Neil Strauss is in his element meeting the stars of LA's sleazy netherworld, but there are poignant encounters with the less famous too
Fans of the antics of tattooed rock pigs will know Neil Strauss as the credited ghost-writer of autobiographies of Marilyn Manson (1998) and metal outfit Motley Cr�e (2001). As the notorious Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods was to the 1980s, Strauss's works were to the turn of this century, revelling in the excesses of bands who had absorbed the life lessons of early metal and gone one louder. Covering hearing-impaired groupies with raw meat? Check. Smoking the disinterred bones of the dead? Check. Strauss's books about these diverting sub-hominids sit depravedly alongside that other work of metal anthropology, Michael Moynihan and Didrik S�derlind's controversial Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground.
In recent years, however, Strauss has become something of a household name in the US, at least among men of a certain demographic. His bestselling 2005 book, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, was an intimate study of PUAs ? inadequate men with their own acronym.
Anyone living outside the Los Angeles coupling demi-monde may be intrigued to learn that there is a guild of sleazebags who attempt to coax women into bed with the aid of mind-control tricks. Strauss went under deep cover among them, emerging with a tumescent fanbase. The Game's follow-up, 2009's Emergency: One Man's Story of a Dangerous World and How to Stay Alive in It, appeared to be a more amiably neurotic sort of work, exploring survivalism, and what to do if the first world implodes. Apparently, we all need to move to St Kitts.
Coming after these hits, Everyone Loves You? feels a little like a kind of stop-gap before Strauss's next Boy's Own exploit. Harking back to Strauss's pre-PUAbescent career as an interviewer, it compiles broken-up bits of his encounters with the famous (Gaga, Madonna, Britney, Tom Cruise) and the infamous (mafioso folk musicians, CIA psych-ops operatives and Paris Hilton) in the guise of a book from which life lessons can be gleaned and themed.
The conceit clunks a little at first, as Snoop Dogg (shopping for nappies after death threats from his former label) segues into a bit of Johnny Cash (discussing mortality). But you swiftly adapt to Strauss's digressive bent and the pages flow, albeit in an attention-deficit sort of way. More dates, times and contexts would have made these transitions less jarring.
Scandalous revelations? Well, Paris Hilton is a racist ("I can't stand black guys. I would never touch one"). Chris Rock provides a recipe for crack ("cocaine, lactose, vitamin B12"). What stops this book ? frequently lavatorial, and great lavatory reading ? from being just another writerly mixtape is that Strauss is genuinely trying to shake down celebrity (and obscurity) for the small change of wisdom. Often, he merely reveals that celebs are astigmatic astronomers of their own navels. And deluded. "I'm proud of the way I was with Tina and my kids," says Ike Turner. "I don't do nothing that I regret, man, because I'm not the one they made me out to be in the movie."
Strauss gives aloof women ? Joni Mitchell, say ? very short shrift, as might be expected of a writer instinctively drawn to the lives of rock pigs, PUAs and porn stars (Strauss also ghostwrote Jenna Jameson's How to Make Love Like a Porn Star).
But Strauss can also be an imaginative and sympathetic interviewer and packaged up alongside his A-list interviews are encounters with unsung heroes (like then-nonagenarian fife-and-drum player Otha Turner) and long-lost outsider artists (Mingering Mike) dearer to his heart. Two of the most affecting stories told here concern the fate of a set of decomposing wax dummies of country music stars, and the grim end of the pioneering music journalist Paul Nelson, the man who apparently gave Bob Dylan his Woody Guthrie records. The wax dummies ? Johnny Cash, Kenny Rogers, the Carter family ? are clothed in priceless original costumes, and Strauss chases them from Nashville to New York basements via a Chinese restaurant owner. Rolling Stone writer Nelson, meanwhile ? A&R to the New York Dolls, mentor to David Bowie ? succumbs to perfectionism, insecurity and mental illness, a recurring dark eddy in this froth of fame. He is found dead in his apartment, having retreated from his high-profile career into increasing reclusiveness and a slow death by starvation. Strauss assiduously attempts to piece together his last days, his motive unspoken, but obvious: there but for the grace of God.
There are epiphanies here, often found in the interstices. Rock'n'roll, it is revealed in a footnote, was probably invented by Chuck Berry as he tried to please both black and white halves of his physically segregated audience. It's a theory that has been aired before but ? to my knowledge ? not properly with Berry himself. The index is hilarious ("noodle origin misidentified, p432", "Brian Wilson's batting average p114", "nerd shit pp1-517"). And we discover that people like Kenny G and Lionel Richie have a lot more perspective than their tunes give them credit for. Richie reflects on his workaholic rise to the peaks of pop stardom, offering up a useful precis for the lessons of fame. "And finally when I got there, I discovered what was at the top. You know what was there?" he asks Strauss. "Nothing. Not one thing. What was at the top was all the experiences you had to get there."
Kitty Empire is the Observer's pop critic
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