Baby Plays Around : A Love Affair, with Music

Rating:
Summary: Truly a love affair...
Review: "Baby Plays Around --A Love Affair with Music" really is the perfect title for this book. The author plays around town in a rock band; her husband just plain plays around. His isn't the only affair here though.

At first glance you might think that this book is meant for a pretty select audience, being about a little band struggling to make it in the New York club scene, but Helene Stapinski is really writing about relationships. As a band member, she must deal with the interpersonal dynamics occuring amongst a group of people trying to be creative and successful, and to add to the complexity of the situation, the band (at least for a time) also includes her husband. Jealousy, competition, ambition, anger and fear all come into play, but each are in a way quelled by the experience of music --an experience that seems to be an awful lot like love.

Though I'm a pretty slow reader, I finished Baby Plays Around in just a couple of days. It held me in both its details and the arc of the character's emotional growth --which I think should be the measure of any great story.

Rating:
Summary: She's nailed it
Review: As a woman who has played in bands since...well, let's not go there because it dates me...I truly appreciate Helene's female perspective on the music business and the complexities of interpersonal band dynamics. Whoever said that "dysfunctional family" was a redundant term could just as easily have been talking about bands. I'm in two of them at the moment, and they both drive me CRAZY...but when it works, you remember why you put up with it. Helene did a brilliant job of putting into words the way it truly feels when the music clicks...and when it doesn't. I salute her courage and honesty.

Rating:
Summary: Baby, read this book!
Review: I am a working mother with no time to read.... When I picked up this book (after reading Ms. Stapinski's fantastic first book) I simply did not put it down until the end. It has the perfect mix of music and relationships and how the two are connected in her life. She has a knack for sprinkling in her self-deprecating humor in all the right places.
I absolutely loved this book...If you are in the mood for a good ride, this is the novel for you!

Rating:
Summary: Yeah Baby , You Really Got Me!
Review: I am always on the lookout for authentic books that deal with the music scene -- and I'm not talking about the countless fan books, nor the ones that are simply out to attack one genre or another. Stapinski's entertaining book is written with insight, passion, and unassuming honesty. On the surface it's just another band getting into playing music, being creative, and trying to make it one way or another. It is refreshing that it's not about a famous band, but a chronicle of one of the millions of groups that form and dissolve almost daily. It's easy to forget that each band is made up of musicians -- i.e., people struggling with their individual destinies and myriad relationships (the essence of all good fiction or non fiction). Having played in many bands myself, I could relate to many of the archetypal scenes described. But more than that it took a critical look at the phenomenon of rock, as well as being informative -- especially in regard to the club scene of New York City. A true delight! -- and the last page came all too soon.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: One of the richest, and perhaps one of the most honest nonfiction books I've read, Helene Stapinksi mines her obsessions, both music and love, to create a riveting masterpiece. This story of a freelance writer who falls through the rabbit hole to end up living a childhood fantasy -- as a drummer in a band -- speaks to any of us who hold a dream in our hearts about 'what could have been' were we to follow our wilder creative spirits. But it comes with a price, with significant and painful fallout in many of her relationships, particularly with her husband, and Stapinski doesn't spare any of the uncomfortable, awkward, and many times hilarious experiences she encounters, taking the reader on a wild ride through the smoky downtown clubs in Alphabet City. The writing is so inviting and personal you feel as though you're helping her lug her cymbals as she chases the chimera of musical fame, and discovers the true meaning of unconditional love: a love that persists through our fleeting, nonsensical adventures.

Rating:
Summary: Love affairs and music
Review: Really die-hard music aficionados can probably fill you in on the dynamics in the Beatles or Rolling Stones -- and Helene Stapinski shows that it's not just the big groups that are like that. Her musical memoir, "Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair, with Music" takes on the internal workings of a rising little band.

Freelance writer Helene Stapinski wanted the play the drums since she was a little girl, so she jumped at the chance to join I Hate Jane with two other women (and briefly roped her new husband into helping out). The band becomes unbalanced when Elizabeth leaves in a huff, and a pair of men join the group. But then things smooth out, and things appear to be going well.

Professionally, that is. One day Helene's husband comes to her and admits that "baby's been playing around" with some little tart at his newsroom. Unsurprisingly, Helene is enraged, and the searing fights and all-out brawls seem to show that their marriage is doomed. So Helene buries herself in Stephonic ("I Hate Jane"'s new name) and plays the drums like never before...

Not everybody can say they have relationship advice from Elvis Costello. And that weirdly intimate chapter where Elvis saves Stapinski's foundering marriage is one of the best in the entire book. Overall, she does an excellent job of bringing the band life to the readers -- the good (musical highs), the bad (internal tension), and the ugly (Stapinski being fired for no good reason).

Stapinski's writing is pleasant and descriptive, like a novel. A very you-are-there feel. And her humor is likably self-deprecating: when thinking about how she has no cool indie music in her CD collection, she thinks "Bless me Elizabeth, for I have sinned I just purchased the new Sting album." That is, until she remembers the wonderful band Yo La Tengo.

That isn't to say that Stapinski's writing is all fun. Her relevelations about her disintegrating marriage are heartbreaking. And there's some understandable bitterness toward the vaguely stalker-like newsroom tart, and a lesser amount toward band frontwoman/singer Julie, who apparently considered herself queen of all she surveyed onstage.

Helene Stapinski draws readers into a crazy quilt of glittering clubs, Inuit towns and the heart of New York City. "Baby Plays Around," and a what a tune she plays in here.

Rating:
Summary: Uninteresting navel-gazing
Review: What is it about journalists that they think their lives are so interesting? I'm tired of reading books and articles like this. Stapinski is one of the worst of the lot; she seems to believe that the world is dying to hear everything about her life, her family, her career. Please, spare us.