Synopsis
In the book, Sugarman recounts his life, beginning with his privileged but troubled childhood in Beverly Hills, which he asserts set the stage for his later self-destructive addictions and behavior. According to his autobiography, after the premature death of his adolescent friend and "teacher", Jim Morrison, Danny Sugarman become friends with and then went on to manage Iggy Pop, before they both ended up in Californian State mental hospitals suffering with severely excessive drug and alcohol addiction syndrome.
Wonderland Avenue covers the first eight years of Sugerman's show business career, commencing with his first job at age 12 opening the Doors' fan mail, and concluding just beyond his 21st birthday, when he is a frail and severely drug-addicted mental patient who has been given less than a week to live. His exposure to the decadent music industry world of parties, groupies, and drugs at such a young age would facilitate a relentless heroin addiction ] that nearly killed him. Notable in the book is Sugarman's close personal friendship throughout his adolescence with late Doors frontman Jim Morrison, who served as a kind of mentor to Sugarman, and his post-Doors activities in L.A attempting to manage the flagging career (and supervise the behavior of) an increasingly unstable Iggy Pop. This section of the book reads as "the blind following the blind".
The book chronicles, in graphic detail, the decadence of the LA rock and roll lifestyle, lived to its most degrading and shocking extremes, in the early to mid-1970s.
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