All you need is cash

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Death to geezer rock! is the clarion call of Rock 'Til You Drop - an incendiary tome primed to go off in the faces of the wheezing rock icons of yesteryear. They, says author John Strausbaugh, have sold out to the money-men - plugging the same old grooves with as much sincerity, as, well, the average baby-boomer politician.

Strausbaugh was in numerous rock bands in his youth - "but knew when to quit" - now he edits the New York Press. Rock 'Til You Drop comes with a salutary warning for ageing hipsters struggling to come to terms with middle-aged spread: "Don't French-kiss today's rock and roll, because you don't know where she's been". For Strausbaugh, "rock is for kids, not parents. Colostomy rock is not rebellion - it's nostalgia". I would love to see the look on Mick Jagger's face when he is handed a copy. For his was the generation, as the author is happy to remind us, who once captured the Zeitgeist with precision - "I hope I die before I get old."

Here is an impassioned, yet brilliantly humorous broadside against the rock industry which refuses to spare even the saintly Bob Dylan. "A Bob Dylan concert," observes Strausbaugh, "is a zombie show that requires self-deception from both the audience and the artist". I went along to the New York launch in a seething sweaty basement club in Manhattan's old garment district, the sort of place ageing rock stars would once have frequented, but would now avoid like the plague.

"All you need is cash," says an unforgiving Strausbaugh. "How can you look at the once-svelte Stevie Nicks and not cringe to see her overweight and stuffed like a sausage into some girdle or corset torture device so constricting she literally can't move in it, her pancake makeup thick and hard as china, her hair a straw fright wig, her once fetchingly crackled voice a scary croak? Yeah, you can go your own way mama. Please."

Yet Rock 'Til You Drop is rather more than a glorious rant directed at those who survived the sex and drugs to milk a new generation while still claiming to be hip and radical.

Strausbaugh chronicles the rise of groups such as the Rolling Stones, their treachery towards their first manager, Sixties Soho habitué and èminence grise of European Art Rock, Giorgio Gomelsky, to whom this book is surely dedicated.

The early days of rock and roll in London give way to conversations with another survivor who, like Gomelsky, never surrendered. Strausbaugh's blast against the commercialisation of music is ably abetted by John Sinclair, once manager of the notorious MC5 band, who earned himself a nine-year sentence for smoking a spliff at the Democratic Party's 1968 Chicago Convention.

And then there is light entertainment in the shape of the comely groupie of groupies, Bebe Buell, recounting her fun time with Liz Derringer and Johnny Winter's razor: "We're tripping and looking at his white whiskers and going, 'God, that looks like cocaine'. So, we wrapped it in tin foil and sold them for 20 bucks in MacDougal Street."

Not everyone will be enamoured of Strausbaugh's acerbity - for it cuts like a hot knife through butter. "The sight and sound of Diana Ross dragging her bony carcass through exhausted renditions of old, old, hits" which "were not nearly as entertaining as watching the tour decompose like a disinterred corpse", he writes with bravery that teeters on the suicidal.

Strausbaugh has received many letters from genuine rock chicks. "As a 17-year-old fan of the Stones," writes one, "to say they are faking it is laughable ... May Keith (Richards) have mercy on your soul".