I'd rather read Elton John's autobiography than watch the biopic.

To repeat, in my world musical biopics are bunk.

Give me a gifted documentarian, archival footage and original songs and I'm in. Having said this, the reviews I've seen for Rocketman suggest it might be an exception.

Might.

But you see, here's the thing. Elton's autobiography is coming this fall, and if the following is any indication of his skill with the written word, I'd prefer reading the book. They're usually better than the film adaptation, anyway.

My chosen excerpt addresses the chance nature of Elton's acquaintance with Bernie Taupin. For 50 years the pianist has written music to Taupin's words, and the their catalog of songs is astounding. Without that, would we even be having this chat?

Elton John: 'They wanted to tone down the sex and drugs. But I haven’t led a PG-13 life', by Elton John (The Guardian)

In this exclusive article, Elton John writes about his extraordinary life and why he finally decided to give the Rocketman biopic the green light

... Jamie and Taron have even managed to capture my relationship with Bernie, which is frankly a miracle, because I really have no idea how that works. We were thrown together at random. I had failed an audition for Liberty Records in 1967, and a guy from the label gave me an envelope with his lyrics in it as an afterthought, like a consolation prize. I’m not sure he had even opened the envelope and read the lyrics himself before he did it: I think he just felt sorry for me and didn’t want me to go away empty handed.

We were very close right at the start of our career together, but we’re completely different people. He comes from the wilds of Lincolnshire, I come from the suburbs of London. He lives in Santa Barbara and he’s literally won competitions for roping cattle. I collect antique porcelain and the only way you’d get me on the back of a horse is at gunpoint. Neither of us can write if the other is in the room. But there’s a weird bond between us that I felt the minute I opened the envelope – I could just write music to his words straight away, without even thinking about it – and it’s lasted over 50 years.

Former Haymarket employees strike back with countersuit, directing attention to Matthew Landan's masters degree thesis.

Unsurprisingly, the ongoing saga of Matthew Landan and his Haymarket Whiskey Bar seems to be settling into the familiar pattern of trench warfare within the legal system.

Landan counter-attacks: "After Facebook Outrage, Owner Of Haymarket Whiskey Bar Sues Over Rape Allegations."

"When internet justice is likely the only justice": Allegations of rape against Matthew Landan result in the closing of Haymarket Whiskey Bar. Are we learning yet?

Last week came the countersuit.

Haymarket Whiskey Bar owner Matthew Landan seeks 'vengeance and suppression,' former employees say in lawsuit, by Jason Riley (WDRB)

“I’ve always considered myself to be something of a liar.”

That quote, from Haymarket Whiskey Bar owner Matthew Landan, appears at the top of a response filed by former employees Landan sued after he was accused of rape on Facebook and his NuLu bar temporarily closed.

Landan said this in a dissertation at the University of Louisville in 2014, according to the workers' counterclaim and motion to dismiss filed Thursday in Jefferson Circuit Court.

Their filing raises Landan’s credibility as an important issue. And the motion to dismiss alleges the true purpose of Landan's lawsuit is "vengeance and suppression" of those who choose not to work with him or talk about the alleged sexual assaults ...

The masters thesis is an interesting twist, although it might be noted that a creative writing syllabus doesn't necessarily support an obligation to pass along concrete truth.

As part of the motion to dismiss, attorney Jeremiah Reece, points out that Landan’s master thesis indicates he is a liar.

“It makes sense that there is a lie bundled into the name of my bar,” the motion quotes. “I have always considered myself to be something of a liar and once even went so far as embarking on a career in public relations (another way of saying I was paid to lie).”

As you might imagine, Landan's seemingly autobiographical thesis has been downloaded very often as of late. Here is an expanded excerpt, from which the WDRB quotes were extracted.

Then there’s me, me and the Haymarket—my attempt to prove that not all work is work, that commerce in whiskey is actually fun. That whiskey is actually a wish key. The ticket to making my dream’s come true. My dreams of course are fairly simple. I don’t want to work for anyone but myself. I want to some day live on an island and go scuba diving five days a week while money from the bar is deposited into my account. I want to be paid for my charisma and good looks and the fact that once upon a time I put in the hard work and took the thumps and knocks, that I paid my dues and now I can enjoy the rewards of my creation.

Yet like the historic Louisville Haymarket, our name is a bit of a lie. We do not sell hay in any quantity at the bar. It makes sense that there is a lie bundled into the name of my bar. I have always considered myself to be something of a liar and once even went so far as embarking on a career in public relations (another way of saying I was paid to lie).

Owning a bar is a profitable way to make one’s living, but it has drawbacks (alcoholic tendencies). I used to own a coffee shop, but this is more exciting and allows me to work fewer hours a day and fewer days a week. In fact I rarely even bartend any longer. Mostly these days I work at playing the host. By and large it is a pleasant way to kill time while on planet Earth. It is rarely boring and there is always someone new walking through my door. In the two and a half years I have owned the bar it has earned a reputation for being one of the preeminent bourbon and whiskey bars in the city and the nation. We (the royal “we”; a way to refer to myself as well as the bar as a unit that is larger than myself) have played host to master distillers from the majority of the major bourbon distilleries. From Julian Van Winkle of the Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery to Jim Rutlidge of Four Roses we have poured drinks for nearly all the major payers in the Kentucky bourbon industry. Haymarket have been lauded in the national and local press. I have served drinks to the mayor, to the bums, to millionaires, the guys building the new bridge over the Ohio River. The Haymarket is home to everyone while they are within its friendly confines. This fills me with both a sense of accomplishment as well as a level of self-satisfaction that I have never felt before in my life. The Haymarket is an accomplishment and an establishment unlike any other. It is a physical manifestation of my dreams and hopes. It is my refuge, my home, and my pal.

The act of arrival at a destination, be it on a train or a plane or by automobile, is not new to me. The act of arriving at success at this level is new. Never before in my life have I been more financially secure. Never have I felt more right foot forward as I approach my destiny. I have not always been a person who sets goals and achieves them. For more than the first half of my life I was adrift and rudderless. I learned how to be an achiever. I started small. And in no way am I now too big to fail. Failure is always within the realm of possibility. But success at this level is new to me. I no longer have to work in the conventional sense. And in that sense, the bet I made with the Haymarket has paid off in spades. Of course I still work. I manage, I stock and order, I count the money, and I pay the bills. But I don’t have to work a forty-hour week (let alone the eighty-hour weeks I used to work when the bar was a coffee shop called Derby City Espresso). In the place of work, I have found a new calling, that of the host, that of the professional drinker, that of the professional entertainer. “Step into my parlor. Let me pour you a dram.”

As an aside, the main point to me isn't Landan's reference to being a liar. Rather, it's the last two sentences in the above excerpt. Meanwhile, LEO's having none of the maneuvering.

Thorns & Roses: The Worst, Best & Most Absurd

Can you say: narcissist? | Absurd

In a disappointing, absurd turn of events, Haymarket Whiskey Bar reopened last week, with owner Matthew Landan behind the stick and protesters marching outside. About the same time, his attorney filed a lawsuit stemming from allegations on Facebook that Landan had raped women. Landan has denied any wrongdoing, and he may prevail in court, but we have to wonder: What makes him think his bar could succeed now that the court of public opinion has ruled against him?

Readers might consider stocking extra microwave popcorn, because this story's likely to get even more surreal.

The baseball wormhole continues: Joe Pepitone and the 2015 reissue of Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud.

Photo credit: Little Studio Films.

In the mid-1960s, Joe Pepitone and Jim Bouton played together for the New York Yankees. Later, Pepitone famously dismissed Bouton's Ball Four, only to co-author an epochal book of his own: Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud.

The two works are very different, but equally groundbreaking. Bouton rendered made major league ballplayers into genuine humans, and destroyed the heroic masks. Pepitone gutted himself with a crazed, self-loathing and relentlessly honest autobiography/confessional, pulling no punches to own jaw. It's dark, hard to read -- and absolutely essential.

I have not read Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud since the summer of 1976, and my dog-eared paperback disappeared before high school graduation. Last year I simply missed these two excellent essays by Dan Epstein in Rolling Stone.

If the Bookseller is reading ...

Joe Pepitone on Smoking Weed, Screwing With Sinatra and 'Seinfeld'

His 1975 autobiography raised eyebrows, and 40 years later, it still shocks. Now, baseball's all-time partier reflects on a life lived to the limit

Joe Pepitone is in an upbeat mood today. "Everything's good, and that's honest," he confides over the phone to Rolling Stone. "Next time you talk to me, and I'm screaming and yelling at you and don't want to talk to you, you'll know everything's horseshit" ...

... Throughout it all, though, Pepitone has never lost his sense of humor – nor, as evidenced by his being name-checked on episodes of Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Sopranos, has he lost his pop-culture cachet. Last year, Little Studio Films optioned the book rights to Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud, and Pepitone is guardedly optimistic about seeing his colorful story make it to the screen. "I just sit back," he says, "but it seems to be going really good so far. We'll see!"

For now, though, he's happy to strut down memory lane and share some thoughts with us about his book, his wild times and those infamous hairpieces.

As for the book itself ...

'Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud:' The Best Baseball Book You've Never Read

Joe Pepitone partied with Frank Sinatra and Mickey Mantle and slept with half of New York. Now, 40 years after it was published, his raucous bio gets a much-deserved reissue

In 1970, Houston Astros pitcher Jim Bouton published Ball Four, one of the most influential baseball books ever written. Breaking the clubhouse code of omertà by portraying ballplayers as skirt-chasing, hard-partying regular guys rather than paragons of virtuous American masculinity, Ball Four forever changed the way that the press covered professional sports; it also unleashed a wave of massively entertaining (and deeply off-color) player memoirs, including Sparky Lyle's The Bronx Zoo and Bill Lee's The Wrong Stuff.

Though Bouton's best-selling memoir was rather hilarious, most of his colleagues weren't laughing at the time. "Why didn't he write that he was the horniest [expletive] in baseball?" complained Joe Pepitone, who had been Bouton's teammate in New York and Houston. But in 1975, Pepitone would follow the trail blazed by Ball Four and write a tell-all of his own – Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud – a book which was not only far more revealing than Bouton's, but also made it exceedingly clear that the horniest expletive in baseball was, in fact, Pepitone himself.

Listening to Morrissey with red wine -- again. Now for the Mozz book.

When I posted this photo on Facebook a couple weeks back and suggested that Nadia had ignored my warnings and insisted on listening to Morrissey while drinking red wine, it got rave reviews.

It's been a good year for aging Smiths fans. First, an excellent solo album by Johnny Marr. Now, a Mozz autobiography in time for the holidaze.

Autobiography by Morrissey – review, by Terry Eagleton (Guardian)

The celebrated literary critic judges Mozzer's book to be superb: he is so devastatingly articulate he could win the Booker

... Morrissey despises most of the people he meets, often with excellent reason. He is scurrilous, withdrawn and disdainful, an odd mixture of shyness and vitriol. The dreamy, heart-throbbish photo on the cover of the book, the nose rakishly tilted above the Cupid's-bow lips, belies what a mean old bastard he is.

Must read (coming soon): "Who I Am," by Pete Townshend.