Dave Bidini

As Pete Campbell plaintively cried out on Mad Men, "Not great, Bob!" Dave Bidini did not have access to Lightfoot — Gord repeatedly refused his requests for an interview. Bidini turns that rejection into a sort of badge of honor, and fashions the book as an "open letter" to Lightfoot, speculating about his life and relating some tawdry gossip and anonymous criticism. Evidently realizing this self-indulgent stunt wasn't enough to carry a whole book, Bidini attempts to give the feather-light narrative more gravitas by alternating sections of his "letter" with a slapdash chronicling of events that happened during a particular week in 1972 — the week when both Dylan and Lightfoot appeared at the Mariposa Folk Festival in Toronto. The every-other-chapter structure makes the narrative even more disjoined than trying to tie together a bunch of completely unrelated events together would be ordinarily. The only consolation for me is I bought this one for $3 at a used bookstore.… (mere)

An interesting book. Not as good as [b:On a Cold Road: Tales of Adventure in Canadian Rock|147353|On a Cold Road Tales of Adventure in Canadian Rock|Dave Bidini|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1333579289s/147353.jpg|142209], but not bad. Bidini has great observances of the various locales, both exotic and mundane, as well as the people. However, I find myself frequently irritated by his snobbery of some music, which is interesting, because he's similar in age and, for the most part, in musical taste to me. Yet I find it grating that he makes fun of some record exec who refers to the album Oranges & Lemons by XTC as Lemons & Oranges, yet later on, Bidini himself refers to the Joe Jackson song On Your Radio as coming from his first album. Sorry Dave, you made as stupid a mistake as that record exec did. That song's from Jackson's second album, I'm The Man. So, if Bidini can't take that guy seriously, how am I supposed to take the author seriously?

It's stuff like that that makes me put the book down for a few days.

Still, overall, Bidini's a good storyteller, and in the long run, the book is a good read.… (mere)

I gave this a three-star rating because there was interesting stories in there about writers. But really, through the short 120 pages of this book, I kept asking myself, who exactly is this book for? It seemed, at times, far too simplistic for the teen writer, and at other times, way too complicated. Then, for the last third, it seemed to turn more into a biography-lite of Bidini.

There was precious little advice, and he didn't really seem to attack the central topics of the subtitle, How I learned to love books and why I had to write them. So, really, I'm still left asking the question...who is this book for and more importantly, what was Bidini's goal?

I sometimes wish Goodreads had a meh rating. I really do.… (mere)