It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of The Who. Nor that my favorite member of the band is Keith Moon. (I'm even posting this on what would have been his birthday.) When I found out a book by this title even existed, naturally I was intrigued. Given the sort of antics that Keith was so famously notorious for, I began brainstorming what sort of a story this could possibly be. I came up with all sorts of possibilities of what Keith could have done with this lipstick....if, in fact, he did truly steal anyone's lipstick. Or perhaps it was just an attention-grabbing title? Who knew...
The book is rather convoluted. First off, it's pretty bad when I initially couldn't tell whether this book was actually an autobiography, or rather, just a very realistic work of fiction involving real-life celebrity names as the main players. It took me several chapters before I started fact-checking names -- the author's name, the name of the publication she worked for, etc -- to see if they existed in real life or not. ...Unbelievably, they did. Alright, at least we've established one thing here. Now knowing that this was in fact a true story, I began to digest it as an autobiography...which are normally my favorite genre of book. This one, however....
It's strange. It had all the elements going for it that under normal circumstances, would automatically be enough to make me love it. It's an autobiography. It's by a british author. It's about classic rock music. There's mentions of the Beatles, the Who, the Monkees, even Lorna Luft, for god's sake (about as close to Liza Minnelli as we get in this book, unfortunately), as well as some classic film stars such as Bette Davis. There's even a fairly good story about Andy Williams in here. And yet.... I still have to say, this book was about the dryest thing I have ever read.
Even the anecdote for which this book was titled after was amazingly lackluster. Yes, Keith stole the author's lipstick. All he did with it was draw on his chest, and remove his shirt to show off his artwork in the middle of a show. ...Honestly, I was expecting a much larger, grander-scale story about Moonie here.
Another gripe I have is how the author is just so unimpressed with just about everyone in this book, and feels the need to nitpick everyone -- usually on their appearance, mostly. Good god, woman, if you were so miserable in your work, why didn't you leave a lot sooner and do something else if you didn't even like any of these people? (Seriously, when we're even at the point of nitpicking Paul McCartney's appearance and failing to understand why the world thinks he's cute....Houston, we have a problem.)
Lastly, and my biggest problem with this book indeed, is the fact that -- okay, this book is written by someone who wrote for music publications FOR YEARS. Not only that, but has since gone on to write 25+ books... AND YET, spelling errors, grammatical errors, YOU NAME IT, they all run absolutely rampantly through the book. I could've excused a few here and there, but honestly, they were all over the place to the point where I was getting beyond annoyed even just trying to read the book and kept having to put it down every few pages to calm myself.
I wanted to enjoy this book; I really did, but I just didn't. And I admit, that left me feeling very sad and quite empty, given what all the book was about, but it was just written in such a way to where I highly doubt it ever grabbed anybody. I'm going to rate this book 2 out of 5 stars, and even at that, I feel like I'm being generous.
