9 Guitar Hero Autobiographies

Whether he’s squirting arterial blood over Izzy Stradlin’s bathroom, firing a .44 Magnum through
his ceiling, drunk- driving at 90mph or running naked across an Arizona golf course to escape his hallucinations of the alien from Predator, the mad hatter spares no details of his late- 80s smack habit. Oh, and he plays a bit of guitar, too.

A toe-curling tragi-comedy in which the KISS Spaceman is punched out by promoters, catches pubic lice, slides into addiction cliché and celebrates his firing from the line-up with a car chase that ends with him spread-eagled at police gunpoint. No Regrets, Ace? Seriously...?

The Crüe’s ‘quiet one’ raises hell across Neil Strauss’s notorious tome, peaking when he roams the streets of Tokyo, blind-drunk, with his pants around his ankles, snapping at tourists in a Godzilla mask. “I thought I was so funny...” he cringes.

Following the Jane’s Addiction guitarist for a year, Neil Strauss is the fly on Hollywood’s filthiest wall, documenting all the hangers-on and dead-eyed models who blow through Navarro’s mansion.

Less memoir, more scrapbook, this posthumous 2002 release reproduces the scathing letters, embryonic lyrics and jet-black cartoons that Cobain scribbled on notebooks and hotel stationery as he neared his suicide.

By two, his father has been gunned down. By eight, he’s being beaten with coat hangers at military school. By the 70s, he’s bouncing between a smack habit and alcoholism, and mourning the fatal bike crash of brother Duane. Thankfully, Allman spins his yarn with the easy humour of a Southern barfly nursing a bottle of moonshine.

Anything Keef can do, Ron can do almost as well, and this 2007 memoir follows the Stones man from water-gypsy roots to standing on the world’s biggest stages, playing ‘spot the tits’. The only tragedy is that it was published before he started bedding the Russian cocktail waitresses...

The Chickenfoot man is compelling on his “bone- f**king-poor” childhood and “alcoholic madman” father, but it’s his potshots at Eddie Van Halen that make Red a set text. “Hunched over like a little old man,” writes Hagar, “missing a number of teeth... he looked like he hadn’t bathed in a week.”

The great Keef’s 2010 autobiography was miraculous for two reasons. First, because it finally lifted the lid on the antics of rock’s gold-standard rogue, following him through a lifetime of heroin binges, mafia run-ins, court cases, punch-ups and arson, with frequent asides on the size of Mick Jagger’s tackle. And second, because the sozzled Stone was actually able to remember it.