Duran Duran, Pantera Bassists Sell Memoirs

Duran Duran bassist John Taylor performs in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Duran Duran bassist and co-founder John Taylor has contracted to write a memoir for Dutton about his highs and lows with the superstar Eighties band. Meanwhile, Pantera bassist Rex Brown has also signed to write a rock & roll memoir with Da Capo.

In what is termed "a major deal," Taylor will write about his band's successes, his descent into drug addiction and depression and his recovery. The book will recount "the million tiny seductions that are required to make the journey from English suburbia to selling out Madison Square Garden," said Taylor in a statement.

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In addition to his work with Duran Duran, who have sold more than 80 million records and placed 21 songs in the Billboard Hot 100, Taylor has been instrumental in the formation of two supergroups, the Power Station and Neurotic Outsiders.

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According to Publishers Marketplace, Brown's memoir will offer his "shocking personal insight into a band that had swapped the grimy clubs of Texas for arenas around the world but whose story would ultimately be touched by tragedy." 

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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