Joey Kramer's memoir, 'Hit Hard,' has many of the decadent stories of sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll (and more drugs) you'd come to expect from a member of Aerosmith, a band that for a time was known as much for their party habits than their music.

Only Kramer, the group's drummer, didn't set out to make your typical rock bio. His struggles with abuse aren't limited to drugs and alcohol, but range from physical and emotional relationships with his father, bandmates and spouses. It all led to years of depression and a nervous breakdown smack dab in the middle of the band's success in the 1990's.

"My main goal is to help people out," he tells Spinner.

The book gave Kramer a shot at tackling issues in his life which he had yet to deal. "The main one being the passing of my dad, who was my main abuser, and the time-sensitive problem I believe is the confusion between love and abuse," he says.

Whenever the artist Nick Cave gets mentioned in the mainstream press, the story invariably includes some version of the phrase "not to be confused with the Australian musician of the same name." That isn't necessary with the novelist Nick Cave, who is the Australian musician of the same name. Twenty years after making his fiction debut with 'And the Ass Saw the Angel,' Cave returns to bookshelves this fall with the 'The Death of Bunny Munro' (Faber & Faber).

Whereas 'And the Ass Saw the Angel' was set in the American South and earned comparisons to the likes of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, 'The Death of Bunny Munro' is set in Brighton, the English coastal town where Cave resides, and has earned the following encomium from 'Trainspotting' author Irvine Welsh: "Put Cormac McCarthy, Franz Kafka and Benny Hill together in a Brighton seaside guesthouse and they might just come up with Bunny Munro."

They were a happy family ... or, something. If nothing else, Dee Dee Ramone and Vera Ramone King were punk's "first couple," long before Sid and Nancy's first kiss. And now Vera has lived to write a book about it. In 'Poisoned Heart: I Married Dee Dee Ramone,' Vera details their tumultuous relationship, in the process chronicling the history of the Ramones -- from Dee Dee's overdose on the set of 'Rock and Roll High School' to the turbulent recording sessions with Phil Spector to, ultimately, the end of the line.

"I was told by renowned chaneller Linda Drake that Dee Dee wanted me to write the book and tell the whole story," Vera tells Spinner. "The good, the bad and the ugly truths. Several times during the writing of the book, I decided to stop because it was too painful for me to remember some of the incidents. Every time I said, 'I can't do this,' Linda would call me out of the blue within less than five minutes and ask if I was still writing the book."

To hear him tell it, songwriter Chip Taylor, best known for writing the Troggs' smash 'Wild Thing,' has three loves: music, horses and cards. So he details in his new autobiography, 'Songs From a Dutch Tour.'

In the book, Taylor, whose real name is James Wesley Voight, details his childhood with brother, actor Jon Voight (yes, that makes him Angelina Jolie's uncle), his ascent to the top of the pop, R&B and country charts, and why he gave it all up for professional gambling. His story is told with photograph's culled from his own personal vaults.

In the excerpt below, Taylor discusses how his biggest hit, 'Wild Thing,' came to pass, and why he was first embarrassed for anyone to hear it.

'A Day in the Life of a Songwriter/Gambler'

I was becoming a solid and established country music songwriter and then I started to add more and more of another early influence to my songwriting. The race records I listened to as a kid began creeping in to my writing and I was coming up with a rock 'n' roll hybrid that was less like the relatively sophisticated New York rock and more like soulful stuff coming out of Memphis. I started to get a reputation for this type of song, but my only song successes were still only country ones -- that is until I got that call.

Brian Johnson has signed a deal with Penguin Books to release a collection of thoughts and anecdotes he has recorded over the years. The AC/DC frontman recently elaborated on the project and shared an amusing story about the first cars he ever owned, back in his native England.

"I like humor a lot, and cars have been a big part of my life," the hard-rock vocalist told Southwestern Florida's Herald Tribune newspaper. "I'm lucky enough that I'm able to buy some of the exotic ones. Instead of doing drugs, I did motorcars. I'm not sure which one is more expensive.

"There's one story about me buying my first car, a Ford 100E," Johnson says. "It was a rust bucket, obviously. I got in the car and drove about 100 yards and the seat went through the floor. I sat there on the road, and the guy who had sold it to me said, '[Bleep], you've just fallen through the [bleeping] floor. Ahhhh, you should've checked that before you took it, me son.' That was me first hard lesson in motorcars."

Mark Oliver Everett -- better known to his fans as "E" -- is the frontman and sole proprietor of indie-rock's Eels. But the scientific community knows him as Mark Everett, son of Hugh Everett, the man who invented the 'Many Worlds' theory of Quantum Physics. It's this identity multiplied by tragedy (his father died when E was 19, His mom died in his arms having lost a battle with cancer, his sister committed suicide, his sister's boyfriend tried to stab him to death and his cousin died on 9/11) that prompted the ever-elusive E to purge his storied past in his new memoir, 'Things the Grandchildren Should Know.' In the exclusive excerpt below, E finds his discovers his father's body, only too late to save him.

As I walked out the front door, I thought I saw something strange in my peripheral vision: my father lying on the couch, as he always did after watching the news, but backward -- with his feet where his head usually was -- which would have been highly unusual, something I had never seen. But I was late and as I hurried out the door, I decided that I must have imagined it and kept going.

I woke up early the next morning so I could make the two-hour drive to register for fall classes in Richmond, but something didn't seem right. I don't know how I knew, but I could tell something was wrong.

I went upstairs and the usual signs of my father going to work were not there. No lights were on and it was eerily quiet. I ran up to my parents' bedroom, trying to mentally prepare myself for the worst-case scenario. As I walked in the room, I saw what I was afraid I would see: my father, lying there faceup on the bed, sideways, fully clothed, on top of the covers with his legs bent and his feet almost on the floor.

I thought maybe he fell asleep like that. I said, "Dad? Are you awake?" He didn't respond. I started to panic.

I yelled, "Dad! Wake up! Come on!"

I shook him. "S---! Come on!"

I yelled right up against his ear, the same way I did with Liz. Just the fact that I was touching him was surreal. I grabbed the phone and dialed 911. When the operator answered I told her that my father wouldn't wake up. She asked where he was and I told her on the bed. She told me to pick him up and carry him to the floor so she could instruct me in CPR. I put the phone down, pushed my arms under his body and picked him up. His entire body was completely stiff, like a board. I carefully carried him across the room, his body frozen in the position that he was in on the bed, and lowered him to the floor. I put the phone back to my ear and told the 911 operator that his body was stiff and asked her what to do next. She said, "Oh ... well ... um, just wait there. Someone will be there soon."

As she finished the sentence I heard sirens blaring in the distance. He must have died the night before. The 911 operator knew there was nothing to do after I told her his body was stiff. The ambulance came and they checked him out. They put a sheet over him and told me to go downstairs. He was only fifty-one. I was in shock and didn't know what to do. It was hard to know even how to feel. My father had just died, but I barely had a relationship with him. And here I was, alone with him in the house, just the two of us. Only, he was dead.

From 'Things the Grandchildren Should Know' by Mark Oliver Everett. Text copyright © 2008 by the author and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

Read E's Spinner Interview

He's an unusual man who makes unusual music, so of course he has an unusual hobby. "I make books," quirk-rocker Tim Fite tells Spinner. "And most of the books that I make are one of a kind. I sew up the binding, glue them, put them together and I read them to myself occasionally, and sometimes to nice people in the crowd."

While Fite says that he doesn't consider himself a "hardcore artisan," he does work for NY's Center for Book Arts when not on tour. And he has plans for his already fanciful website involving PDF files of bind-them-yourself books that fans (or even just interested readers) can download and print. "You fold it 8 times and you cut it once with a pair of scissors and then you have a little itty bitty book," says Fite, who describes the tales as "children's stories for adults." "I'll do it once a week or something until you have a library of 11 little itty bitty books."