Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead: Journeys into Fame and Madness, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead: Journeys into Fame and Madness by Neil Strauss.

With his groundbreaking book The Game, Strauss penetrated the secret society of pickup artists. Now, in Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead, the Rolling Stone journalist collects the greatest moments from the most insane music interviews of all time.

Join Neil Strauss, “The Mike Tyson of interviewers,” (Dave Pirner, Soul Asylum), as he

• Makes Lady Gaga cry, tries to keep Mötley Crüe out of jail & is asked to smoke Kurt Cobain’s ashes by Courtney Love
• Shoots guns with Ludacris, takes a ride with Neil Young & goes to church with Tom Cruise and his mother
• Spends the night with Trent Reznor, reads the mind of Britney Spears & finds religion with Stephen Colbert
• Gets picked on by Led Zeppelin, threatened by the mafia & serenaded by Leonard Cohen
• Picks up psychic clues with the CIA, diapers with Snoop Dog & prison survival tips from Rick James
• Goes drinking with Bruce Springsteen, dining with Gwen Stefani & hot tubbing with Marilyn Manson
• Talks glam with David Bowie, drugs with Madonna, death with Johnny Cash & sex with Chuck Berry
• Gets molested by the Strokes, in trouble with Prince & in bed with . . . you’ll find out who inside.

Enjoy many, many more awkward moments and accidental adventures with the world’s number one stars in Everyone Love You When You’re Dead.

This is actually a more relevant book to read than you may realise. Firstly it is a fun, interesting and insightful book, with a series of interviews and non interviews too. Some are successful, some are monosyllabic, some never come to fruition, often because they have died. Strauss sometimes manages to pull off really interesting, insightful interviews, and sometimes they just blow him off time and time again. Sometimes when he fails to get something useful you really empathise with him due to the difficult nature of some of the people he has encountered. In this way this book provides a great resource and reference for all of us in the interview business. We are always looking to achieve interesting, informative, readable interviews, rather than just merely bland promotion of whatever the latest product it is that they are supposed to be selling.

Some interviewees are better practised at extracting the necessary transactory exchange between these two desires, not always complementary between interviewer and interviewee. We once heard an interview with Sting where he managed to come across as friendly, pleasant, and well able to head off any question of a personal nature or on a topic that he did not want to cover. Straus’s travails, both positive and less so are enjoyable to read as he shares his ups and downs with us. If you really have no time to enjoy the long and circuitous route with him, then his epilogue alone is well worth reading and could easily form the basis of an inspiring commencement speech or perhaps even a TEDx ‘how not to interview prickly people’ or something fun like ‘Things I Learned From Famous People’, which was the original byline on the book.

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