cover image A MISFIT'S MANIFESTO: The Spiritual Journey of a Rock & Roll Heart

A MISFIT'S MANIFESTO: The Spiritual Journey of a Rock & Roll Heart

Donna Gaines, . . Villard, $24.95 (416pp) ISBN 978-0-679-46327-6

After spending most of her career studying others—most notably the death-metal dropouts captured in her 1991 book Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids—sociologist Gaines focuses the microscope on herself in this memoir. In a variation on the old rock-'n'-roll-saved-my-life story, Gaines describes a new self for each decade: she's a Ronettes-styled bad girl in 1960s Rockaway, Queens; a sleazy Lower East Side punk in the '70s; and a headbanger out on Long Island in the '80s. While a compelling memoir delivers a yarn with a deeper level of understanding, Gaines does a whole lot of boasting but fails to make much sense of it, as if confessing were equal to self-analysis. As Gaines writes early on, she's a "bourbon guzzling, pill-popping, penis-addicted workaholic" and a "tattooed Jew with a Ph.D. and a pistol permit." Never mind that these aren't the strongest underground creds these days; the posing also makes for dull reading. Equally dated is Gaines's writing style, which alternates between beat-style ramblings (on seeing Led Zeppelin: "Mother and father, militia and messiah—all in a freshly squeezed lemonade dripping down [lead singer Robert] Plant's thighs") and academese (on a first love: "The linear collapsed in the associative and synchronicity obliterated chronology"). Toss in some loaded personal insights (on why musicians become drug addicts: "How do you calm down after you've interfaced with God?"), and readers are saddled with nearly 400 pages of self-indulgence. (Mar.)