I just read Miss O’Dell – My Hard Days and Long Nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and the Women They Loved. For a music-lover of my generation, it’s a page turner, or at least it was for me, because I couldn’t resist catching a glimpse of the inner world of rock ‘n’ roll.

It isn’t a very attractive world, if you ask me. Most of the rock stars don’t come off very well in the book, although Chrs O’Dell was clearly fond of most of those guys. She was an insider who worked for performers like Beatles and the Stones and Dylan at different times and was good friends with many of those characters (mostly men) and their wives. It seems this all happened because she was at the right places at the right time and because she was persistent in trying to be an insider.

The book describes endless parties, vast quantities of narcotics and the dysfunctional love lives of a bunch of rock stars from the late 60 through to the 80s. It also describes her own struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction. O’Dell was at the right place at the right time for all kinds of events we consider to be important in rock ‘n’ roll history and she gives us a glimpse of what those events were like from a different perspective.

Music lovers should know this book is not about the music. In the end, the book satisfied my curiosity about those music icons and how they lived their lives, but by the time I was three quarters through, I was done with those characters and with the author. I didn’t want to know any more about how much drugs she ingested or which rock stars she jumped in the sack with.