This breezy tale of the author’s 20-year-long, on-and-off affair with Eric Burdon of Animals and War fame—they met when she was 18 and he was in his late thirties—won’t change any of your preconceptions about the rock and roll lifestyle. It’s an authentic, first-person story of what it’s like to be a rock and roll groupie, told in gushing, breathless prose (the author never uses one phrase when three will do).
The prodigious and prolonged drugging, drinking, and carrying on will remind you there’s a reason why “sex and drugs and rock and roll” are so often mentioned in the same breath. However, there’s not a lot of dish and no real surprises. Hints are dropped, but the author insists she never witnessed any bad behavior directly.
The story of how she got into the rock scene and her early involvement with Burdon is framed by the story of their disappointing final encounter, the attempted last fling of “the shiny happy Sherry Fairy” after 15 years of giving up the glamour and living a normal, middle-class, suburban life, complete with diapers, kids, and a marriage on the rocks.
Although much of this rock and roll memoir is entertaining, in the end—and it’s not really a “fairy-tale” ending—no one seems to learn from experience, we don’t gain any real insight into Eric Burdon’s personality (or even the author’s), and the music itself seems almost beside the point.
Reviewed by Jean Gazis for IndieReader