In 1989, author Steve Erickson suggested that the great American novels of the
past 35 years were to be found not on the printed page, but rather, in the
grooves of records by Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Marvin Gaye, Bruce
Springsteen, and Little Richard. Seven years later, little has changed: In the
post-modern Nineties literature swims the stream of popular consciousness more
slowly than ever, lapped by the aggressive technology and energetic
commercialism of not just rock & roll, but also Hollywood and Silicon
Valley. Nevertheless, whether you call it “timeless” or “old-fashioned,” a book is a
book is a book, with its own particular byways of language, storytelling,
emotional truth, and intellectual discourse. At least, that’s what Rosanne
Cash, Bill Morrissey, and Richard Hell think. In a backwards twist on
Erickson’s notion, this disparate trio has temporarily put aside music for a
jump between the (hard)covers: Each of them has written their first fictional
efforts, each with the support of a high-profile literary house. In March,
Hyperion Books published Bodies of Water, a collection of short stories
by country-queen-turned-introspective-New-Yorker Cash. Edson, the first
novel by New England singer-songwriter Morrissey, hit the bookstores in April
via Alfred A. Knopf’s Random House. And this summer, Scribner will unveil Go
Now, the novelistic debut from punk pioneer (and established poet) Hell.
It may have never occurred to Berry, Sinatra, or Springsteen (yet), but Cash,
Morrissey, and Hell are actually part of a time-worn, if modest, tradition of
rocker authors. John Lennon and Bob Dylan both tried their hand at writing
without accompanying chord changes, Lennon with his bits of verbal/visual
whimsy (In His Own Write) and Dylan with a novel (Tarantula) that
made his lyrics look terse. Cult songwriter Leonard Cohen is probably better
known to the world-at-large as the author of Beautiful Losers. More
recently, Jimmy Buffett scored a best-seller (Where’s Joe Merchant?) and
Australian Nick Cave played Faulkner with his novel And the Ass Saw the
Angel.
What these people have in common is a love of words as well as a felicity with
them. Which is to say they’re songwriters, not drummers, and that’s a job that
demands a certain gift for expressive lyricism, vivid physical details,
metaphorical imagery, and even musicality. “Songwriting helps tremendously,”
Rosanne Cash says. “I’m more aware of the rhythm of language, and some kind of
subtle melody underneath.” But prose demands more than a sense of flow — and
more than the ability to nail a moment or character with a single line or
chorus. “You’ve got enough rope to hang yourself with,” Morrissey notes.
“There’s a lot more rope to hang yourself with,” Cash says.
That, however, was part of the fun. “I wanted to see if I could do it,”
Morrissey, who’d written a number of short stories but never a longer work,
says. “It was a challenge to really explore stuff, to be more than evocative.
The hardest thing was the pacing.” Otherwise, he stuck to a familiar dictum,
handed down to him by a professor and National Book Award winner named Thomas
Williams. “He taught me to say what you mean in the most economical way and get
out.”
Edson by Bill Morrissey (Random House, $23 hard) is a spare,
old-fashioned tale of elegy and transcendence set in a rustic New Hampshire
mill town. The main character is Henry Corvine, a talented but long-dormant
folkie trying to shake off a recent divorce, as well as a less recent rejection
by the music business. Call it “semi-autobiographical.” “He’s not me, but he
and I have gone through a lot of the same things,” Morrissey says. He’s also
willing to concede that one character, a sort of pop crossover acoustic waif
type, is a vague composite of Suzanne Vega and Shawn Colvin, while veteran folk
fans will chuckle at the young stylistic thief who offhandedly asks for Dave
Van Ronk’s phone number. Edson gets across the lovely mystery of
music-making as well as a sense of the communal folk world, but it isn’t a
novel about music. It’s a well-wrought yarn about loneliness and emotional risk
that captures the day-to-day moments and setting of a changing blue-collar
world.
Autobiography comes into play in Rosanne Cash’s writing too, but not in a
musical sense. Like her introspective, emotionally acute songs, the stories in
Bodies of Waters (Hyperion, $19.95 hard) are about mothers, lovers, and
wives making their way through memory and insecurity towards identity and
freedom, or at least accommodation. “The place I work from is that central,
deep place where the emotional threads are, the things that want to propel you
on to the next level of evolution,” Cash says. “I don’t know where else to get
inspiration other than my own life.”
A college English major who also studied acting briefly, Cash has written
short stories for two decades and also paints. Her work is a continuum of
expression that cuts across several forms. “The ideas know where to go,” she
says. “Or if they’re compelling enough they end up in both.” For example, her
new 10 Song Demo disc features a song called “Bells and Roses”; the
image also surfaces in the story “Part Girl.”
For Richard Hell, the guise of writer is not particularly novel, but writing a
novel was. Since 1982’s Destiny Street Hell has only made one record
(the 1992 Dim Stars project); he’s more likely to surface at poetry readings,
and has been publishing poems and prose for longer than he’s made music. He
doesn’t miss it much — besides the hassles of being in band, his advance for
Go Now (Scribner, $18 hard) was three times as much as his whole group
got for 1977’s Blank Generation, which Sire Records claims just went
into the black last year. Like Bill Morrissey, Hell viewed a novel as a chance
to stretch some new artistic muscles, and what’s more, he loved the process.
“It made every day interesting, getting up in the morning to find out what was
going to happen next,” he says. “It was exciting, it wasn’t work. Rehearsing
with a band was usually work.”
Hell also admits to “first novel syndrome,” as he puts it, basing the premise
of Go Now on something that happened to him in 1980. His protagonist,
Billy Mud, is a strung-out, burnt-out punk rocker who takes a cross-country
drive from L.A. to New York, ostensibly to write a book. Along the way he
struggles with self-deception, sexaholism, creativity, other people, a pesky
little dope habit, and various other transgressions. Giving new meaning to the
concept of the “unreliable narrator, Mud delivers a raw, unyielding internal
monologue that is alternately paranoid, hilarious, cruel, insightful, and
pathetic.
What’s ironic about Hell’s ongoing involvement in plain old prose is that he’s
exactly the type of artist to whom Steve Erickson’s formulation applies. Like
Dylan, Hell and his peers (Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith) were revolutionaries,
poets who radically reimagined rock & roll and married it to the
intellectual, dragging their ideas beyond the specialized world of the
literati. “Rock & roll bypassed conventions and told truths and was sexy in
a way that couldn’t be found anywhere else,” Hell recalls. “It had perfect
dignity, it was this magnificent form, and I knew that a quality I could bring
to it was to fully engage the mind, and use language. Plus, y’know, it’d get
you laid.”
— Jason Cohen
Three things a true AC/DC
fan should never do: 1) Buy a studio album after Back in Black; 2)
Question the sanctity of Angus Young’s riffs; and 3) Miss them when they come
to town. But you already knew that, so here’s a fourth:
Don’t read AC/DC: The World’s Heaviest Rock by Martin Huxley (St. Martin’s
Griffin, $10.95 paper). Chances are you already know more information than is
here in these pages; even if you don’t, AC/DC’s lyrics are light-years more
revealing. This isn’t serious biography full of lurid revelations of sex, drugs
and booze or even a serious examination of AC/DC’s place in popular culture (if
that wasn’t obvious enough).
This is nothing more than a series of press releases and record company bios
cobbled together into chapters bearing titles remarkably similar to certain
Young/Scott/Young and Young/Johnson/Young compositions. While the chapters
dealing with Bon Scott’s death and Brian Johnson’s ascendancy and the band’s
back-from-the-dead 1990 world tour aren’t total wastes of time, there isn’t
anything in the book more illustrative than the cover art, a volume knob turned
up to “AC/DC” — oh, you know, the one past 10.
Here’s three things that will educate you more about the band than this book:
1) Repeated listenings to High Voltage, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, and
Back in Black (Live is optional): 2) Watching one of their
videos; and 3) Having lots of sex and drinking until you pass out. (No bonus
points for Bon Scott imitations, though). Honestly, I don’t think Huxley did
any one of the three. If you want to know the story behind “The Jack,” well,
you’re just going to have to ask Angus, cause it ain’t in here. Author Huxley
forgot to include the chapter about himself, the one called “Dirty Deeds Done
Dirt Cheap.” Pity.
— Christopher Gray
The little sub-genre of
publishing known as the “quickie paperback bio” gets no respect. You’ve seen
them in the grocery stores by the checkout stand — such books usually feature
as subject the celebrity of the moment or the most famous person to die
recently.
These books get no respect, of course, because there is often little to
respect. They are usually sloppily edited, churned out in paperback — never
having seen hard covers — dumped into bookstores and grocery stores, and
seldom see a second printing. They also tend to reflect the current status of
the star du jour so as to be completely obsolete in six months (“New Kids on
the Block would really prefer to be ordinary people.” Hey, Donnie — no prob!).
For those people whose sense of the bizarre extends to such publications,
Courtney Love: Queen of Noise by Melissa Rossi (Pocket Books, $5.99 paper) is
not likely to disappoint. Journalist Rossi previously co-authored Freak Like
Me: Inside the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, a subject that still seems to have
poorly prepared her for Hurricane Courtney.
Given that so much of Love’s life is already publicly documented, Queen of
Noise is inexcusably cobbled together, rife with grammatical and other writing
errors (both Pamela Des Barres and Billie Holiday are misspelled), and rehashes
incidents most of us already know. To Rossi’s credit, she does not seem to
over-dramatize the already hysterical pace of Love’s life and career but
neither does she reflect much on Love’s musicanship and songwriting. Instead,
we get Courtney the misfit youngster, Courtney the awkward adolescent, Courtney
the trust-fund teen, Courtney the manipulative slut/groupie/hanger-on, Courtney
the aspiring rocker, Courtney as wife of Kurt Cobain, and finally, Courtney the
rock star. It’s enough to make the reader reach for a shotgun.
Listen, Vanity Fair cover aside, Courtney’s no angel — no one thinks that —
but neither is she the Wicked Witch of the West. The Sturm und Drang of Love’s
life may seem like perfect book fodder but her real power is visual and aural.
And I feel sorry for Courtney. Sorry because her fucked-up childhood is smeared
across her face like another shade of crimson lipstick. Her insecurity is on
display every time she props her foot up on a monitor wearing a crotch-length
dress. At 32, she still cries about the pain of growing up when the truth about
Courtney is that this is her life –everything she dreamed and schemed for. And
it doesn’t get much more real than that.
I wouldn’t heap all the blame for the shabbiness of the book on the author —
there’s much to be questioned about a culture that encourages and supports
these types of “literary” ventures over “real” writing (however you define it),
and writers are no less subject to the lure of fast money than rock stars. But
Courtney Love is fascinating, a woman of unreal ambition and desire, burning
with the kind of passion that must be ignited, like fire. And she will also
have to be dead before we get real, unexpurgated story.
— Margaret Moser
In “Slowness,” Milan Kun-
dera recounts an episode in which his friend, Goujard, hands him a book written
by a female reporter who, after a few meetings with Henry Kissinger,
erroneously convinces herself that she and the Secretary of State were meant
for each other. So unshakable is her certainty that this woman misinterprets
several overt brush-offs as part of a cover up to protect her. She not only
makes an ass of herself but gladly tells the world how maladjusted she is as
well. Goujard kept the book along with others on a shelf with a hand-marked
sign reading: “Masterpieces of Unintentional Humor.” Frank Zappa’s Negative
Dialectic of Poodle Play by Ben Watson (St. Martin’s Griffin, $17.95 paper)
belongs on that same shelf.
Very basically, Poodle Play is biography, and on that simplistic level
it is fairly awesome. But it is also awesome to the extent that it is a
misguided attempt to be intellectually significant. While the biographical
elements run throughout the book, the primary aim of Poodle Play is to
reveal Zappa as a linguistic mastermind and brilliant dialectician blurring the
lines separating art and life.
And Watson is completely serious in his liberal comparisons of Zappa to the
likes of Marx, Joyce and others. The project is disturbingly surreal. One man’s
obsession with an artist has gotten out of hand, not to the point of
endangering anybody, but to the point of discovering non-entities. For
instance, Watson claims Montana is obviously about “the lonely pleasures
of masturbation.” This fact is supposedly made readily apparent by simple
examination of the song’s title: mONtANa. The capitalized letters spell Onan,
the original heathen who spilled his seed, thus condemning the rest of us to
hell should we ever toss off. Perhaps some of the lyrics in the song might lend
themselves to Watson’s conclusion, but from his method of analysis I can only
guess that he would infer from my name, mIChaEl, that I am an Eskimo.
Sure, Zappa has done some clever spoofing and shot taking at The Biz,
organized religion, the PMRC, etc.; but it’s tough to believe that
Apostrophe (‘) is essentially King Lear. Throughout the book
Watson goes to tremendous lengths to superimpose on Zappa’s lyrics ideas and
imagery from other literary sources. But Watson’s desire to find similar
significant ideas left by Zappa himself doesn’t mean those ideas are actually
there. Someone’s desire to win the lottery doesn’t increase their chances of
doing so. Watson is screaming “I won” despite the fact that his numbers don’t
match.
In a transcription of an interview between Watson and Zappa at the end of
Poodle Play there are two or three exchanges which take the following,
(over)simplified form:
Watson: “(Insert name of Zappa work here) immediately brought to mind (insert
name of monumental work of literature or philosophy here).”
Zappa: “That’s funny because I have never read (repeat name of monumental work
of literature or philosophy here).”
Watson: “That’s amazing.”
Watson is not saying “That’s an amazing coincidence” or “I am amazingly
insane,” instead he thinks the fact that Zappa is largely ignorant of the
content of, say, the “Phaedo” only supports his notion of Frank as some kind of
super-genius. In other words, Zappa doesn’t have to be familiar with these
works to be referring to them because he is somehow privy to the same
transcendental intellect to which few in history — Shakespeare, Plato,
Coleridge — have had access.
There is no indication that Watson is joking.
— Michael Bertin
This article appears in June 21 • 1996 and June 21 • 1996 (Cover).