Booksology Reviewed: November, 2025Published: 2022, Rare BirdRating: 2.5/5Reviewer: JP
I’ve never held Matt Sorum particularly high regard as a drummer. I’m not suggesting he is unskilled, not at all, he is 1000% better than I will ever be, but it just that I never really listened to the bands he performed with; The Cult or Velvet Revolver and I’m only just a casual fan of Guns N’ Roses. The only band I really liked him in was Hawk (1986) and that was extremely short-lived and not even mentioned in his autobiography, DOUBLE TALKIN JIVE.
One might ask, why bother reading and reviewing a book about a dude that I only have a marginal interest in? It’s partly, because of my broad goal of reading and reviewing every Hard Rock and Heavy Metal book in existence, and partly because, despite my ambivalence to his music, Sorum seems to be quite the cool rock star and probably had some pretty amazing globe-trotting stories to tell.
I grabbed the 245-page hard cover version which has about three-dozen photos on 16 glossy plates in the middle. The book has a couple of co-writers and a brief introduction from Billy Gibbons.
It starts with a hook of a drunk Sorum being arrested and thrown in jail after a Hollywood party. Then we start with his early life story. After that we follow him and his family around California as a kid with various adventures, misdemeanours, injuries and accidents.
DOUBLE TALKIN JIVE is entertaining but also formulaic and conventional. The California kid comes from a broken home, discovers girls, and drugs at an early age, does poorly in life and school before being saved by rock and roll after watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan and seeing a Kiss show. I’ve read a dozen rock star autobiographies with the exact same pattern of events.
Then Sorum follows the big city lights, moves to LA, joins a band and what follows is a long series of party and tour anecdotes which seem like constant name dropping; Belushi, Williams, Halford, Kinison, Entwhistle, Tyler, Ulrich, and a bunch of other people I’m not familiar with. He does session work, studio work, fills in for various people using his natural drumming talent and personality to get him deep into the scene.
Sorum has always been an addict and often the details are sketchy as he freely admits smuggling, and using, vast quantities of cocaine and his memory is pretty shot from years of drug abuse. The book, after he moved to LA just degenerates into a long series of party stories, getting drunk, getting high, getting laid, trashing hotel rooms…not much substance or style. A lot of my interest came from his interactions with other musicians people who I was more curious to read about.
The long section about GNR was cool from a tour debauchery standpoint and lots more name dropping, Schwarzenegger, Trump, Cher, Billy Joel, Princess Di…on and on it went. The book ends on a slightly higher note, Sorum gets married, moves to the desert and picks up the occasional gig touring in South American and South Africa in various all-star projects.
My expectations for DOUBLE TALKIN’ JIVE were low and he met them but it was still a damn fun read, giving me a chance to live vicariously through the eyes of one of the elite rock stars of the 80’s, 90’s and beyond!
