fired from Soft Machine (that's Kevin Ayers, but he asked Wyatt to do the dirty job) on grounds that Summers was too good and following Ratledge in a jazz direction), he hired Summers once back in England in 74 and played in his band for about 18 months, until the Police was about to happen.

 

So  the title can indeed take a double meaning, when he said that had he taken one subway later, he's have missed Stewart Copeland and tried to convince him to have have a go at it.

 

But being sensibly older than both Sting and Copeland, it's also obvious that The Police was his last break at stardom. So when he got his break it was over ten years later than most guys of his generation >> hence , one train later.

 

Summers has a good writing style, with his own sense of humour: I thought Nick Mason was funnier and less revengesome or more diplmatic >>> WTF are we supposed to do with the info that Long John Baldry almost raped Summers, especially that the info comes after LJB is dead and couldn't defend himself????

 

Sometimes, this book had me think of Emerson's  Picture Of An Exhibitionist, where the people in the trio (ELP or Police) couldn't get along, and he fires first (as does Emerson) at his colleague. Sting appears like a terribly egostist and egocentrist, certain that he was alone in Police's success,n but also refusing most of the other two's songs.

 

 

 

 

Good that the thread has been revived. I didn't know it was there. Now I would like to find a copy for myself.