Rating: 
Summary: Feel, hear, see, smell, & taste this story.
Review: As the first person to congratulate Mister Gussow on a fine performance as he nervously left the bandstand the time he finally lost his jamming-at-Dan-Lynch's Blues Bar cherry on a fateful Sunday afternoon in the mid 80's, I can attest to the fact that he has indeed painted an accurate portrait of that much beloved juke-joint which served as the core of the New York Blues scene for many, many years. Through his vividly descriptive narrative, I was practically able to smell the piss stench that always wafted towards the lead singer's miC whenever some drunken bozo left the men's room door ajar after expelling their rented Budweisers, and the stale cigar and cigarrette smoke that hung in the air and the bad breath of "Godzilla" who would keep the aisles clear. Mister Gussow's words also conjured up audio hallucinations of the strains of gin-soaked harmonica solos that sailed through the western style swinging doors onto 2nd avenue. While not a completely inclusive portrait of this scene, it is certainly representative, and would serve well as a partial history to those who missed out on the whole Dan Lynch era which came to a sad end in 1996. And the Dan Lynch Era was a crucial aspect of the New York Blues scene in it's heydey.While I can certainly nit-pick at some of the details and recollectons of some of the events described within, I must say that this reading was thoroughly enjoybable (well, at least the stuff about the Blues and harp playing and the Big River Road show... not necessarily the love stories and references that only hardcore literature majors would know or care about), and if it weren't for the fact that I had to sleep and go to work, I would have read this memoire from start to finish without putting it down. And the last time any book moved me to do that was The Cat In The Hat.While I enjoyed Mister Satan's Apprentice largley because it brought back memories (it was like looking at a photo album), I have friends who were not the least bit connected to the scene, who enjoyed it too. I think any Blues or Jazz player / afficionado / and especially harmonica player would gleam a lot from the Mister Gussow's work, and I commend him for what is a grandiose accomplishment. Of course, I will have a hard time forgiving Mister Gussow for spoiling the big plot surprise to The Star War Trilogy, which I have YET to see... (and probably won't even bother to see NOW, now that I know what happens...) so if you also haven't seen it... when you get to the part where he's watching the Return Of The Jedi, close your eyes and skip to the next paragraph on that page.Despite describing himself as "chickensh*t" demeanored early on in this book, Mister Gussow apparently has a lot of balls to write boldly and honestly and about many situations and characters herein, whom he realizes may in fact come looking for him later... I admire that (if not necessarily condone it).Mister Gussow has a unique writing style, which revolves around an exquisite flair for description. He places you at the scene each time, by appealing to each of your senses. Yes, in my humble opinion, this cerrulean and midnight-black duotoned, glossy jacketed, fun and fact filled, rectangular hard cover, ivory paged, paragraph packed, autobiography of a sandy haired, freckled, Crayola-peach colored, well meaning, intelligent, determined, soulful, and societally (is this a word?) conscious, scholar of life and the Blues is well worth your dirty green dead presidents, and if you purchase it here via Amazon, you will apparently save a lot more of these said dead presidents than if you patronized the large national chain store that *I* got it at, so do yourselves a favor and click the little button that says' "buy it now" , and avoid further run-on-sentences on my part. Bluesfully, Mark The Harper
Rating:
Summary: If you love the blues, you'll love this book!
Review: I could hardly put this book down to perform activities of daily living, let alone going to work. "Mr Adam" has created a masterpiece of American musical literature. Being a blues lover of many years, I was bored to death by the almost clinical approach of most writers on the subject. Not so, Mr. Gussow! He delivers a passionately honest and heart felt memoir filled with wonderfully alive and vibrant individuals, sharing with us the one true American music, the blues.
Rating:
Summary: If you love the blues, you'll love this book!
Review: I could hardly put this book down to perform activities of daily living, let alone going to work. "Mr Adam" has created a masterpiece of American musical literature. Being a blues lover of many years, I was bored to death by the almost clinical approach of most writers on the subject. Not so, Mr. Gussow! He delivers a passionately honest and heart felt memoir filled with wonderfully alive and vibrant individuals, sharing with us the one true American music, the blues.
Rating:
Summary: Great story of a young bluesman and his mentors
Review: I started reading this figuring it would be a good book mostly for blues enthusiasts (I used to be a blues DJ at our college radio station, and have had the pleasure of seeing Satan and Adam perform live). While it certainly didn't disappoint my blues expectations, I honestly think it's a great read for anyone. More than anything, it's a touching tribute to Adam's two mentors, Nat Riddles and Mister Satan, both truly fascinating men. Adam creates a solid narrative structure and does a great job of knowing when to step aside and let the subjects speak for themselves (the transcript of Mister Satan's "God Tape" is alone worth the price of admission). By all means, read this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Despite bloat, a white-hot must-read for music fans
Review: In "Mister Satan's Apprentice," street musician extraordinaire Adam Gussow has left in just about everything, and it's about 40 percent too much; the book would have read far better at a sleek 250 pages. But the good stuff is really good, and the book is well worth reading despite its distractions and digressions. In his early 40s, Gussow is currently a doctoral candidate in Princeton's English department. But thousands know him as the harmonica-wielding half of the "progressive gutbucket blues" duo Satan and Adam -- three-CD recording artists, photogenic subject of any number of newspaper and magazine features, and cameo stars of the U2 movie "Rattle and Hum."In his autobiography, Gussow gets deep inside blues, and his relationship to it, and manages to successfully translate the music into language. "Blues harmonica played well was a miniature tongued slalom, a tornado swallowed and contained," he tells us, and his words capture every bit of excitement that the grooves and notes have to offer. "Mister Satan's Apprentice" is about much more than the blues, though -- it's a provocative meditation on race from a white man immersed in a traditionally black genre, neighborhood and world. Playing around with his first harmonica, in 1974, Gussow contemplates the subtleties of playing blues. "It had something to do with being a black guy," he muses. As the protagonist in his narrative, Gussow pales (no pun intended) next to two marvelous characters: his two mentors, Nat Riddles and Sterling "Mister Satan" Magee. Twenty-two years older than his protégé, Mister Satan is as colorful as they come. He's a visual artist and apocalyptic numerologist with a murky music-industry background, and a font of, if not wisdom, then brilliantly idiosyncratic aphorisms and soliloquies. A Harlem fixture when Gussow approaches the guitarist to jam along, he shouts and hollers, runs hot and cold, towers over other men. Mister Satan looms larger than life, but harmonica player Nat Riddles is entirely real, an odd-job taxi driver with a dazzling smile and soulful tone. "He was perpetually on the verge of becoming the blues world's Next Big Thing," Gussow writes. "A young black harp-player with the Sound." Riddles flits in and out of fortune, showing up unexpectedly to astound a New York club, phoning from somewhere in the South, destitute and desperate, surviving gunshot wounds only to eventually succumb to a cruel wasting disease. It's the music, finally, that counts most -- Gussow gives his story its own soundtrack, one of restlessness and yearning, of his struggle to capture the Sound: "The Sound was Southern-bound, it was cocky, playful, manic, chucking, resentful, edgy, comforting, relentless. It took incredible lip strength and finesse to produce. It was sexual. It was the haunted, restless feeling of a guy's apartment late at night after the woman who used to live there had moved out. It was whatever nasty things she was doing with the other guy-a virile sensitive soulmate-this very minute. It was the best way of beating those visions back into the ghoulish cave they had crawled out of. Working hard at the Sound was a socially acceptable way of sobbing, raging, and primal-screaming from a hot heart while pretending merely to be practicing." A little of this kind of writing goes a long way, and there's an awful lot of it here. Granted, it's a real challenge to maintain a level of excitement in writing about music page after page, particularly about blues, a genre built on the same few chords locked in a repetitious groove. So it's forgivable that Gussow often leans out a little far: "The sidewalk scene dissolved; I was wandering in a garden of earthly delights, hands cupped against the sweet cold fluid air. Every bent note was a pitch-perfect arrow puncturing the gray dusk. You only live now. Blue notes danced and spun, lines endlessly unfolding like so many wrapped gifts laid bare." You have to remind yourself that he's talking about a harmonica, one of the more prosaic of instruments. For all Gussow's breathless adjectives and action verbs, he's frustratingly vague about the technical aspects of the duo's "huge raw perfect sound." The book's photos show Gussow with effects pedals at his feet, but he makes no mention of them; he doesn't mention the basic information that he plays in "cross harp" style until page 386; Mister Satan's "phase-shifted guitar wash and deafening clatter" is described pretty much only in metaphorical terms, as, for instance, "an endlessly unrolling Persian carpet with gristle and clanks added." Gussow is so good at getting inside his playing that the narrative sags whenever it moves to other topics. A hefty amount of the bloat deals with his failed relationships. We meet mercurial crackhead Robyn and inconstant ex-fat girl Gail, but mostly there's erratic, irritable hyperfeminist Helen. Gussow tells us on page 30 that Helen left him back in 1984, so we're predisposed to dislike her, and we indeed do. "Most men had a girlfriend," he writes. "I had Aphrodite crossed with Kali the Destroyer, She of infinite ravenous limbs." Worse, the book's artfully jumbled narrative, with short sections ordered sort of sequentially on several tracks, dooms us to read about Helen over the entire course of the book. We think we're finally through with her, and then: "1983. Things with Helen had turned out surprisingly well . . ." Enough already! In the late '80s and early '90s, a period when racial violence kept flaring up in the outer boroughs of New York City, Satan and Adam's young-old, white-black novelty made a splash, but momentum slipped away. "Minor celebrity beckoned, then faded," Gussow writes. And despite the book's vibrant cover photo of the pair, they no longer perform, according to an e-mail Gussow sent me. "[I]t's impossible to keep the act together," he wrote, noting that Mister Satan now lives in south-central Virginia and has no telephone. That's a real shame.
Rating:
Summary: If you love the blues, you'll love this book!
Review: Mr. Satan's Apprentice is a heartfelt, soulful journey of self-discovery and self-expression. Gussow writes powerfully and lyrically about his complex friendship/partnership with the eccentric blues genius Mr. Satan. In the end, this is an uplifting example of a real-life "dialogue" between two very different -- and equally compelling -- central characters.
Rating:
Summary: lyrical and uplifting
Review: Mr. Satan's Apprentice is a heartfelt, soulful journey of self-discovery and self-expression. Gussow writes powerfully and lyrically about his complex friendship/partnership with the eccentric blues genius Mr. Satan. In the end, this is an uplifting example of a real-life "dialogue" between two very different -- and equally compelling -- central characters.
Rating:
Summary: A book for lovers and players
Review: Recently it was my privilege to see author and harmonica player Adam Gussow at my local huge independent bookstore here in the Eastern US. I rarely do commercials, but if you can't catch Adam, you can check out his new novel "Mr. Satan's Apprentice". Adam calls it "a blues memoir", and so it is. The guy is a no-shit, kick-butt, street-smart harp player! FYI, I have fairly high standards in this realm. If you've seen or heard the New York duo "Satan and Adam", you'll know what I mean. The guy is ALSO a juicy and creative, energetic, sexy writer - something I'm also picky about. Princeton Ph.D. candidate - English. Adam's book describes a journey that a few of us know, but most do not. The musician in you will relate to the tale of the emergence of deep and powerful music from the little instrument - and the romantic in you will throb with the ways the emerging harmonica player and boundary-crosser discovers the things he needs to grow musically and personally - and then sometimes fearlessly, sometimes not, sets out to acquire them. You'll meet his teachers and mentors, and like it or not, you'll see life through the eyes of this seeker of musical and personal connection. You'll go with Adam on the romantic roller coaster as loves come and go - and you'll travel with him to Paris to play in the Metro and on the street; to the American South, and to other places exotic and otherwise - including a hitch with the road company of Broadway show based on Mark Twain's Sawyer and Finn. Later we get into the recording studio with Mr. Gussow and Mr. Satan - the Harlem street mystic and one-man band who becomes Adam's main-man mentor and muse, the Mr. Satan of the book's title. Throughout the book you'll find Adam the street intellectual examining his position as a white man among black men (and black women) in this blues-filled world - an examination in which Mr. Satan plays a key role. A book for players and lovers - of the spirit of the music, of the street; of the endless forms of beauty and love, as they are found ALL over the place. The author is one who knows, and magically, describes, many of the gut experiences we players know; to my knowledge no one's ever written quite this way about these things before. Like the performing moments, the pulling out of all the everything you've got and then some, when the audience is on it's very EDGE, right there with you; when you are truly and purely the great IT! Blowing and drawing deep, and deeper, and then high and higher; and the room is all whoops and smiles, and all there in your hand. A good player knows these things, and believe me, in a blues band, nobody gets that kind of juice but the harp player. OK, so maybe you don't know the peak of performance grace and light - but you know your peaks, and Adam's telling can stir it back into view... Adam Gussow writes of music, romance, conflict, and awakening in an intimately physical and heart- connected way. As a player, I'm rocked. -"Harmonica Jack" Merrylees (JMerrylees@aol.com)
Rating:
Summary: An inside look at the lifestyle of street musicians
Review: The author uses wonderful analogies to enable the reader to visualize the lifestyle of street blues musicians. The friendship that grows between two different men from two different cultures is enlightening. Also, the philosphy of the blues musicians that is conveyed throughout the book acts as an opiate to the stresses of our complex world.
Rating:
Summary: Arrival and Appreciation: Bringing Home The Blues
Review: What is most appealing about MISTER SATAN'S APPRENTICE is the perfect blend of intelligence and heart. Here Adam Gussow pays tribute to his mentors, the late, great Nat Riddles and Mister Satan, a.k.a. Sterling Magee. It is through these men that "Mister" Adam sought the secret - the soul on how to play the blues, the real thing. Anyone who ever heard Adam play, knows this man has something very special. It is more than talent. It comes from within, and so does his book. This blues memoir vividly describes how and where he nurtured his passion to play harp. Kudos to "Mister" Adam for sharing his story. It is written with universal appeal, and with obvious special significance to anyone connected to the blues scene. His writing style is refined, embracing. It is his music on the printed page.
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