Escape from Bellevue : a dive bar odyssey

by Campion, Christopher John.

Format: Print Book 2009
Availability: Available at 1 Library 1 of 1 copy
Available (1)
Location Collection Call #
CLP - Main Library Mezzanine - Non-fiction CT275.C274515 A3 2009
Location  CLP - Main Library
 
Collection  Mezzanine - Non-fiction
 
Call Number  CT275.C274515 A3 2009
 
 
Summary
Indie rock raconteur Campion--one of the few patients ever to escape from Bellevue's locked ward--recalls his band's tumultuous ride, his plummet into addiction, and the strange road back to sobriety.
Published Reviews
Booklist Review: "Campion, lead singer of the (almost) nationally famous indie band Knockout Drops, is no polished writer. His stories ramble. He digresses. He desperately needs an editor. But there is undeniable power in the cautionary tale of his drug-and-alcohol-fueled rise and fall in the rock world. It isn't just that the stories he tells are increasingly harrowing, or that his multiple addictions exact a terrible cost in lost friends and lovers and alienated family members, or that for a time he was essentially homeless. It's that Campion is a talented raconteur, capable of turning every misbegotten moment from early adolescence spent hanging out with his older brother's garage band to drug-hazed college years to equally hazy days down, out, and on the road in Massachusetts and Maine into addictively fascinating prose. His years on stage, including the autobiographical off-Broadway rock musical Escape from Bellevue, have clearly taught him how to get and hold attention. Campion parties like a rock star, crashes and burns like one, then rises from the ashes to tell us about it.--Helbig, Jack Copyright 2009 Booklist"
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Publisher's Weekly Review: "Expanding on the material in his eponymous autobiographical off-Broadway musical, Campion, lead singer in the band Knockout Drops, cops to inventing characters and misremembering some facts and time lines. Readers, and perhaps he, cannot therefore know whether he has embellished the all-night booze-and-blow-fueled partying with the rodeo clowns and the bearded lady, or the witty repartee recollected verbatim from drunken stupors of decades past, or the anecdote about riding crowded elevators dressed only in a girlfriend's pink thong. Oh well, it's all surely accurate in the way that rock 'n' roll ballads are faithful records of failed love affairs. At any rate, Campion's portrait of his knockabout sojourn in New York's indie rock demimonde in the 1990s, when his band perched agonizingly on the cusp between loserdom and breakout success, has the ring of truth. So does his account of the alcoholic slide that transformed him from a hearty mainstay of the Greenwich Village bar scene into a desolate bum incarcerated in the titular psych ward. Campion tells this tale of a very long trek on the wild side with hangdog humor and bleary charm. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved"
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Additional Information
Subjects Campion, Christopher John.
Singers -- New York (State) -- New York -- Biography.
Alcoholics -- New York (State) -- New York -- Biography.
Dramatists, American -- Biography.
Nightlife -- New York (State) -- New York.
New York (N.Y.) -- Biography.
Publisher New York :Gotham Books,2009
Language English
Description 372 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN 9781592404261 (hardcover)
159240426X (hardcover)
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