In "Mister Satan's Apprentice," street musician extraordinaire Adam Gussow has left in just about everything, and it's about 40 percent too much; the book would have read far better at a sleek 250 pages. But the good stuff is really good, and the book is well worth reading despite its distractions and digressions. In his early 40s, Gussow is currently a doctoral candidate in Princeton's English department. But thousands know him as the harmonica-wielding half of the "progressive gutbucket blues" duo Satan and Adam -- three-CD recording artists, photogenic subject of any number of newspaper and magazine features, and cameo stars of the U2 movie "Rattle and Hum."

In his autobiography, Gussow gets deep inside blues, and his relationship to it, and manages to successfully translate the music into language. "Blues harmonica played well was a miniature tongued slalom, a tornado swallowed and contained," he tells us, and his words capture every bit of excitement that the grooves and notes have to offer. "Mister Satan's Apprentice" is about much more than the blues, though -- it's a provocative meditation on race from a white man immersed in a traditionally black genre, neighborhood and world. Playing around with his first harmonica, in 1974, Gussow contemplates the subtleties of playing blues. "It had something to do with being a black guy," he muses.

As the protagonist in his narrative, Gussow pales (no pun intended) next to two marvelous characters: his two mentors, Nat Riddles and Sterling "Mister Satan" Magee. Twenty-two years older than his protégé, Mister Satan is as colorful as they come. He's a visual artist and apocalyptic numerologist with a murky music-industry background, and a font of, if not wisdom, then brilliantly idiosyncratic aphorisms and soliloquies. A Harlem fixture when Gussow approaches the guitarist to jam along, he shouts and hollers, runs hot and cold, towers over other men. Mister Satan looms larger than life, but harmonica player Nat Riddles is entirely real, an odd-job taxi driver with a dazzling smile and soulful tone. "He was perpetually on the verge of becoming the blues world's Next Big Thing," Gussow writes. "A young black harp-player with the Sound." Riddles flits in and out of fortune, showing up unexpectedly to astound a New York club, phoning from somewhere in the South, destitute and desperate, surviving gunshot wounds only to eventually succumb to a cruel wasting disease.

It's the music, finally, that counts most -- Gussow gives his story its own soundtrack, one of restlessness and yearning, of his struggle to capture the Sound: "The Sound was Southern-bound, it was cocky, playful, manic, chucking, resentful, edgy, comforting, relentless. It took incredible lip strength and finesse to produce. It was sexual. It was the haunted, restless feeling of a guy's apartment late at night after the woman who used to live there had moved out. It was whatever nasty things she was doing with the other guy-a virile sensitive soulmate-this very minute. It was the best way of beating those visions back into the ghoulish cave they had crawled out of. Working hard at the Sound was a socially acceptable way of sobbing, raging, and primal-screaming from a hot heart while pretending merely to be practicing." A little of this kind of writing goes a long way, and there's an awful lot of it here. Granted, it's a real challenge to maintain a level of excitement in writing about music page after page, particularly about blues, a genre built on the same few chords locked in a repetitious groove. So it's forgivable that Gussow often leans out a little far: "The sidewalk scene dissolved; I was wandering in a garden of earthly delights, hands cupped against the sweet cold fluid air. Every bent note was a pitch-perfect arrow puncturing the gray dusk. You only live now. Blue notes danced and spun, lines endlessly unfolding like so many wrapped gifts laid bare." You have to remind yourself that he's talking about a harmonica, one of the more prosaic of instruments.

For all Gussow's breathless adjectives and action verbs, he's frustratingly vague about the technical aspects of the duo's "huge raw perfect sound." The book's photos show Gussow with effects pedals at his feet, but he makes no mention of them; he doesn't mention the basic information that he plays in "cross harp" style until page 386; Mister Satan's "phase-shifted guitar wash and deafening clatter" is described pretty much only in metaphorical terms, as, for instance, "an endlessly unrolling Persian carpet with gristle and clanks added." Gussow is so good at getting inside his playing that the narrative sags whenever it moves to other topics. A hefty amount of the bloat deals with his failed relationships. We meet mercurial crackhead Robyn and inconstant ex-fat girl Gail, but mostly there's erratic, irritable hyperfeminist Helen. Gussow tells us on page 30 that Helen left him back in 1984, so we're predisposed to dislike her, and we indeed do. "Most men had a girlfriend," he writes. "I had Aphrodite crossed with Kali the Destroyer, She of infinite ravenous limbs." Worse, the book's artfully jumbled narrative, with short sections ordered sort of sequentially on several tracks, dooms us to read about Helen over the entire course of the book. We think we're finally through with her, and then: "1983. Things with Helen had turned out surprisingly well . . ." Enough already!

In the late '80s and early '90s, a period when racial violence kept flaring up in the outer boroughs of New York City, Satan and Adam's young-old, white-black novelty made a splash, but momentum slipped away. "Minor celebrity beckoned, then faded," Gussow writes. And despite the book's vibrant cover photo of the pair, they no longer perform, according to an e-mail Gussow sent me. "[I]t's impossible to keep the act together," he wrote, noting that Mister Satan now lives in south-central Virginia and has no telephone. That's a real shame.

I could hardly put this book down to perform activities of daily living, let alone going to work. "Mr Adam" has created a masterpiece of American musical literature. Being a blues lover of many years, I was bored to death by the almost clinical approach of most writers on the subject. Not so, Mr. Gussow! He delivers a passionately honest and heart felt memoir filled with wonderfully alive and vibrant individuals, sharing with us the one true American music, the blues.

Recently it was my privilege to see author and harmonica player Adam Gussow at my local huge independent bookstore here in the Eastern US. I rarely do commercials, but if you can't catch Adam, you can check out his new novel "Mr. Satan's Apprentice". Adam calls it "a blues memoir", and so it is. The guy is a no-shit, kick-butt, street-smart harp player! FYI, I have fairly high standards in this realm. If you've seen or heard the New York duo "Satan and Adam", you'll know what I mean. The guy is ALSO a juicy and creative, energetic, sexy writer - something I'm also picky about. Princeton Ph.D. candidate - English.

Adam's book describes a journey that a few of us know, but most do not. The musician in you will relate to the tale of the emergence of deep and powerful music from the little instrument - and the romantic in you will throb with the ways the emerging harmonica player and boundary-crosser discovers the things he needs to grow musically and personally - and then sometimes fearlessly, sometimes not, sets out to acquire them. You'll meet his teachers and mentors, and like it or not, you'll see life through the eyes of this seeker of musical and personal connection. You'll go with Adam on the romantic roller coaster as loves come and go - and you'll travel with him to Paris to play in the Metro and on the street; to the American South, and to other places exotic and otherwise - including a hitch with the road company of Broadway show based on Mark Twain's Sawyer and Finn. Later we get into the recording studio with Mr. Gussow and Mr. Satan - the Harlem street mystic and one-man band who becomes Adam's main-man mentor and muse, the Mr. Satan of the book's title. Throughout the book you'll find Adam the street intellectual examining his position as a white man among black men (and black women) in this blues-filled world - an examination in which Mr. Satan plays a key role.

A book for players and lovers - of the spirit of the music, of the street; of the endless forms of beauty and love, as they are found ALL over the place. The author is one who knows, and magically, describes, many of the gut experiences we players know; to my knowledge no one's ever written quite this way about these things before. Like the performing moments, the pulling out of all the everything you've got and then some, when the audience is on it's very EDGE, right there with you; when you are truly and purely the great IT! Blowing and drawing deep, and deeper, and then high and higher; and the room is all whoops and smiles, and all there in your hand. A good player knows these things, and believe me, in a blues band, nobody gets that kind of juice but the harp player.

OK, so maybe you don't know the peak of performance grace and light - but you know your peaks, and Adam's telling can stir it back into view...

Adam Gussow writes of music, romance, conflict, and awakening in an intimately physical and heart- connected way. As a player, I'm rocked. -"Harmonica Jack" Merrylees (JMerrylees@aol.com)

Adam starts out with a very difficult to support thesis, that bogs down in incredable academic leaps of faith. Not only does he not provide adequately provide support for the theme of his book; he almost abandons trying to half way through. The chapter focusing on Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" was refreshing and eye opening, but the rest of the book does not sway one to ackowledge the validity of his point. The constant use of "Blues Literature" to support his theory of real worl dblue falls short by nature, being that the blues authors quoted wrote fiction where is by its essence prone to exagerationa nd romanticism and can not convincingly back up his point about white oppression and violence being the backbone of almost all blues music and acting as a coded message universally gotten by the black blues audience. The academic nature of this book loses touch with the reality of things.