Escape from Bellevue
A Memoir of Rock 'n' Roll, Recovery, and Redemption
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4.6 • 10 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Read Christopher John Campion's posts on the Penguin Blog.
Indie rock raconteur Chris Campion-one of the few patients ever to escape from Bellevue's locked ward-recalls his band's tumultuous ride, his plummet into addiction, and the strange road back to sobriety
Chronicling more than twenty years in the life of a Long Island kid who became a hardcore fixture of Manhattan's indie rock scene, Escape from Bellevue is a coming-of-age tale like no other. As the lead singer of New York-based indie rock band Knockout Drops, Campion got a taste of fame (but, alas, no fortune) on a wild ride that lasted from the early 1980s through the 1990s.
Escape from Bellevue puts the spotlight on the collective psychosis of twenty years spent in a rolling bacchanal. Just as the Knockout Drops reached the height of their success, Campion began his downward spiral. After finally coming to grips with his addictions, Campion molded his songs and stories into a sold-out off-Broadway musical. Now, presenting these tales in a memoir of madness and redemption, Campion once again proves to possess the creative genius of a die-hard front man.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Expanding on the material in his eponymous autobiographical off-Broadway musical, Campion, lead singer in the band Knockout Drops, cops to inventing characters and misremembering some facts and time lines. Readers, and perhaps he, cannot therefore know whether he has embellished the all-night booze-and-blow-fueled partying with the rodeo clowns and the bearded lady, or the witty repart e recollected verbatim from drunken stupors of decades past, or the anecdote about riding crowded elevators dressed only in a girlfriend's pink thong. Oh well, it's all surely accurate in the way that rock 'n' roll ballads are faithful records of failed love affairs. At any rate, Campion's portrait of his knockabout sojourn in New York's indie rock demimonde in the 1990s, when his band perched agonizingly on the cusp between loserdom and breakout success, has the ring of truth. So does his account of the alcoholic slide that transformed him from a hearty mainstay of the Greenwich Village bar scene into a desolate bum incarcerated in the titular psych ward. Campion tells this tale of a very long trek on the wild side with hangdog humor and bleary charm.
