DAVIS, Stephen 1947-

PERSONAL: Born September 8, 1947, in New York, NY; son of Howard (a television director) and Hana Charlotte (Fischer) Davis; married Judith Arons (a psychotherapist), June 12, 1976; children: Lily, India. Education: Boston University, A.B., 1969.

ADDRESSES: Office—Blue Hills Productions, P.O. Box 123, Milton Village, MA 02187. Agent—David Vigliano, Suite 809, 584 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

CAREER: Boston Phoenix, Boston, MA, associate editor, 1970-71; Rolling Stone, New York, NY, associate editor, 1972-73; New Age (now New Age Journal), Brighton, MA, associate editor, 1977-85; freelance writer.

MEMBER: Boston Athenaeum (life member).

AWARDS, HONORS: ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, 1988, for excellence in music journalism.

WRITINGS:

Reggae Bloodlines: In Search of the Music and Culture of Jamaica, photographs by Peter Simon, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1977.

(Editor, with Simon, and contributor) Reggae International, Knopf (New York, NY), 1982.

Bob Marley, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1985.

Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, Morrow (New York, NY), 1985.

Say Kids! What Time Is It?, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1987.

(With Mick Fleetwood) Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac, Morrow (New York, NY), 1990, published with a sound disc as My Twenty-Five Years in Fleetwood Mac, discography by Frank Harding, Hyperion (New York, NY), 1992.

(With Levon Helm) This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band, Morrow (New York, NY), 1993.

Jajouka Rolling Stone: A Fable of Gods and Heroes (fiction), Random House (New York, NY), 1993.

(With the members of Aerosmith) Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith, Avon Books (New York, NY), 1997.

Old Gods Almost Dead: The Forty-year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones, Broadway Books (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor to New Grove Dictionary of Music, Oxford University Press (New York, NY). Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times, Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, Newsday, Omni, CoEvolution Quarterly, Oui, The Beat, Mojo (UK), and Libération (Paris).

SIDELIGHTS: Stephen Davis told CA: "What a writer needs most (besides a helpful spouse, an audience, an agent, and a check) is inspiration on a daily basis. I get my inspiration mostly from music (Marley, Charles Mingus, Claude Debussy) and other writers, especially Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin, and my journalistic competition. My greatest pleasure from my work, aside from being able to provide for my family, comes from seeing my books in translation and British editions. Almost all of my books are in print in Japan and are available in French and Italian editions as well."

A writer who focuses on popular culture and entertainment, Davis has devoted a number of volumes to the exploration of reggae music and to its most famous artist, Bob Marley. A worldwide pop phenomenon rooted in Jamaican culture and the millenarian visions of the Rastafarian faith, reggae is "this century's premier music of social redress," wrote Greg Tate in the Village Voice; it calls for the unification of Africans everywhere and for deliverance of the world's dispossessed. Reggae International, edited by Davis and Peter Simon, is an anthology of essays that look at Jamaica's history and culture, Rasta's tenets, reggae's international parallels and influence, and its messianic messenger Marley. Deeming the book "graphically gorgeous," Tate commended much in the volume: "The first section, 'Tracin De Riddim,' is thoughtfully long on historical homework," while he considered Rory Sanders's chapter, "The Rastafarians," "an overdue reexamination, if not reversal, of the primitivist view of Rasta which persists in the U.S." Tate also reported that Timothy White "works up a vivid mural of Jamaican folk culture that is mesmerizing."

Davis's Bob Marley recounts the life of the third-world superstar from his country boyhood to his death from cancer at the age of thirty-six in 1981. The son of a black Jamaican woman and a white English army captain, Marley spent his early years steeped in the mysticism of Jamaica's backwoods and later years on the tough streets of Kingston's ghettos. Interested in African-American music, the young performer showed the influence of rhythm and blues in his earliest songs. After forming the Wailers singing group, Marley adopted the Rastafarian faith, bringing its call for black unity to an international audience. His riveting musical gifts and magnetic personality granted him an almost religious following, and the singer's romantic entanglements and idealistic political involvements did little to shake his messianic appeal. "Few other popular musicians have touched people from so many different cultures," observed Randall F. Grass in the New York Times Book Review. "In his recordings and performances, he celebrated the struggle of dispossessed people everywhere, and he preached a natural way of life with such charismatic force that fans proclaimed him a prophet." While noting "some errors of detail [and] questions unanswered" in the biography, the critic observed, "Davis has written a straightforward journalistic narrative [that] does not ignore any facet of Marley's life." Reviewing Bob Marley for the Toronto Globe and Mail, Norman (Otis) Richmond concurred: "Davis's work captures Bob Marley as the bridge-builder he was."

Hammer of the Gods, a subsequent Davis publication, follows heavy metal British rock group Led Zeppelin while on a 1970s American tour. Scoring enormous popular success, Hammer of the Gods spent ten weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. For Say Kids! What Time Is It?, a behind-the-scenes look at the 1950s children's television program Howdy Doody, Davis draws from personal experience: his father, Howard Davis, was a writer and director for the hit show featuring the freckle-faced puppet and friends, and Stephen was a frequent visitor to Howdy Doody's Peanut Gallery. The author reveals that things were not as they appeared in Doodyville: performers were made to hawk Howdy Doody merchandise relentlessly (bringing in $15 million a year), life backstage was dominated by infighting and manipulation, and "rehearsals . . . were ribald affairs," wrote Lynn Van Matre in the Chicago Tribune Book World, "in which the cast and crew regularly put the puppets through pornographic paces." The critic concluded, "Drawing upon interviews with former cast members as well as old Howdy kinescopes and archival material, Davis has written a richly detailed, even-handed account of the Howdy Doody phenomenon—and the all-too-human folks who made it all happen."

Davis returned to the subject of rock history with Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac, cowritten with Mick Fleetwood. Genevieve Stuttaford in Publishers Weekly promised that the book "will please avid readers and fans alike." Another rock biography, This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band, followed. According to a critic in Publishers Weekly, the book contrasted well with Barney Hoskyns's Across the Great Divide: The Band and America, also published in 1990, which focused largely on the recollections of the Band's other most prominent figure, guitarist Robbie Robertson.

Jajouka Rolling Stone: A Fable of Gods and Heroes marked a departure into the world of fiction. Based partly on Davis's own experiences, it is the story of an American journalist working for National Geographic in Morocco, where he has gone to study with the legendary musicians in the town of Jajouka. Despite its far-away setting, the book is still closely tied to pop cultural history: a number of western icons, most notably the late Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, also traveled to Jajouka to learn from the "Master Musicians" there.

Returning to the subject of rock history, Davis worked with singer Steven Tyler, guitarist Joe Perry, and the other three members of Aerosmith on Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith. Whereas the former members of Led Zeppelin had been incensed by the portrayal they received in Hammer of the Gods, according to Larry Katz in the Boston Herald, "that notorious book only convinced the members of Aerosmith that Davis was the right man to tell about the number they did on themselves." (That is, about the excesses of their personal lives prior to the late 1980s, when the group members gave up cocaine and other drugs.) Describing Walk This Way as "really more of an oral history than an autobiography," Katz noted that "it makes for compelling reading—especially throughout the first half, which covers Aerosmith's rise to rock stardom in the mid-1970s. Then came the years of debauchery, when Aerosmith lost its direction and career in a hellish blizzard of white powders. 'We call them "the wonder years,"' Tyler says in the book, 'because we wonder what happened to them.'"

With Old Gods Almost Dead: The Forty-year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones, Davis took on another group of great stature in music history. In a review for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Steve Dollar noted, "as befits a professional music biographer, Old Gods is a professional music biography, useful for its archiving of countless stray bits of information, but only as compelling as the story it has to tell." The problem, suggested some critics, was not with Davis, but with his subject. Not only had the Stones' saga already been chronicled many times, but by the time of the book's publication in 2001, their best work lay thirty years in the past. Still, wrote Steve Wilson in Book, "Davis's engaging history of the Rolling Stones reminds us why we still love the band."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Book, November-December, 2001, Steve Wilson, review of Old Gods Almost Dead: The Forty-year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones, p. 68.

Booklist, August, 1993, Joe Collins, review of Jajouka Rolling Stone: A Fable of Gods and Heroes, p. 2035; November 1, 2001, Mike Tribby, review of Old Gods Almost Dead, p. 454.

Boston Herald, September 8, 1997, Larry Katz, review of Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith, p. 28; November 20, 2001, Larry Katz, review of Old Gods Almost Dead, p. 44.

Christian Science Monitor, December 28, 1993, Whitney Dodds Woodruff, review of This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band, p. 13.

Entertainment Weekly, November 16, 2001, Brian M. Raftery, review of Old Gods Almost Dead, p. 164.

Esquire, March, 2001, review of Old Gods Almost Dead, p. 110.

Globe and Mail (Toronto), August 3, 1985, Norman (Otis) Richmond, review of Bob Marley.

Journal-Constitution (Atlanta, GA), November 25, 2001, Steve Dollar, review of Old Gods Almost Dead, p. C-6.

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 1993, review of Jajouka Rolling Stone, p. 475; September 15, 2001, review of Old Gods Almost Dead, p. 1334.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 12, 1993, review of Jajouka Rolling Stone, p. 13.

New York Times Book Review, March 31, 1985; November 18, 1990, Robert Waddell, review of Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac, p. 29; December 29, 1993, Margo Jefferson, review of This Wheel's on Fire, p. B4.

Notes, December, 1991, Shelley L. Rogers, review of Fleetwood, pp. 531-33.

Observer (London), April 10, 1994, review of Bob Marley, p. 21.

Publishers Weekly, August 10, 1990, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Fleetwood, p. 428; May 10, 1993, review of Jajouka Rolling Stone, p. 50; October 4, 1993, review of This Wheel's on Fire, p. 62; October 8, 2001, review of Old Gods Almost Dead, p. 53.

Rolling Stone, October 16, 1997, Mark Coleman, review of Walk This Way, p. 32.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), March 4, 1979; January 19, 1986; October 15, 1987.

Variety, October 1, 1990, review of Fleetwood, p. 104.

Village Voice, September 20, 1983, Greg Tate, review of Reggae International.

Washington Post, December 21, 2001, David Segal, review of Old Gods Almost Dead, p. C2.