The last holiday : a memoir /

GIL SCOTT-HERON grew up surrounded by heroism. He distrusted empty promises and easy solutions. He also had a very hard time with himself. Whether you expect a memoir to explain how the third sentence relates to the first two will determine how you feel about this posthumous book. "The Last Holiday," published eight months after Scott-Heron's death at 62, provides sharp oratorical examinations of the American social contract as well as a pop star's bathetic memories and celebrity encounters. At some point in the second half of his life, he became a crack addict; his career and ambitions and relationships suffered for it. This is all public knowledge, though it forms no part of his memoir except in very cloudy hints toward the end. Scott-Heron tells us he respected "books and teachers and laws." He calls Thurgood Marshall "my candidate for Man of the Century." He was a Samaritan, a political activist who learned that symbolic gestures went only so far and a moralist who knew that nobody could be forced to believe anything. Precocious in youth - at 20 a published novelist and poet, a teacher of literature at Federal City College in Washington a few years later - Scott-Heron might have made an excellent old man, one with much to teach us. Some of the problems he wrote about in the '70s and '80s have since intensified: environmental disaster ("We Almost Lost Detroit"); consumer stupor ("The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"); the triangle of addiction, family implosion and jail ("The Bottle," "Angel Dust," "Home Is Where the Hatred Is"). But he supped away long before his death. In the last decade, what one mostly read about Scott-Heron was a post-history of a living person: articles about his drug sentences and jail time, a missed parole hearing, an alleged act of domestic aggression against a girlfriend. He played concerts, but his final album - "I'm New Here," released in 2010 - was his first collection of new material in 16 years, and seemed at least as much the vision of its assembler, the English producer Richard Russell, as that of its star. So it is with this book. In a letter included in the British edition of "The Last Holiday" - and not included in Grove's American edition; a mistake, in my view - Jamie Byng of Canongate Books explains how the memoir came about. Scott-Heron had been working on it in the '90s as a third-person narrative, Byng says. Let's call that Book A. The manuscript had been centrally about his 1980-81 tour as an opening act for Stevie Wonder, who mightily impressed him, and that singer's campaign to honor Martin Luther King Jr. with a federal holiday, culminating in a rally in Washington. (The holiday was first observed in 1986.) Presumably the story would have ended there; maybe it was a book about King and Wonder and only secondarily about the narrator, whom Scott-Heron called "the artist." He rewrote it in the first person, with occasional verse, starting in 2004, at his editor's request: thus, Book B. It is good to know all this, because a reader quickly starts to wonder: what kind of book is this? When did Scott-Heron write each section, and what was he trying to prove at the time of writing it? Why do many stories - like one about a protest he led, while a student at Lincoln University, against poor campus health services; or one about his involvement with the 1979 concerts against nuclear power that became the album and film "No Nukes" - slide into vagueness, as if the outcomes weren't important? There are weird tonal shifts, lingerings over minor details, and anecdotes about Stevie Wonder's touring retinue and sense of humor that would seem proportionate in Book A but are oversize in Book B. We read about Scott-Heron in a Houston hotel, spacing out in front of the TV, and we begin a two-page side road about Texans, full of run-on thoughts: "People in Texas seem to have tremendous egos, no matter what part of the state they're in or what part they play in it. Their partisan perspective toward their state was probably appropriate when they were what they hadn't yet been told they were not anymore." This is good - it's the rhetorical wordplay that made his raps between songs so vivid and funny - but nearly meaningless in the context of this book. His maternal grandfather in Jackson, Tenn., had been a baseball player of local legend and an insurance salesman during the Depression. His grandmother worked as a laundress for some of the most powerful families in town, to whom she spoke her mind about the mistreatment of black people. ("She was not stuck-up or snooty or snobbish," Scott-Heron writes, on one of many alliterative rolls. "She was not narrow-minded, naïve, neurotic, nosy or negative.") His father was a Jamaican-Canadian soccer star who left Scott-Heron and his mother to play for Glasgow Celtic. His mother had graduated from Lane College in Jackson, with high honors. Heroes, all. Scott-Heron himself, along with two black classmates, desegregated a Jackson junior high school, and he writes lucidly about that experience and its aftermath - including his mother's decision not to push him into it, and the strangeness of studying the Civil War in a white Southern school: "It was like reviewing it from the loser's locker room." He went to high school in New York, where he attended the Bronx public school DeWitt Clinton and then Fieldston, the Riverdale private school, which gave him a full scholarship and a sharpened feeling of otherness. He attended a black college, Lincoln, in Oxford, Pa., alma mater of Langston Hughes, Kwame Nkrumah and his beloved Thurgood Marshall. But he was an indifferent student, to his family's frustration, and in various parts one feels Scott-Heron struggling with his own will to heroism - especially at the end, when he touches lightly on his stroke in 1990, the death of his mother in 1999 and his feelings for his three estranged children. "I am honestly not sure how capable I am of love," he writes. "And I'm not sure why." Still, he offers a theory: because members of his mother's family did not express love explicitly. This seems like an excuse for not doing right by other people, a tendency he criticized in songs like "Brother" and "Your Daddy Loves You." Of his children, he says: "I hope there is no doubt that I loved them and their mothers as best I could. And if that was inevitably inadequate, I hope it was supplemented by their mothers, who were all better off without me." And that is a jarring shift, because he talks with pride and honesty about family and learning before tailing off into self-recrimination. There's no connection from the beginning to this, no middle-period filling-in. It would seem odd for someone like Gil Scott-Heron to write a book purely trading on his own fame and notoriety, because he never seemed to be in it for the money. He was not a born superstar or a beautiful loser; he was a newspaper-devouring songwriter who didn't expect the success he got and took the time to be specific and engaged and curious in his work. What leaps out of Scott-Heron's best albums, like "Pieces of a Man" and "Winter in America," is how uncheap the shots are, even when he's exaggerating or being comedic. In his time, he was a great artist; when he started writing this book, his time, as well as some of his curiosity, was over. I don't know if we can expect him to be great in a book that he only half inhabited. Scott-Heron slipped away long before his death last year; the great artist had become a crack addict. Ben Ratliff is a music critic for The Times and the author of "The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music."

A jazz and blues poet-musician known as a spoken-word performer, Scott-Heron is often called the godfather of rap and is indeed considered one of the founding fathers of hip-hop. Among his most influential works is the composition The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which originally appeared on his album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970). This well-written and fresh memoir, posthumously published he died in May 2011 recalls Scott-Heron's upbringing in Jackson, Tennessee, and New York City. He was the son of an opera singer and a Jamaican soccer player (the first black athlete to play for the Glasgow Celtic football team in Scotland) and was among the few black students to attend the prestigious Fieldston School in New York. Scott-Heron comments on his love of language and his respect for education. He discusses his recording career, including the critically acclaimed Winter in America (1974); his publishing career; and his 1980 tour with Stevie Wonder. Engrossing and even at times uplifting, Scott-Heron's self-portrait grants us insights into one of the most influential African American musicians of his generation.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2010 Booklist

Often called the godfather of rap, Scott-Heron released 20 albums and many singles, including the deeply influential "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." Now, even after his death, Scott-Heron continues to mesmerize us in this brilliant and lyrical romp through the fields of his life. He carries us from his birth in 1949 and childhood in Jackson, Tenn., just east of Memphis, to his coming-of-age in New York City and his many and varied musical adventures with recording industry executives such as Clive Davis of Columbia Records. Scott-Heron recalls his grandmother talking to the junk man one day and the next thing he knew, an upright piano was being carried into the house; his musical career commenced when he started learning to play hymns on that piano. When the family got a second radio, he was able to listen to WDIA in Memphis, where Carla and Rufus Thomas and B.B. King were on-air personalities. When the interstate highway paved over their neighborhood, Scott-Heron and his mother moved on to New York, where his musical career took flight and soared. Scott-Heron's memoir also gracefully calls out Stevie Wonder and his initially attempts and eventually successful campaign to establish Martin Luther King's birthday as a national holiday. In this captivating memoir Scott-Heron movingly gives thanks for the "Spirits," those intangible influences in his life that moved him and helped direct his life and to whom he gives back so fully through his gift of lyrics and music. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Scott-Heron, a prolific, poet, novelist and musician, stays true to his reputation in this "poetic treatment" of his journey from humble origins to pop culture icon, interspersed with selected poems. Scott-Heron's "cool" is apparent, and the candor with which he writes about his experiences performing with some of the music industry's biggest names (Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson) makes the accounts amusing at times. In addition, the book delivers the social commentary on some of the pivotal events in this country's history his fans have grown to expect and respect. However, despite the accessible writing found here, readers will be left with no more knowledge of the writer than can be acquired from his other books and recordings-perhaps the title is intended to be a collection of liner notes documenting his 50-year career since the answers to "Who Was Gil Scott-Heron?" can only be revealed through the clues hidden in the many albums and books he leaves as his legacy. Verdict Long-standing fans and those curious about the man widely regarded as the "Godfather of Hip-Hop" are unlikely to find in this memoir the answers to questions about his descent into addiction, or a life interrupted by the ravages of HIV. Recommended only for poetry, music, and Scott-Heron's fans and those with a curiosity about the famous figure.-Tamela Chambers, Chicago Pub. Schs. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Now and Then, 2000, etc.), a once-prolific poet and recording artist who had all but disappeared from the culture for more than a decade, before his revival with 2010's I'm New Here, a well-received comeback album. At that time, a resurgence of publicity cast light on his hiatus, as his crack addiction and incarceration for cocaine had silenced a voice that had been strong and prophetic, with cuts such as "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" having a profound influence on the most socially conscious hip-hop. A few months later he died. There isn't a single mention of the artist's struggles with drugs and the law here, almost nothing from the last decade of his life and only spotty accounts of the 30 years that transpired after his 1980 tour with Stevie Wonder. Oddly enough, that tour and Wonder's efforts to establish a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. provide this book with both its focus and its title. There is also plenty about the author's formative years, after his soccer-playing father left his mother and Scott-Heron was raised by his grandmother in Tennessee, before moving to Manhattan to live with his mother. The author writes with a wit and warmth at odds with what he perceives as his image of "some wild-haired, wild-eyed motherfucker." He came from a well-educated family, received a postgraduate literary education, became a student militant during the early '70s and taught writing while establishing the fusion of jazz, groove and spoken word that would prove so influential. Yet his partnership with musical collaborator Brian Jackson ends without explanation, as does his wife's transition to ex-wife. Of his third child, he writes, "How I became a father again at nearly fifty years old is a story I will save for another time." The author ran out of time, leaving plenty of stories untold.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.