There Goes Gravity by Lisa Robinson (BOOK REVIEW)

There is more than one description for a music journalist. Some of us are living, breathing encyclopedias of recorded music, effortlessly comparing deep cuts from thirty years ago to a newly minted master tape without blinking an eye. Then there are the ones who studiously inject their writings with BIG WORD philosophic mental wanderings about the state of music today. And finally there are those of us who prefer to walk through the minds of the artists, tripping over childhood memories and swimming in song lyric origins. Lisa Robinson is one of the latter.

I’ve always said that while I was dreaming about being a music journalist and photographer as a teenager, Cameron Crowe was actually doing it at the same age. But honestly, Lisa Robinson was our real hero. Flipping through magazines during the seventies and eighties, she popped up in by-lined story photos sitting next to rock stars like Robert Plant and Mick Jagger on THEIR plane or in THEIR hotel room. She was the mysterious journalist in dark shades writing about Jimmy Page and the New York Dolls and you just KNEW she was the coolest person in the world. And now finally she has stopped long enough to write about HER life amongst rock’s idols.

There Goes Gravity takes us into those black & white freeze-framed images of a life in rock & roll. For music journalists, this is a hungrily devoured how-she-did-it holy grail. For music fans, this is a hungrily devoured eye-to-the-keyhole look at private lives and exciting parties. In actuality, it is 347 pages of fun stories and delightful memories by one of music’s defining journalists who was there while it was happening. “It never felt like a job; it was fun, it was new, it felt like a calling,” Robinson explained in her new book. “Whether I was in a private plane with Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones or at a ballroom in Manchester or standing in 2 inches of beer on the floor at CBGB’s – it was exactly where I wanted to be.”

Robinson begins her tome in a Memphis hotel room in 1975. The Rolling Stones are on what would become a legendary tour of the US and she is being stirred from her sleep by the ringing of the phone. It’s Jagger looking for a girl. Not for him but for his friend. “I just thought you might be interested,” he tells her. Robinson declines and goes back to sleep.

Robinson was never a groupie, never a partier with the band, although she hung out backstage and in hotel rooms, sometimes spending hours talking with the musicians and various other members of their entourage. She was writing for Creem and New Musical Express and the New York Post but she never saw herself as a critic. “I wrote gossipy columns and conducted interviews,” she wrote in Chapter One. “This was somewhat of a rarity in the early 1970’s when ‘rock journalism’ was in it’s infancy and mostly populated by boys who had ambitions to become the next Norman Mailer.” Robinson wanted to trek through the memories and get to the roots of how-why-when. And because of her honesty and no doubt her personality, they trusted her with most of those answers.

It doesn’t matter whether Zeppelin or Lennon or Lady Gaga is your music of choice because she brings us from that 1975 tour through the CBGBs early punk days with Patti Smith and the Ramones and Lou Reed, through the rise of politics in music via U2, into the rap world of Eminem, the brilliance of Bowie and the transformation of Michael Jackson. Her stories are priceless, sharing excerpts from interviews old and new, as well as behind the scenes snapshots many people are not privy to. She shows us Jackson as a young man in a big overly-protected home and the man he became, still overly-protected in an even-bigger home. She brings us inside Gaga’s childhood apartment, cooking with her parents and opening up just enough to make you wonder. Eminem never smiles, Richards is always blunt, Plant is naturally flirtatious. John Lennon and Yoko Ono are one entity. Elton John is wickedly funny. Madonna is fake.

Overall, There Goes Gravity is a fast, fun read with delectable serving-sized chapters of rock & roll history. She drops names – Strummer, Kanye, Mercury and Roth – but with nary a sense of arrogance or entitlement. She mentions watching concerts at Madison Square Garden and Grammy Award telecasts from the sides of the stages. Lou Reed comes to her house to hang out with her husband, writer and producer Richard Robinson. Bono sings a paraphrased ditty to the tune of “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker,” substituting in Lisa’s name, every time he sees her. She was summoned to Yoko Ono’s apartment not long after her husband’s murder because she trusted her. She advised The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde against getting involved with The Kinks’ Ray Davies (she didn’t listen) and convinced Walter Yetnikoff, then president of CBS Records, to sign the Clash (he listened). She always followed her own instinct, giving props to bands she felt were the real deal, most of them having punk rock heartbeats, and she became one of the most respected music journalists of her generation because she was real, because she was trusted. Lisa Robinson has raised the microphone stand so high for others to aspire to, and for the readers of music journalism today, that only makes for better, deeper interviews. We all win in the end because of Lisa Robinson.