Ghym's review
The Confessions of Rick James: Memoirs of a Super Freak by Rick James
I have been a fan of Rick James for a long time, and even got a ticket to a concert of his once, and then, he died before I could see the concert. This dude lived a hard life, so it wasn't that surprising he died relatively young. This biography has all the shocking moments of a VH1 Behind the Music Special, but it also reveals a lot of things about Rick James that people would find surprising in different ways. James came up not in the R&B world of the 60s and 70s, but in the rock world of the 60s. He was good friends with Crosby, Stills & Nash and admired them greatly. He liked Big Band music. He was way more complicated than people could imagine from his "Superfreak" image, and a talented musician who never really got his due as a serious artist. He also had his share of problems, drug-related and otherwise. He apologizes for nothing, though, in this book, and basically just tells it like it was. James is not a book writer by nature, and the book suffers from gramm...more
