Music has been an important part of my life from an early age—first Afro Cuban music (Dizzy Gillespie), then Chicago soul (Curtis Mayfield) and then the ecstatic boundary busting psychedelic era which opened my tastes to include everything except European polka music (except for the Schmengy brothers). Nonetheless, I have never been much interested in reading about music or musicians, even the ones that became part of my musical diet. Partly that was due to what I viewed as the less than stellar biographical offerings. That changed with writers such as Nick Tosches, Peter Guralinick *and David Hadju.**
Hadju’s bio Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (profiled closest Duke Ellington’s collaborator. Among Strayhorn’s credits is the non-pareil ballad ,Lush Life, which he wrote at the age of 19)
and Peter Guralnick’s Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick
were both vivid accounts of very original musicians and to some degree (more so with Guralnick) ethnographic studies that made sense of the cultural terrain that spawned their talented subjects.
Back when notes of patchouli and cannabis wafted through the hip universe and tye-die t shirts and bell bottom jeans were the uniform of the day and a regnant slogan was “ Don’t trust anyone over 30” and music was available on 8 track cassettes (the worst format ever), thought s od the future were relegated to speculative fiction . Since then the Walkman, the iPod , Spotify have delivered a future that is a music lovers paradise.
Three recent biographies of musicians—Stephen Stills, Joni Mitchell and Lou Reed, unpack careers that spanned the years from the roiling 60’s to our fin de siecle era (Reed died in 2013). Had they just been remembered for the iconic For What itsWorth (Stills), Woodstock, (Mitchell) and Walk on the Wild Side (Reed) they would still belong in the pantheon of great songwriters . But of course these American (and Canadian) originals contributed so much more as these profile…
Stephen Stills Change Partners: The Definitive Biography by David Roberts
Stephen Stills is one of the last remaining music legends from the rock era without a biography. During his six-decade career, he has played with all the greats. His career sky-rocketed when Crosby, Stills & Nash played only their second gig together at Woodstock in 1969. With the addition of Neil Young, the band would go on to play the first rock stadium tour in 1974. From Lorrie Moore’s piece on Stills:
…Stills is one of the last remaining rock-and-roll geniuses from a time when rock music was the soundtrack to an antiwar movement—“For What It’s Worth,” “Woodstock,” “Ohio” (about the 1970 Kent State shootings)—back when the global counterculture was on the left rather than the right. Roberts’s book makes this inexactly clear. Stills has been on the scene from the start, forming Buffalo Springfield when Jimi Hendrix was being booked as the opening act for the Monkees on tour. He has seemingly played with everyone—from Bill Withers to George Harrison. He was the first person to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice in one night, for his work in Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills & Nash. “What a wonderfully strange and beautiful cast of characters life has handed to me,” he said in his acceptance speech.
Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe
From the Publisher
Joni Mitchell may be the most influential female recording artist and composer of the late twentieth century. In Reckless Daughter, the music critic David Yaffe tells the remarkable, heart-wrenching story of how the blond girl with the guitar became a superstar of folk music in the 1960s, a key figure in the Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1970s, and the songwriter who spoke resonantly to, and for, audiences across the country.
A Canadian prairie girl, a free-spirited artist, Mitchell never wanted to be a pop star. She was nothing more than “a painter derailed by circumstances,” she would explain. And yet, she went on to become a talented self-taught musician and a brilliant bandleader, releasing album after album, each distinctly experimental, challenging, and revealing. Her lyrics captivated listeners with their perceptive language and naked emotion, born out of Mitchell’s life, loves, complaints, and prophecies. As an artist whose work deftly balances narrative and musical complexity, she has been admired by such legendary lyricists as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and beloved by such groundbreaking jazz musicians as Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock. Her hits―from “Big Yellow Taxi” to “Both Sides, Now” to “A Case of You”―endure as timeless favorites, and her influence on the generations of singer-songwriters who would follow her, from her devoted fan Prince to Björk, is undeniable.
In this intimate biography, drawing on dozens of unprecedented in-person interviews with Mitchell, her childhood friends, and a cast of famous characters, Yaffe reveals the backstory behind the famous songs―from Mitchell’s youth in Canada, her bout with polio at age nine, and her early marriage and the child she gave up for adoption, through the love affairs that inspired masterpieces, and up to the present―and shows us why Mitchell has so enthralled her listeners, her lovers, and her friends. Reckless Daughter is the story of an artist and an era that have left an indelible mark on American music.
In what Francine Prose calls a “protective biography , she opines
Uncritical admiration can make “Reckless Daughter” seem like a 400-page fan letter, though one certainly prefers Yaffe’s approach to that of biographers who despise their subjects. Championing Mitchell, right or wrong, and trying to stay on her good side is not exactly the same as taking her seriously as a composer and performer. Ultimately, it hardly matters. The person who wrote and sang “Blue,” “Court and Spark” and “Hejira” doesn’t need protection from readers who, decades after those albums appeared, remember Mitchell’s songs. Anthems not only of restlessness and heartbreak but also of intelligence, insight and courage, they are tributes to the power of music to imprint itself indelibly on the consciousness of its listeners.
Lou Reed: A Life by Anthony DeCurtis
From the publisher
As lead singer and songwriter for the Velvet Underground and a renowned solo artist, Lou Reed invented alternative rock. His music, at once a source of transcendent beauty and coruscating noise, violated all definitions of genre while speaking to millions of fans and inspiring generations of musicians.
But while his iconic status may be fixed, the man himself was anything but. Lou Reed’s life was a transformer’s odyssey. Eternally restless and endlessly hungry for new experiences, Reed reinvented his persona, his sound, even his sexuality time and again. A man of contradictions and extremes, he was fiercely independent yet afraid of being alone, artistically fearless yet deeply paranoid, eager for commercial success yet disdainful of his own triumphs. Channeling his jagged energy and literary sensibility into classic songs – like “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Sweet Jane” – and radically experimental albums alike, Reed remained desperately true to his artistic vision, wherever it led him.
Now, just a few years after Reed’s death, Rolling Stone writer Anthony DeCurtis, who knew Close Reed and interviewed him extensively, tells the provocative story of his complex and chameleonic life. With unparalleled access to dozens of Reed’s friends, family, and collaborators, DeCurtis tracks Reed’s five-decade career through the accounts of those who knew him and through Reed’s most revealing testimony, his music. We travel deep into his defiantly subterranean world, enter the studio as the Velvet Underground record their groundbreaking work, and revel in Reed’s relationships with such legendary figures as Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and Laurie Anderson. Gritty, intimate, and unflinching, Lou Reed is an illuminating tribute to one of the most incendiary artists of our time.
David Yaffe spotlights what he describers as Reed’s “cantankerous” nature
The songs of Lou Reed are a manual of sorts for how to keep living after you have let yourself and everyone else down, or after the world has done that for you. Reed doesn’t judge anyone for shooting heroin or defying societal norms, or for making sweet, gentle love to someone right before they OD. His songs are not sentimental about death, and they never, ever try to make you like the person who is singing them. He was more lacking in guile than most in rock and roll and he was notoriously cantankerous. When he had a liver transplant a few months before his death, The Onion ran a satirical piece
“It’s really hard to get along with Lou—one minute he’s your best friend and the next he’s outright abusive,” said the vital organ, describing its ongoing collaboration with the former Velvet Underground frontman as “strained at best.” “He just has this way of making you feel completely inadequate. I can tell he doesn’t respect me at all. In fact, I’m pretty sure he’s already thinking about replacing me.” The joke worked because it was so true: anyone who got close to Lou—bandmates, lovers, archivists—invariably had such an experience after a while.
Along with with access to all the world’s music digitalization has fractured the categories of music and has reduced artistic name recognition to near anonymity. Whether 50 years hence we will celebrate musical giants like Mitchell, Stills and Reed, of course remanis to be seen…
Mavis at 70 plus years is still performing. Warren Zevon passed a few years ago and his wife put together a very original collection of testiments by people who knew Warren . Mingus was/is a giant who should occupy the Amerian musical pantheon with Duke Ellington George Gershwin. Charlie “Bird ” Parker ‘s life is the template for tragic lives of the creative originals The books below are excellent examples of the shift from hagiography to ethnography.
While renowned chronicler of American music Peter Guralnick made his bones with his seminal two volume study of cultural icon Elvis Presley ( of whom I was not a fan) when I came upon Guralnick’s Dream Boogie *: The Triumph of Sam Cooke (of whom I am an immense fan) I suspected we might be kindred spirits. So, when I received his recent opus on Sam Phillips , I arranged to meet with him. As it turns out, among other things, we both place value on and enjoy digressive conversation (which I think is redundant, as I view real conversation to be inherently digressive.) In any case, what follows is that chat (hopefully the first in an ongoing series), which is, as you may suspect, a peripatetic journey through mid century American music and much more.
Sam Phillps by Peter Guralnick
Robert Birnbaum: Would it bother you— I really don’t like to pose people. Do you mind, if while we’re talking, I take your picture ?
Peter Guralnick: As long as I’m not eating, or dribbling.
Robert Birnbaum:Yes.
Peter Guralnick:Or drooling.
Robert Birnbaum: (laughs) I’d like to get the drooling photo.
Peter Guralnick: Everybody wants that.
Robert Birnbaum:That’s the money shot, that’s what they said to me. People Magazine said, “Get Guralnick drooling and there’ll be lots of money for you.”
Peter Guralnick:I’ve looked at some of your other interviews, they’re really cool.
Robert Birnbaum:Thank you.
Peter Guralnick:The people you talk to… and you even talked to Don Winslow
Robert Birnbaum: I introduced him and spoke with him in front of an audience at [Brookline] BookSmith.
Peter Guralnick: What a great writer, [author of] The Power of the Dog.
Robert Birnbaum: I like both that one and the new one, The Cartel…
Peter Guralnick: I don’t know, The Cartel didn’t grab me quite as much, maybe it’s because I couldn’t follow it as well. But The Power of the Dog —man, that just knocked me out. How about Kem Nunn? You’ve got to read The Dogs of Winter.
Robert Birnbaum: Ok, today’s the 17th of December. I’m talking to Peter Guralnick.
Peter Guralnick:It’s not the 17th.
Robert Birnbaum:Well, lets pretend it’s the 17th. What day is it?
Peter Guralnick:The 15th.
Peter Guralnick [photo: copyright 2016 Robert Birnbaum
Robert Birnbaum:(laughter)You have to be picky about it.
Peter Guralnick:No, ordinarily I wouldn’t know.
Robert Birnbaum:I’m talking to Mr. Fussy here.
Peter Guralnick: If you ask me any other day, I wouldn’t know, but I do know today.
Robert Birnbaum:See, I even have a date book and I don’t know. Well, whatever the date is, I’m talking to Peter Guralnick. And we are rolling. You spend part of the year in Nashville at Vanderbilt, are you still doing that?
Peter Guralnick: Yeah, I’m going back this year, this is the 11th year I’ll be teaching Creative Writing spring semester there. It’s been great. It’s kind of misleading that Little, Brown wrote that, “He divides his time.” I said, “Well, that sounds okay,” but really I live around here and I teach creative writing at Vanderbilt spring semester.
Robert Birnbaum:Is Vanderbilt separate, like many colleges, from the community? Is it a little island unto itself? When you’re at Vanderbilt can you see where you are in the town?
Peter Guralnick:You’re pretty much in the middle of things. I’d say my largest range of association is, not just within the music community, but within the larger community. I’m certainly friendly with people at Vanderbilt, but the larger community is very accessible and you’re right in the middle of it. I’m not sure that Vanderbilt chooses to be in the middle of it, but they are.
Robert Birnbaum:Compare life in that town, to life in New England for instance. Big cultural difference?
Peter Guralnick: I can’t.
Robert Birnbaum: You just don’t spend enough time?
Peter Guralnick: What it is, is that my life in Nashville the teaching is like running a camp. I think it’s total immersion, in a self-sustaining community. It’s been very rewarding working with the students, both under-graduate and graduate. But, because of the fact that I’m living in town, living on the edge of town you might say. I go out all the time, I see people, I meet people.
Robert Birnbaum: Catch live music?
Peter Guralnick:I go out to hear live music all the time. Whereas, basically when I’m at home, at least for the last 20-25 years, I’m writing. I’ve always been writing, but the point is I live an hour outside of Boston.
Robert Birnbaum: No distractions.
Peter Guralnick:There are no distractions. And in Boston music starts later and later. In Nashville you can go out and you can catch a 9:00 set, you might even catch two sets and be home by 11:00, because you’re only 15 minutes away.
Robert Birnbaum:Well,everyone wants, inquiring minds want to know. Is the Sam Phillips book—I’m not sure it’s a biography. Is the Sam Phillips book like an penultimate project for you? Is everything else going to be anticlimactic after this?
Peter Guralnick:No. I always said, I never set out to be a professional biographer.
Robert Birnbaum:Are you a professional biographer?
Peter Guralnick:No. I’ve always wanted to write something different,to continue to write something different with each book. I started out to be a writer, when I was a kid. When I was eight or nine years old. I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be a baseball player. I have no professional concept of either.
Robert Birnbaum:If you’re at spring at Vanderbilt, you watch very good baseball [Vanderbilt has a very good baseball program]?
Peter Guralnick:I don’t much like watching. I love to play. I played baseball until I was 48 and then I ran into a tri-focal crisis. Now, I just play tennis. I’ve played sports all my life, it’s been a great source of reward, satisfaction and friendship. A great source of friendship.
Robert Birnbaum:You were talking about writing.
Peter Guralnick: I wanted to be a writer. The music came about just because – I mean, I wrote my first novel when I was 19, I published a couple of collections of short stories when I was 21 and 22. But I started writing about music during this same time period – the whole point was purely, entirely, simply to tell people about this music that I thought was so great. The opportunity came about when the underground press started popping up – Crawdaddy! startedin ’66 or ’67, Boston After Dark began around the same time, and then there were the blues magazines in England. People who knew me couldn’t help but know how much I loved the blues, so they asked me if I’d like to write about it. How could I say no? Just to have the opportunity to put the names of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley in print….But just to square the circle, to go back to your original question, I think as I continued on this path that I had set out on first with Elvis, I guess I saw the Sam Phillips almost as the third in the trilogy of biographies. That wasn’t how I started out, but that’s how I eventually came to see it. I can’t conceive of writing another biography, not out of any disaffection, or disillusionment with it, but because I’ve spent the last 27 years writing biographies. Now I’m going to go back to writing short stories.
Mister Down Child by Peter Guralnick
Robert Birnbaum:Not a novel?
Peter Guralnick:Well, maybe.The last novel I wrote, which is either the 10th or the 11th, has been stuck in the middle of third draft for a long, long time. So I want to go back to it, see if it’s worth finishing. It may well not be and if it isn’t I’m going to be doing the stories, then I think I’ll go on to another novel.
Robert Birnbaum:There isn’t another, forget about musical, there’s not another figure, cultural figure or person that you are interested enough in to investigate their life?
Peter Guralnick:There is, but not that I want to write the book. I read the review of the John le Carre biography in the Times today. Which I was quite interested in. As I think you know by now, I don’t read biographies much, I don’t read non-fiction much. I thought that would be an interesting subject to explore. I would have loved to have written a biography of Willie Mays. That was something I thought about a lot after finishing the Sam Cooke. Then I just realized it would be like starting all over again, I had no contacts. I had no access to that world. It would be a matter of persuading people who had no idea who I was, that I was somebody worth talking to.
Robert Birnbaum: You’d have to persuade him that you were worth talking to.
Peter Guralnick:Then it turned out somebody else was working on the book. That actually wasn’t what discouraged me, I had already decided I couldn’t do it.
Robert Birnbaum: Is there a musical figure, character that deserves a biography that no one has written about?
Peter Guralnick:There are hundreds.
Robert Birnbaum:Name a few of them?
Peter Guralnick: Merle Haggard, has had a lot of books written about him, but I think no great biography. He’s one of the great creative artists of our time. Somebody like Alice Munro, deserves a great artistic biography. There are many writers like that. Somebody like, Charlie Rich would be a tremendous subject for a biography, but probably it would not be one that could be sold.
Robert Birnbaum:How could a Sam Phillips biography be viewed as having commercial potential? ? Especially as the cultural literacy window has narrowed so much.
Peter Guralnick: Five years.
Robert Birnbaum:That’s right.
Peter Guralnick:Is that being generous?
Robert Birnbaum:I was going to say 7-10, but five sounds about right. I asked people, in fact I even asked my physical therapist who’s 30. I started naming names, both current and 15-20 years. I said, “I’m reading a book about Sam Phillips.” “Who’s Sam Philips?” She didn’t even know there was a singer named Sam Phillips.[1]
Peter Guralnick:I wanted to say one thing. After I finished the Elvis biography I would run into people who’d say, “Now, you’ve written about the King, who would be a worthy subject?” I would say, “Anybody.” I would say that this is a matter of human dignity and human worth. It has nothing to do with fame, it has nothing to do with celebrity. I’ve spoken many times about a friend of mine, Irving Roberts. He did – and this isn’t even the beginning of all that he did – he did all of the maintenance work and construction and, oh, just everything that needed doing, including good advice, at camp. His father built the camp that my grandfather started and that I later ran. I couldn’t even begin to describe all of Irving’s talents and skills – he’s one of the most interesting people, one of the most brilliant people, one of the most inventive people, one of the most resourceful and compassionate people I’ve ever met. He would be a great subject for as biography!
Robert Birnbaum:Uncle Silas would have been a worthy subject.
Peter Guralnick:That’s true. In other words, this ranking of the worth of subjects to me is, I’m not saying you’re doing it, but it’s anti-democratic. In a way that only a true Trumpian could understand.
Robert Birnbaum:The point is, you’re lucky to be affiliated with a publishing house that has somebody like Michael Pietsch, whose really an editor and a book person.
Peter Guralnick: Michael Pietsch [2]is the best friend I’ve ever made in publishing. In all the years I’ve been in publishing, I’ve made good friends, but he is the best friend I’ve made.
Robert Birnbaum:The introduction he wrote, the tip in he wrote to the advanced reading copy was, I think appropriate, do you think somebody else would have bought this book?
r.
Peter Guralnick: Cal Morgan at Harper, but he just left Harper. You know, he published Jess Walter[3].
Robert Birnbaum: I love Beautiful Ruins.
Peter Guralnick:Oh, all of his books are great. Every one is different.
Robert Birnbaum: Has anyone written about Howlin Wolf, in a good way?
Peter Guralnick:There’s a biography of Howlin Wolf that’s a wonderful accumulation of so much great stuff. Mark Hoffman wrote it, Mark and James Segrest. [4]It’s great that they did it. That’s a book, you wanted to ask me, is there a biography I would have liked to have written? I would have loved to e write a biography of Howlin’ Wolf, but I talked myself out of it, I thought it was too late. But Mark and James Segrest went out and found all these people, contemporaries of Wolf, friends, family, everything. So, you know, I’m not ranking or regretting – I mean, as Solomon Burke said to me a number of times, “Bile will consume you.” You never want to go there if you can help it!
Robert Birnbaum:Did he make that up?
Peter Guralnick:I think so.
Peter Guralnick: He also said, “Who is it that’s Pete the Writer when he’s alone in his hotel room at night.” He was pissed off at me, mildly pissed off at me at the time. I sign all my letters that way now, Pete the Writer In his Lonely Room. No, I mean, they went out and did something that I didn’t think could be done. That was a book I would like to have written. My own biography of Howlin’ Wolf, I mean. Satchel Paige [5]is another person I would have loved to have written about. I pitched the story on Satchel Paige to Rolling Stone, while he was coaching out in Oklahoma. He was coaching third base in a rocking chair. I figured, how could it miss? But Rolling Stone didn’t see it that way.
Robert Birnbaum: Are there pictures of that?
Peter Guralnick:I’ve never seen any.
Robert Birnbaum:There’s got to be. How could somebody not.
Peter Guralnick: On the internet, anything. Even if it didn’t exist, it does exist.
Robert Birnbaum: I agree with you, I think that’s right, but that’s not the way the book industry works. That is to say they do need subjects with high name recognition.
Peter Guralnick [photo: copyright 2016 Robert Birnbaum
Peter Guralnick:Well, look, after Elvis – and this is just an exemplary tale (no bile) – after Elvis, I was looking for a new agent and I talked to 16 or 17, I think. I told them my next book was going to be about Sam Cooke, and every one of them said, “Big mistake. Bad career move, after the King.” Then they suggested things which they said could bring a great deal of money, and I believed them and I said, “Yes, but I’m writing about Sam Cooke.”
Robert Birnbaum: Let me bless you for that. First of all I don’t read biographies and I don’t usually read musical biographies. But, I loved Sam Cooke. I’m from Chicago, I love that book. Thank you for the book.
Peter Guralnick:This is what happened to me, I’ll say to you that the 18th agent that I spoke to was David Gernert, and he said, “This is really cool.” And he went out and sold it, and that’s what I did. But it involved a conscious recognition on my part. That I was reducing my market share with each book, enormously. And, you know, it’s no big deal, but I was writing the books I wanted to write. And I can honestly say I’ve never written about anybody that I didn’t want to write about. Every single person I’ve written about is somebody I’ve written about out of admiration.
Robert Birnbaum:And love.
Peter Guralnick: And love.
Robert Birnbaum:You loved Sam Phillips.
Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick
Peter Guralnick:Yeah. Loved Sam Cooke too, even if I didn’t know him. The point is, my concept is that, I want to write as much as possible from the inside out. I’m not interested in being an arbiter of fashion, I’m not interested in providing judgments. I’m interested in providing an open book and to some extent, by doing it, I discovered that writing biographies provided me with a landscape that offered as much potential as the fictional landscapes that I had been focusing on.
Robert Birnbaum:Let me pause you here. Your conversation with Mark Feeney, [6] you’ve come to see non-fiction as, “As giving me the opportunity to create these great characters on this expansive plane and populate this world. Because, I came to see it in each of these books, the facts we’re given but not the story. The characters were extraordinary people who developed out of ordinary circumstances. We live in a society that seeks judgement so much of the time, that seeks a bottom line that so often distorts the complexity of reality. Whether it’s Elvis or Sam Cooke, or Sam Phillips, I’m interested in what motivates them, their aspirations, their hopes, their dreams, their disappointments, their inner life. Not a catalog of their achievements.” I think deep down that’s what people want to really read. 600 pages of facts about what a guy had for breakfast when he was seven and what his sex life was at the age of 70 maybe more information than a reader wants.
Peter Guralnick:From my point of view the ideal is to write a book as interesting as the person. To write a book, in the case of Sam Phillips, in which it’s not just the main characters but the cultural milieu that provides the focus. It’s the supporting cast, it’s people like Tom Perryman, in the Elvis book who is out there in Gladewater in East Texas. Out there in Gladewater, he’s the program director and a DJ, and he sees something in this 19-year-old and promotes Elvis on for the first time outside of Memphis and the Hayride. The point is this is a man of imagination, he’s a man that’s looking to get ahead on his own. He’s a man looking towards the future. He doesn’t play a big part in the book, but there are so many people like that.
Robert Birnbaum:It’s that old democratic thing, ideally everyone has a story. There’s a story with everyone, you can find multitudes of people that would make an interesting story and book. Getting back to this craft of talking about people, I like biographical essays. Which concises someone’s life, somebody who knows the person and that can speak eloquently. I have read a few [ your books], David Hadju’s book on Billy Strayhorn.[7] Nick Tosches’s and a couple of his books,. I didn’t really like his Dean Martin. But he put him into cultural context. He doesn’t just about the details of the person’s life, a lot of which is mundane, and banal. I don’t think many people capture that, is it because the publishers look for hagiographic tracts or exposes on popular artists.
Peter Guralnick:I think you’d have to expand your definition, it’s not just the industry, it’s academe, it’s the academy. Which is also looking for facts and for instance some of most acclaimed biographies, well, leaving aside, let’s say, a book like Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters,” which is a masterpiece of portraiture and a masterpiece of describing the climate of the time – well, look, I don’t want to get into anyone in particular, but sometimes these books just pile up, they just pile on the facts, as if they were writing a PhD thesis, or a glorified school paper. You’ll read something and you’ll be struck by it, and then the next paragraph will reinforce it, the following paragraph will drive home the point even more. You say, “I get it, I get it” – you know what I mean?
t, the following paragraph will drive home the point even more. You say, “I get it, I get it” – you know what I mean?
Robert Birnbaum: I mean, four volumes on someone’s life. Didn’t Dumas Malone write six volumes on Jefferson? But what I was going to say, by now its sort of a cliche for me, my feeling is that novels like Gore Vidal’s, “Lincoln,” and “Burr” – I felt that I learned more about Lincoln in Vidal’s novel, “Lincoln ” than I did in reading any texts and any description of him.
Peter Guralnick:I thought those two were wonderful novels. But so was Henry and Clara.
Robert Birnbaum: Tom Mallon. Henry and Clara. That’s a great book.[8]
Peter Guralnick:Isn’t that a terrific book?:You can see what I read.
Robert Birnbaum:I’ve been talking to Tom for years, since I discovered that book.
Henry and Clara by Thomas Mallon
Peter Guralnick: I just read the Reagan and I read the Nixon before that. To me Henry and Clara…
Robert Birnbaum:It’s a brilliant idea. To take a great event and take it from the side, then see what it did to these characters. It’s like writing a novel about a people who were in the grassy knoll. Tom Boyle wrote something about McCormacks era, Colonel McCormack’s era, Riven Rock.[9]
Riven Rock by TC Boyle
Robert Birnbaum The woman [Katherine McCormack] that McCormack’s son married turned out to be a really fantastic woman who ended up at MIT. I think they’ve named buildings after her. I guess what I wanted to get to was, a few years ago the notion of creative non-fiction was introduced and people like to argue about it. I guess, I think that the dividing line, between fictional narrative and non-fictional narrative is blurring. In many cases you can tell a story better and you can argue about what the facts are, but you can tell a story better by introducing elements that are not necessarily factually correct.
Peter Guralnick: I’m not sure. I wouldn’t make that division, I wouldn’t draw that distinction. I think in many ways the characters, the real-life characters that you run into in anybody’s life, that I’ve run into in the stories of Sam Cooke or Sam Phillips or Elvis Presley, are just as compelling. You have all these ancillary characters whose stories in their own way are just as compelling. I think the two essential elements, different elements but in the end fusing into the same thing, are the focus on character and the focus on story. The point is that in terms of narrative, you have to have this narrative momentum. Which is an invention like Hemingway’s dialogue, like slapback, the repetitive-echo device that Sam Phillips employed to such wonderful effect, it’s an invention to make the real realer. Without that narrative momentum you’re just dead in the water. You attempt to get an overview, but you have to recognize that the overview you’re getting is entirely different from the overview another writer, or the reader, might bring to it, or that that person sitting over there might get from another angle. Each of us, given the same set of facts, the same set of interviews, the same set of quotes, the same set of everything, would create an entirely different book.
Robert Birnbaum:I would amplify that, by saying that it’s also the case, that if I read this book a second time, or if you wrote the book a second time there would be differences.
Peter Guralnick:There would absolutely be differences. It’s how the weather is. The point is, I mean, that I used to think, in terms of writing fiction, what I had for breakfast, something that might be in the news, whatever was in the air, started you off in a completely different – or somewhat different – way. I mean, it struck me early on, when I first started writing. I started writing every day when I was around 15. I read the Hemingway interview in the Paris Review where he said that –
Robert Birnbaum:He wrote 1000 words a day or something like that?
Peter Guralnick:He wrote every day, he wrote for a certain amount of time. I thought, man, I don’t think that I can write as well as Ernest Hemingway. But I can at least write every day, I think I can write 1000 words a day. It may be shit, but I can commit myself to that. And I did, from the time I was 15, pretty much for the next 30 years. I mean, I could get in at 3 o’clock in the morning, I might have to go to work at 9 – when I was in college, I might have an early class – it didn’t matter. I was going to get up early to write.
Robert Birnbaum:What’s the feeling like when you’re doing that? What do you feel like?
Peter Guralnick:Frustration. Frustration. So much of the time what you’re writing just doesn’t make it, it isn’t any good.
Robert Birnbaum: And you know that when you’re writing it?
Peter Guralnick:Well, not so much if you’re involved in ongoing work. What I was doing for the most part, at the start anyway, was doing beginnings of things which never panned out. Later on, when I was committed to ongoing work, whether it was a novel or a book, it got easer. But I can remember sitting down every day to write the profile of Johnny Shines in “Feel Like Going Home” – I remember specifically how overwhelmed I was by all the material I had, and how could I convey the essence of what I wanted to say? That was one of the few stories, that and Charlie Feathers in “Lost Highway” –
Lost Highway by Peter Guralnick
Those two times, it wasn’t that I had more facts or more information than I did on anybody else, but I remember feeling a sense of hopelessness that I could ever boil this down to create the portrait that I had in my head. The finely etched portrait! Then, finally, I guess the dam just broke. But that’s different from what I was talking about before , in high school and the first couple of years of college, starting fresh every day, and then having to start fresh again the next day, because what I’d written the day before just didn’t go anywhere, it was, like, scribbling. I suppose it isn’t that different from what all of us face all the time, from what I know I still face, certainly. The idea of starting – you have a blank piece of paper, a blank screen and you sit there and nothing comes. You start to write and you say, “This is terrible, this is ridiculous.” You force yourself to keep going and at the end of the day you have 600, 800 words.
I used to do it in notebooks, I would just turn the page. I didn’t crumple up the pages. You turn the page and you start something else the next day. That’s entirely different from working on a novel, or continuing with ongoing work. To me the whole point of what you’re looking for in any creative act – and creative act can encompass just about anything you commit yourself to fully in life – the whole point is, you’re looking for that moment when you’re lost in what you’re doing. You have applied everything that you know and in some ways you’ve cast it out and you are going just on autopilot, because you’re lost in the act.
Robert Birnbaum:Contemporarily. I guess that’s being in the zone, I guess.
Peter Guralnick:In the moment, in the zone. It’s what Chet Baker [10]talked about when he said, “Let’s get lost.” I mean, if I write for three and half, four hours, say, which would be my ideal time, although lately I’ve been writing in much longer stretches, because of the exigencies of life – but if you write for three or four hours and get five or ten minutes in which you’re just completely lost, that’s what it’s all about.
Robert Birnbaum:Against the background of frustration, occasionally you get that high of feeling something good has happened?
Peter Guralnick:Yeah. Again, I think I’m misleading you a little, because I don’t mean that writing the Sam Phillips, writing about Sam Cooke or Elvis day after day, I mean, certainly I could get stuck at certain points, but that was not the same kind of frustration that I might feel –
Robert Birnbaum: You had a goal.
Peter Guralnick:Right. I had a goal. And if I wrote something – if I wrote 5000 words that I committed myself to, I thought, This is fantastic, and then I decided it merely repeated action or themes that I had already developed, I was prepared to throw it out. Well, to save it in a file of lost moments anyway!
Robert Birnbaum:How big was the original manuscript that you turned in?
Peter Guralnick:The same size.
Robert Birnbaum: How big was the manuscript that you worked on before you turned it in, or did you just pare it down as you went?
Peter Guralnick [photo: Robert Birnbaum]
Peter Guralnick: As I went. The idea of re-writing, I used to write three discrete drafts. Of everything that I wrote pre-computer. The first draft was long hand. Second draft I typed out from the manuscript, changing as I went along, , the third draft I typed out from the beginning, every single page. Now, I feel like it’s almost inescapable that you’re re-writing all the time. I save, if you could see my hard drive – I save all the different versions and variations. When I finished the Sam Phillips, it was the book that I wanted to write. From the beginning, for example, I knew that there needed to be this turn, there needed to be this personal element that would gradually intrude and then take over, change direction over the last third of the book. It was kind of like recognizing with Elvis, not too long after I had started writing, that it was going to have to be two volumes. That the story took place in two entirely separate acts and that after his mother died, it was as if the curtain came down. What followed was a different story, with a different person involved. With Sam Phillips, I knew from the start, among other things, because I didn’t want to pursue a linearity which in no way did justice, either to Sam as a character, or to the fact that the last 40 years of his life were spent pursuing things that were not of intrinsic narrative interest. Not just to the reader, but to me. I didn’t want to write about, he acquired a radio station, sold a radio station. He built a radio tower.
Robert Birnbaum:He called Fidel Castro after the Bay of Pigs.
Peter Guralnick: Well, yeah, that’s the kind of thing I wanted to write about exactly, I wanted to create a narrative structure that was as entertaining as what Sam wanted to create in the studio. Which meant blowing up strict linearity, giving much freer rein to anecdote and above all to digression.
Robert Birnbaum:Let me ask you. If an FBI profiler looked at Sam Phillips life and maybe used your book. Would there be a more contemporary diagnosis of his psychological profile?
Peter Guralnick: I feel as if, what I want to write is something which is a sufficiently open book that every reader can come away from it with his or her own impression. I feel with each of the books I’ve written, there were necessarily points at which you think, I’m just not going to get there. “There” meaning, it’s never going to come into focus, I’m just getting too far out on a limb. But then, with each of the books and even the profiles, at some point it snaps into focus. All of a sudden I see the person, it seems like I see the person whole – I mean, that sounds reductive, but I see the person as a dynamic character. If I’m writing about Johnny Shines or Charlie Rich, I’m suddenly able to zero in on to what I want to focus on, what I want to bring out. And I would hope that the discerning reader, or the non-discerning reader, might find something entirely different. The portrait of Colonel Parker in “Careless Love,” for example, is intended to be a nuanced portrait. One in which I actually take a countervailing view of both the Colonel’s role and character.
Robert Birnbaum:A more generous interpretation.
Peter Guralnick:His intellectual brilliance, his imaginativeness, his humor, and his insecurity. Many people have said to me, “Boy, you really nailed the Colonel as the son of a bitch that he was.” That’s fine with me, for them to see it that way. But I want to portray something different, I want to portray a multifaceted person.
Robert Birnbaum:You’re not interested in concise judgement, you want the pictures. Let somebody else say what they are. Was it your quote or somebody else’s quote that said, “Phillips was an impenetrable mystery.” I can’t remember.
Peter Guralnick: I don’t remember.
Robert Birnbaum:You probably didn’t say that, I don’t think you said that.
Peter Guralnick: No. It’s the same way in which people I know, I was with people sometimes who were either offended by Sam, the kind of defensive maneuvering, or preventive maneuvering that he did. The preambles that he would deliver before you even started the interview – it really didn’t matter, because when you got down to it, he was going to say whatever he was going to say, and you could say whatever you wanted to say, there weren’t going to be any holds barred.
Robert Birnbaum:How many hours did you spend with him, do you think? Do you have any sense of the amount?
Peter Guralnick: No. Hundreds.
Robert Birnbaum:On tape?
Peter Guralnick: On tape, I would say several hundred. We did a documentary in 1999, and that really, actually, for one thing I think it brought us closer. Everybody says, “Oh, you were friends with Sam for 25 years.” I wasn’t. It took a long time – and there were lots of stages to pass through along the way. As he said to me, and I’m sure you picked up on this in the book, he said, “My son Knox loved you from the minute he met you – but I didn’t.” I mean, he could say things, and some people might think, Well, did you feel intimidated? Insulted? But I had no basis to be insulted. I’m just interested in Sam’s reaction, whatever my personal feelings might be. And it’s not that I don’t have personal feelings – that I can’t be enormously gratified at times, or disappointed at others. But you really have to take the view that it’s all phenomenological – Pete the Writer, as Solomon Burke pointed out to me, is different from Pete the Person.
Robert Birnbaum:It’s understandable to expect that if you spend that much time with someone and you connect the project to love and admiration.
Peter Guralnick:But, I wasn’t saying that to him. Sam prided himself on his ability to read people. He said to me, kind of to explain his withholding of approval, or love, or whatever, from me over that period of time, “Well, I know you had your doubts about me for a long time.” And I’m thinking, “Boy, talk about projection! I was sold on you from the minute we met.” But that was okay. The point was, as I worked on the Elvis biography, and I interviewed Sam a good number of times and came to know him better. I would say during that time, we became friendly, not friends exactly, but friendly, friendlier. Then during that time period, Knox and I began to talk to him about doing the documentary. Which is something he wanted more than anything in the world, but to which he kept saying no for 6 or 7 years—
Robert Birnbaum:He wanted to do it, but he said, no?
Peter Guralnick:He said, no. I came to realize when we finally did it, the reason that I think he said no, was because he was so committed, with any project that he involved himself in, there was just no holding back. Shooting the documentary meant three, four months of doing nothing but that. I think that’s what he was reluctant to commit himself to. There was no drinking, there was nothing but the project. To some extent it involved an extremely challenging attempt at reigning himself in, which he wasn’t altogether successful at. There was no attempt to influence the outcome – I mean, he was disappointed that his nephew, Phillip Darby, wasn’t in it, because Phillip had been so instrumental in setting everything up in Florence, and he did a great interview, too. But other than that, there may have been some things he didn’t like about the show, but there was never any issue.
Robert Birnbaum:Was he being interviewed by other people when he came back into public life after ’79?
Peter Guralnick:Totally.
Robert Birnbaum:What was your sense of those conversations, was he as frank and honest with them, with everybody as with you?
Peter Guralnick::I think so. And, you know, the thing was, in the aftermath of doing the documentary. I think that’s when we really became good friends. I mean, you know, everything operates on the eleemosynary principle
Robert Birnbaum:Which principle?
Peter Guralnick:Eleemosynary. It’s my father’s favorite word, my father is 99 now, and he always used the word, ‘eleemosynary’ from the time I was a kid, but at the age of 90 he came to feel he had been misusing it all those years. But I’m going to stick to the way he always meant it.
Robert Birnbaum:What does it mean?
Peter Guralnick: It’s doing well by doing good.
Robert Birnbaum: [inaudible 00:44:02].
Peter Kind of, I guess so. It’s why Sam for example, I don’t think I used the word in the book – I’m sure I didn’t – but when Sam was trying to persuade Jules Bihari, the oldest of the Bihari brothers, who had Modern Records, and then Leonard Chess, too, that they had to pay the black acts, and pay them well – they had to pay them for their songs as well as their performance, the argument that he used was that it was only by paying them, by recognizing their worth financially, as well as in the respect that they accorded them, that they would give the artist a sense of true self-worth, self-empowerment and get out of the artist the best that he or she had to offer. And, in the process, sell more records.
Robert Birnbaum: Can we talk a little bit about post-racial music. There was a Viagra commercial or Cialis that had a Howlin Wolf song behind it.
Peter Guralnick:Yeah, right. Elvis, too.
Robert Birnbaum:To me that’s astounding.
Peter Guralnick: One of the great benefits of having Tivo, or I guess any DVR, but I’m sticking with Tivo, is not seeing the ads. But really what we’re talking about here is the ultimate commercialization, or Disneyification, or commodification of – well, of everything. Everything is just grist for the mill – the mill, I guess, being the marketplace, the infomill, the way in which we are distracted, or distract ourselves – from what? I mean, it doesn’t matter if it’s Beethoven or Picasso or Howlin’ Wolf – it just comes down to trivialization, it reduces everything to the ironic wink. It denigrates the whole idea of intrinsic worth.
Robert Birnbaum:I think we’re past that, I think I’ve told you it’s past that.
Peter Guralnick:We’re way past it.
Robert Birnbaum:Right, but I do always think of when I hear that. I remember hearing a Charlie Mingus, “Goodbye Pork Pie,” in a Volkswagen commercial. My first thought was, I tried to imagine the meeting, the creative meeting, “Oh, wait what kind of music, what are we going to do here?” Then some 25 year old, who just discovered Charlie Mingus goes, “Why don’t we play this,” and they go, “Yeah, that’s hip.” Without just even acknowledging that this guy was a masterful musician, that he created some of the best music of our time. Just throw it in behind a Volkswagen ad.
We’ve got to assume the commercials are about making people stupid anyway.
Peter Guralnick: Oh, I don’t know, I’m not just talking about commercials – really you’re talking about capitalism, you’re talking about the commodification of everything. But, you know, I’m not trying to offer any great judgments on this. I mean, I’m not the arbiter of taste. To tell you the truth, the first time this started happening on TV, I’ve got to admit I was kind of thrilled. I thought, “Wow, that’s incredible” – man, to see Wolf’s image in a Levis ad, or to hear him on a soundtrack, even if it was the soundtrack for a commercial, I thought, “Wow, that’s incredible!” because it seemed in a way, I know this is really silly, it seemed like he was being embraced by mainstream culture. But, I’ve gotten over that.
Robert Birnbaum:If it was being embraced, his records, his recordings would be sold out and there would be docudramas about his life. But getting back to Sam Phillips, what I wonder about is, his goal, his mission, or his hope was that this music would drop the barriers between races –
Peter Guralnick: At the end of his life he was saying, he believed that music had the power to stop wars. I think that this would be a further extension of this vision that he had, one that I wish were the case. I can’t say that I altogether endorse it, that I can see it altogether. Wish I could.
Robert Birnbaum:Music’s always been a powerful force in my life. I’m always listening to music, there are times when it takes me to places that nothing else does, so I think it’s probable. But, I don’t see that, maybe for a lot of people some music sometimes does that, but I don’t know that I see music as the cleansing elevating force. What I wanted to say was, this notion that there’s divide between white people and black people on music, that never made sense to me. I guess what the music corporations didn’t get was that there was always an audience.
Peter Guralnick:There was always a crossover too. If Jimmie Rodgers is the father of country music and is in essence a blues singer. There’s a certain irony in that, isn’t there? I mean, crossover always existed, but it was like segregation being the law of the land –I mean, it may have been the law, but in fact it was a total denial, an attempt to deny the way that things actually were. That in the South in particular blacks and whites were living cheek by jowl, that you have a history of mixed race that goes back forever, and that the majoritarian culture never was willing to acknowledge, from slavery on.
Robert Birnbaum;Plus, I’m sure a lot of white people, for their entertainment went to backwoods juke joints.,
Peter Guralnick:I don’t think so.
Robert Birnbaum:You see it in the movies every once and awhile, some white kids end up at some black ….
Peter Guralnick:This would be really extraordinary. I don’t think Howlin Wolf and B.B. King saw too many white kids. The one thing I’d say is that you can’t dismiss the historical context, the fact that black and white music were separated commercially, in the way that they were sold, in the way that they were accounted, right up until the advent of Rock and Roll
Robert Birnbaum:The advent of ‘rock and roll ‘ coincided with the advent of teenagism.
Peter Guralnick: This is the way it’s come to be seen.
Robert Birnbaum:Maybe that’s retrospective.
Peter Guralnick:I’m not convinced that that’s actually what it was. I mean, Ray Charles was not a teen artist, but he was very accessible artist, as well as being a very profound artist, just like Louis Jordan in a much slyer, more ironic way before him (and he was one of the few who actually reached a pop audience, like the Ink Spots, or the Golden Gate Quartet, I suppose, in the ‘40s). I’m not sure it had anything to do with the teen audience, their popularity, they were looking to be popular artists like Frank Sinatra, at first on the r&b charts, but then when the charts really opened up, on the pop charts, too.
Robert Birnbaum:Do you know the story of Ray Charles going to, playing Birmingham Alabama. He had a white Jewish guitar player. Do you know the story, it’s in the, “The Wrecking Crew,” the book[11] ? There’s a white Jewish guy whose in the Wrecking Crew, but Ray Charles liked him so much he hired him for his band. They’re playing a gig in Birmingham, the State Troopers are in front of the venue, where they’re unloading. They get on the bus and they’re looking and they see this white guy.This guy starts speaking pseudo-Spanish. So it was okay if he was Spanish.
Peter Guralnick: I hope with curly hair.The point was that, the music had the potential to break down barriers all along. And what Sam foresaw, was that the power of the music, the scope of the music, just the grandeur of the music would break down those artificial categories. As it turned out, it didn’t happen exactly the way the he foresaw it, but it did in effect happen. Not because of Sam alone, or Elvis either, obviously, it was something that was in the air, to which they contributed enormously.
Robert Birnbaum:Why do people want to say that Rocket 88, was the first Rock and Roll song?
Peter Guralnick:I think it probably goes back to Paul Ackerman, the editor of Billboard, as far as I can tell he was calling it the first rock ‘n’ roll record early on, maybe as early as 1956-57. I mean, really, you could point to “Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Strange Things Happening” just as well. But if you’re talking about “Rocket 88,” basically, I think it’s because of the propulsiveness of the rhythm, because of the subject, maybe it was because of the lead guitar and the sound that was coming out of that guitar as a result of the amp being busted. (To Sam, that was an original sound.) To me it just seems to capture the spirit of the age, in its rawness, its exuberance, its brashly optimistic post-war mood. But again, I don’t know that it was aimed at the teen market at all when it first came out. In retrospect, it came to fit the definition of teenage music that was imposed on rock ‘n’ roll – as much as a commercial label, a marketing tool, as anything else. And in a way I think that was the least important part. I mean, think of someone like Fats Domino – what makes him a teen artist? I don’t think he was. He was a blues singer, he was a rhythm and blues singer, he was a pop singer. I mean, to begin with, he was a huge R&B star, and as a Rock and Roller he became a huge pop star, with a uniquely lovable appeal.
Robert Birnbaum:Are we seeing a eternal return with the adoption of Rap music by white kids? Or, identification with?
Peter Guralnick:
Peter Guralnick: Oh, I suppose so – but that’s always been true. There’s always been an exchange of cultures, ever since the invention of the radio and the phonograph, ever since you had these tools for mass dissemination. I mean, there are no more purely isolated cultures, although there are certainly regional strains. I remember, one time David Evans took me to see R.L. Burnside at his home, it seemed like it was somewhere out in the woods, somewhere around Coldwater or Holly Springs, Mississippi. And he just rolled back the rug, took out all the furniture, and people came and danced to this incredible, driving music – and it was all R.L. Burnside and his sons. It was original, as Sam might have said. But even in this isolated situation, the music you heard was heavily tied to the commercial music R.L. Burnside grew up with – I mean, it wasn’t isolated at all. The point is he’s playing music that actually is tied directly to Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, but he’s not impervious to other influences, too. Nobody is. When I talked to Howlin Wolf and I said, “Where did you get your howl from?” he says, “Jimmie Rodgers.” I’m writing down “Tommy Johnson,” or I’m thinking, “Mississippi Sheiks,” and he’s saying, “Jimmie Rodgers” – you, know, the Singing Brakeman, the “father of country music.” He was very insistent on it. So you never know. I mean, you have somebody like, Bobby “Blue” Bland, being equally influenced by the sermons of Aretha’s father, the Reverend C.L. Franklin, and Perry Como. Cultural theft is such a misunderstanding in so many ways, because you have cultural exchange going on all the time – in all directions. If you’re talking about monetary theft, there you’re describing capitalism and to some extent, you’re talking about the theft of what they earned from people who simply don’t know contractual language, the language of business, both blacks and whites, blacks more so certainly on a broad societal basis, but there’s no question that in the music business hillbilly artists, kids, neophytes of every sort have been just as disadvantaged and stolen from on that basis. To get past that, you might have to overthrow the whole capitalist system.
Robert Birnbaum:I worked in record stores. I worked for an independent record promoter in Chicago for a couple of years. I worked for a record company. My sense of it always was, it was one of the filthiest, most corrupt businesses, I couldn’t think of anything more corrupt. Maybe the movies with the Hollywood bookkeeping system…
Peter Guralnick:I would argue that if you’ve worked in other areas of business.
Robert Birnbaum:They were just as dirty?
Peter Guralnick:Many of them, sure. My father who has been a physician all his life and at 99 is still fighting for a better system, a single payer system, a system that puts the patient at the center of the treatment, rather than on the sidelines. I’m not saying he would endorse this view – but I think you could find the same kind of financial manipulation within the medical field. Look at all the doctors who are called to order, or called up on their overcharging, on their misuse of the system. I feel like when there’s a profit motive, and it is in essence the primary one, it will tend to misplace a certain sense of priorities
Robert Birnbaum:I agree with you, but I think what I’ve noticed is that there were less regulation of the systems, so that for instance if you are an independent distributor and you wanted to get a record played, boxes of records would go out your back door over to the radio station.
Peter Guralnick:It was less regulated in a sense, but surely after the financial crisis of 2007-2008, how much more regulated….
Robert Birnbaum:By regulation I don’t mean that kind of regulation. I just mean there wasn’t that much book keeping, loosey-goosey, expense accounts were pretty. When I worked for a record company people, my colleague promotion men. —when they went to a conferences or prom tours they would charge watches to their hotel room.
Peter Guralnick:I’m not arguing for them, or for that system. I’m only saying, how many more millions were squandered in similar ways, but magnified beyond imagination, on Wall Street, by the whole financial system –
Robert Birnbaum:In the main I would agree with you. If there’s a profit motive, your contractor’s going to try and rip you off, it’s not even that it’s ripping off. They understand the game is to maximize whatever money they can and if they have to gain that system. That’s legitimate really.
Peter Guralnick:All my life, this is from the example of my father and my grandfather, I’ve tried to find people that I can work with on a handshake basis. Which would be everybody from Michael Pietsch, down to the plumber or the carpenter or the electrician. Whom I value as highly as anybody. I’m looking for those people, people like that, and I’m looking to act that way myself.
Robert Birnbaum:What I’m hearing and what I’m sensing, is that your father and your grandfather were people who actually lived by certain moral imperatives —that this was part of their conversation, their approach to life.
Peter Guralnick: It was always part of the conversation. It was always – not the subtext, it was the conversation itself.
Robert Birnbaum:Which is glaringly missing from everyday life.
Peter Guralnick: It’s the conversation I always tried to have with my kids. It’s the conversation I try, however limited it may be, that I try to have with my grandchildren and that my kids have with their children. I’m not trying to prescribe anything for anybody else, but to me, I don’t know anything else. I don’t know how people can be led to vote. You just want people to be able to think for themselves.
Robert Birnbaum:What is that Jewish maxim, “You save a life, you save a universe.” Something like that. That’s, I think ,the way it is. We have to end this, but I think we should talk again and maybe I’ll take a drive up to Newburyport when the weather is nice. I usually don’t even leave my zip code , but I could take a drive up north. Anyway, this was enjoyable.
Peter Guralnick:I feel like I misled you, I took you down too many divergent pathways.
Robert Birnbaum:That’s what a conversation is,isn’t it? Well, thank you.
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ENDNOTES
* Dream Boogie is also a poem by Langston Hughes which he reads here
“Stanley McCormick, youngest son of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper and founder of what was to become International Harvester, was confined for most of his adult life on a grand estate not far from where I now live. Shortly after his marriage to Katherine Dexter, a socialite from Boston (and the first female graduate in the biological sciences from M.I.T.), he suffered a mental breakdown that manifested itself in extreme hostility toward women, his wife in particular. He was diagnosed as a “schizophrenic sexual maniac,” and locked away in Riven Rock, the family estate. Katherine nonetheless remained married to him all his life and never stopped looking for a cure to his condition. What many readers have found interesting here is that the most outlandish developments, like those in The Road to Wellville, adhere very closely to reported facts, proving once again that pure invention is no match for the truly bizarre and sad ways in which we organize our lives. That said, this is a love story, grand, depressing, and, I hope, ultimately touching. It is also morbidly funny.”
11) The Wrecking Crew The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Best-Kept Secretby Kent Hartman
“In Los Angeles in 1960s-70s, if you wanted to record a chart-topping track or album, you called in the crack session musicians collectively known as the Wrecking Crew. Consisting of artists unknown outside the music industry, like drummer Hal Blaine and bass player Carol Kaye, as well as those who would go on to recording fame of their own, such as Glenn Campbell and Leon Russell, the Wrecking Crew was the West Coast’s cream of the crop of session players, backing top-notch hit makers Phil Spector, Frank Sinatra, the Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, and many more. Hartman (marketing, Portland State Univ.), who has worked with many well-known recording artists including Hall & Oates, Three Dog Night, and Lyle Lovett, tells the group’s definitive story with a music industry insider’s insight and enthusiasm. The only other work on these behind-the-scenes pros is Blaine’s Hal Blaine and the Wrecking Crew, which is more narrowly focused on the experiences of the stalwart drummer. Verdict: Recommended for readers interested in popular music and the music industry, particularly West Coast pop and classic rock.” ―Library Journal
There is also a documentary called the Wrecking Crew. Here’s the trailer
Isn’t anyone sick of the ceaseless shit-stream of lists of ‘best’, ‘hottest’, ‘coolest’ ‘781 must- projectile hurled into the ether by an ever growing horde of people with opinions, one of which is that their opinion will be valuable to the rest of the world? Really, how many of these inventories qualify as even useful.
If however you have an interest these predictable journalistic devices the literary website Large Hearted Boy offers an assiduously collected list of lists (which it has been offering annually for eight years)
And, so it was a pleasure and a relief to encounter that literary flower of Cambridge, Katherine Powers’s astute criterion —as in Favorite Books of 2015. In keeping with the spirit of Ms Power’s offering, I canvassed a number of friends and acquaintances for news of their own favorites of 2015*
George Scialabba
One of the great unheralded (except in Cambridge Massachusetts) English speaking public intellectuals.Here’s his website. And here is George’s psychiatric (diagnosis: depression) medical record as published in the Baffler. And of course you will want to read my conversation with George at this very journal.*
The Demise of Virtue in a Virtual America by David Bosworth
David Bosworth, The Demise of Virtue in a Virtual Age
The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford
Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
The Age of Acquiescence by Steve Fraser
Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence
Love Hotel by Jane Unrue
Jane Unrue, Love Hotel
What Kind of Creatures Are We? by Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky, What Kind of Creatures Are We?
*And keep an eye out for a new collection from that guy with the funny Wop name … George Scialabba, I think … called Low Dishonest Decades: Essays and Reviews, 1980-2015, coming in February from Pressed Wafer.
Howard Dinin
If Howard is not a man for all seasons, he certainly is one for many. A skilled photographer, gourmand and cook, he is also a man of many carefully chosen words. But most importantly he is a great and generous friend, advisor and IT consultant. Howard is working on a project ( that I am not at liberty to discuss) which should I will bring to your attention in the fullness of time.Stay tuned.
I operate on the presumption, long since proven to my satisfaction, that any book worth reading, whatever the subject, is always about something greater than itself—usually falling under the rubric of either cosmology, epistemology, or ontology.
Loathe as I am to admit to reading fiction any longer, accepting the risk of appearing deliberately to be hipper than thou by doing so, the fact is, always admitted sheepishly, that I do read fiction. But I read a great deal of all else of the genera of literary forms. And by literary, I hasten to add, I don’t mean any snot-nosed distinction between what is always someone else’s notion of what is high and what is low; rather it may be what is words alone, or what is words accompanied, like a piece of chamber music, by other sensory instruments, usually sounds and images, but what you will when you come right down to it.
Here’s what amounts to a potpourri of the stack being in descending order from the current date, as it has accumulated. You may conclude that I have read at least some of each, and completed one or another, if not recently, then at least long enough ago that it was time for another intimate re-acquaintance. If the book looks worn or misshapen, it’s for a reason.
I’ve quickly snapped the covers for Brother Birnbaum as I was headed out the door, laden with luggage and food and a sack or two filled with the impedimenta of a gadgeteer/flaneur/photographe on holiday.
The physical books depicted will have to wait for my return, but not a small number are also in residence in e-form on a tablet which rarely leaves my possession.
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa
Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa
Photography by Ian Jeffrey
Photography by Ian Jeffrey
The Other Paris by Luc Sante
The Other Paris by Luc Sante
Two Towns in Provence by MFK Fisher
Two Towns in Provence by MFK Fisher
Portraits by John Berger
Portraits by John Berger
The Difficulty of Being a Dog by Roger Grenier
The Difficulty of Being a Dog by Roger Grenier
Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir by Truman Capote
Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir by Truman Capote
Zone: Selected Poems by Guilluame Apollinaire
Zone: Selected Poems by Guilluame Apollinaire
Submission by Michel Houellebecq
Submission by Michel Houellebecq
The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
FIN
Paul Buhle.
As is frequently the case I became aware of, and filled in, a large gap in my cultural literacy, as I chanced to become aware of Paul Buhle— that happenstance stemming from noting his collaboration with Howard Zinn to create A People’s History of American Empire— a graphic recapitulation of Zinn’s magnum opus.
A People’s History of American Empire by Howard Zinn and Paul Buhle
From that useful discovery I found out that Buhle is a former member of the sixties era radical organization Students for a Democratic Society and a devotee of Marxist and cricket scholar, CLR James. He is the author/editor of nearly thirty books, among them: Images of American Radicalism, Marxism in the United States, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America’s Favorite Movies, The Encyclopedia of the American Left, The Immigrant Left in the United States, The New Left Revisited,Insurgent Images: The Agitprop Murals of Mike Alewitz,From the Lower Eastside to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture. Che Guevara, a Graphic Biography, Wobblies! A Graphic history of the Industrial Workers of the World Jews and American Comics and Bohemians. Paul was kind enough to take the time to offer some suggestions…
Paul Buhle
Odd Angles of Literary 2015
These are some of the favorites that would otherwise hide themselves under my desk or in the attic. They deserve readers.
Crime Does Not Pay by OR: Dark Horse Books,
Crime Does Not Pay, Volume 4. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, from 2013 first edition. 217pp, color, $49.99.
These are the pleasures of sin, straight out of the middle to later 1940s as War Comics lose their charm and crime comics, with mobsters, molls (in “headlight” tight sweaters) and assorted victims get plugged full of lead thanks to this best seller of the era. Most oddly, publisher Lev Gleason had been a near-communist supporter of the Spanish Civil War’s Abe Lincoln Battalion, publisher of a short-lived slick lefty magazine and of a more successful knockoff of Reader’s Digest. He found his faithful readers in bloodthirsty teenagers. Actually the stories are lively and the art by some of the best, including bizarre figures like Bob Wood, alcoholic and murderer, just like his characters.
La Lucha Drawn and Written by Joe Sack,
La Lucha: the Story of :Lucha Castro and Human Rights in Mexico. Drawn and Written by Joe Sack, edited by Adam Shapiro, with a Preface by Lucha Castro. New York and London: Verso, 2015,96p, $16.95.
A Spanish Association for Human Rights project centering upon a true heroine in the world South of the Border, notably Chihuahua, more like the underworld where violence is a daily occurrence and violence against women. The art is soft-expressionist, suitable to murder and impunity from arrest, “disappearances” with no seeming resolution and heroic efforts at popular resistance. The happy ending promised US authorities by the Calderon government only brings more death and misery. Read, learn, wince.
Flashed: Sudden Stories in Comics and Prose. Edited by Josh Neufeld and Sari Wilson.
Flashed: Sudden Stories in Comics and Prose. Edited by Josh Neufeld and Sari Wilson. Indianapolis: Pressgang, 2016, $15?
This is one of the most unusual comics ever to find itself in my mailbox. Neufeld, an erstwhile collaborator with Harvey Pekar and acclaimed comic artist of post-flood New Orleans, joins editorial partner, novelist Sari Wilson, and many artistic-literary partners in trying to push fictional or semi-fictional prose and comic art against each other. A two-pager by Lynda Barry would, alone, make this book worth seeing. Perhaps the remainder is best seen as young people experimenting. I had difficulty following these brief and varied efforts, but appreciate the effort.##
Steve Fagin [photo: Robert Birnbaum]
Steve Fagin
Frankly I believe it should be sufficient to point out that Steve and I have been friends since high school in Chicago (Mather, Class of 1964). And that once a year Steve comes up to Boston from Manhattan and we visit Fenway Park. However, I do feel compelled to note he was a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego. His videos include The Machine That Killed Bad People, Zero Degrees Latitude, Virtual Play, Memorial Day (Observed), The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel and TropiCola which focused on contemporary Cuba. Also, he is the subject of the bookTalkin’ With Your Mouth Full: Conversations With the Videos of Steve Fagin.
Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full edited by Steve Fagin
A Noah’s Ark of 10 2015 favs
Theater
Phoebe Fox, Russell Tovey, Mark Strong, Nicola Walker, and Michael Gould star in Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, directed by Ivo van Hove
1) View From the Bridge @ the Lyceum
Van Hove does Miller
a super saturated rendition squeezes blood from a turnip of a play and reminds one that the over wrought , well done, can turn melodrama into great tragedy
A scene from Elevator Repair Service’s The Sound and The Fury
2) The Sound and Fury @ The Public theatre
Elevator Repair Service does Faulkner
Understanding , in certain cases , can be greatly overestimated. Being lost and confused only brings into focus the desperate ,hopeless idiocy of these terminally handicapped Faulkner babbling things .
Sports
1) Anderson defeats Murray 4th round of U.S. Open @ Armstrong Stadium
There is nothing better than the 4th round of the U.S. Open with upwards of 6 matches in a single venue . The intimate Armstrong Stadium with both temperature and humidity in the 90s is ectasy(SUMMER IN THE CITY)
2) Duel in the Sun,
deGrom outpitches Greinke as the first place Mets end Greinke’s 45 + scoreless innings streak and beat the Deserter Dodgers @ CitiField
LOVE,Love, love those pitchers
Movies
Films unlikely to win audience awards@ New York Film Festival
Film festivals have been kinda ruined by the audience award. The point of a festival should not be to pander but to challenge. I hate Sundance, I hate Sundance, I hate Sundance
J’taime Cet obscur objet du désir
!) Guy Madden’s Forbidden Room
2)Apichatpong Weerasethakul ‘s Cemetery of Splendour
Opera
More and less Kentridge
1)Kentridge’s Refuse the Hour at BAM
The first 21st century opera I have liked and liked it AND HOW. If forced to choose I liked the music by Phillip Miller better than the text and ART by Kendridge , but cannot squabble with the overall effect…WOW
2)Berg’s Lulu directed by Kentridge at the Met
Well, as I suspected I thought the Berg music , described by some “clever person “as Schoenberg and Mahler played at the same time, worked less well with the visuals of Kendridge than his spectacular version of Shostokovitch’s brilliant the Nose , but that was some hard act to follow. I’m sure many would squabble with my preference for Shostokovitch over Berg , but I think few would argue that Kentridge’s schtick works better with Shostokovitch than Berg
BOOKS
Sidewalks by Valerie Luselli’
1)Valerie Luselli’s Sidewalks , but not her rave reviewed The Story of My Teeth. I find Story of My Teeth derivative, but perhaps both books are and I just prefer the antecedents to her essays in Sidewalks? Put another way, Sidewalks feels like a book written by an old person, Teeth by someone very young.
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
2)The Leopard: A Novel by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
I kinda cheated on this because I put it on my list every year and by the by I defy you to tell me a better book movie combo that the di Lampedusa novel and the Visconti movie
Peter Guralnick If you ended up in this way station you would , at the least. be familiar with Guralnick’s seminal two-volume biographical essay on Elvis Presley. But me not being a Presley admirer I didn’t come to Peter’s work until his excellent exposition of Chicago musician Sam Cooke’s (“A Change is Gonna Come”)life in Dream Boogie. I reconnected with Peter in conversatio with him on his latest opus devoted to the life of rock and rill pioneer Sam Philips( Elvis Presley, Howling Wolf, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, BB King and more. Soon to see the light of day will be that conversation…
Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson
Hemingway’s Boat – Paul Hendrickson
The digression (always) rules. Like Tristram Shandy and Footsteps by Richard Holmes, this is to be cherished both for its cunning narrative strategy and for the firm truths that reside at its center.
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Lowland – Jhumpa Lahiri
Compact, emotionally and politically expansive, and broadly, tragically humanistic in the choices and resolutions that it tentatively offers.
The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary
The Horse’s Mouth – Joyce Cary
I’m not sure how many times I’ve read this, or seen the movie (written by, and starring, Alec Guinness), but I am savoring it all the more this time more for its Blakeian essence and unabashedly romantic celebration of freedom.
The Hollywood Trilogy by Don Carpenter
I had read a bunch of Don Carpenter novels, including The Class of ’49 and his celebrated down-and-out classic, Hard Rain Falling, but nothing prepared me for the rambunctiousness of these three novels. (Well, maybe his posthumously published Friday at Enrico’s…) I guess I should have paid more attention to his biography. I mean, he did write the script for Payday, starring the inimitable Rip Torn as Hank Williams?/Waylon Jennings? the ultimate archetype of a falling star.
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
A God in Ruins – Kate Atkinson
Sprightly, exploratory (better time-travel than The Man in the High Castle) but fundamentally rooted in the human equation, with deeply etched portraits that stay with you forever. Very much like her earlier Life After Life and her wonderful Jackson Brodie detective novels.
Dogs of Winter
by Kem Nunn
Mythic – and real. Great (melo) drama, probably the pinnacle of his surf-noir novels. Just as The Power of the Dog (what’s with all these dogs?) may be Don Winslow’s cartel peak. But in each case there’s so much more.
The Neapolitan Trilogy by Elena Ferrante
The Neapolitan Trilogy – Elena Ferrante
I haven’t gotten to the fourth yet, but I can’t wait. It’s as if the Patterson, New Jersey of William Carlos Williams had been transported to Naples.
Citizen Vince by Jess Walter
Citizen Vince – Jess Walter
Another great novel from a writer who defies categorization. Every one of his books is altogether different – every one is accomplished in its own right. (But start with Beautiful Ruins if you’re looking for sheer delight.)This is a re-read. I can’t believe how much – well, delight – I missed the first time around.
Three Junes by Julia Glass
Three Junes – Julia Glass
This was another re-read, I think prompted by her latest, And the Dark Sacred Night, and leading me back to all of her other interconnected books, with their thoughtful (and likeable) characters and depiction of a familiar and frequently interior world that you can go back and visit again and again.
Inherent Vice by P.T. Anderson
The Master by P.T. Anderson
Inherent Vice and The Master – P.T. Anderson
Like all of his films, great, detailed, and fundamentally uncategorizable literary landscapes. There Will Be Blood? Come on.
Carried Away by Alice Munro
Carried Away – Alice Munro
The tops. I read it every year. Every reading yields new levels of meaning and mystery. I can think of no one who can suggest all the manifold and contradictory dimensions of a world (in a short story!) like Alice Munro.
Richard Hoffman Although I think I was a Facebook friend of Richard’s I did not meet the poet/essayist/college mentor/social activist until we sat together before, during and after attending Professor Jabari Assim’s
surreal court hearing for a preposterous traffic violation (look it up in the Boston area newspapers) in my current hometown of Newton, Massachusetts. As with Peter Guralnick, you can look forward a lengthy unexpurgated conversation between 2 alta kackers (me and Richard). Look out, World.
You fill find here a recent essay by Richard Hoffman.
I’m going to chicken out when it comes to contemporaries whom I know, and especially colleagues; if I missed somebody I’d feel bad. Between my students’ writing, the reading I do for my literature classes, the work of my colleagues I try to stay up with, contest judging, reading ARCs for possible blurbs, there’s time for only a few of the growing stack next to my chair. However, among those who made it from that stack to a more permanent berth on my shelves are the following:
Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon
Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon. This hybrid of memoir and cultural commentary was recommended to me by bookseller Matt Pieknik when I read at McNally Jackson in NYC. He had read my Love & Fury and thought that Eribon and I were covering similar ground. He was right. I love the book because he isn’t afraid to throw over, revise, outgrow, his former thinking. He is a biographer of Foucault, a respected French avante-intellectual, but with the death of his father the long bungee cord of his parentage pulls him back to Reims and his working class family. He sifts through complex questions of loyalty and identity and the political consequences of the left’s near abandonment of working people. It’s just a terrific book.
Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shariar Mandanipour.
Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shariar Mandanipour. I am acquianted with Mandanipour through PEN New England. (He’s teaching now at Tufts.) This is what it is like to live as a literary person under the boot of authoritarian censors. The thing is, this book is a hoot! It’s a novel, like Catch-22, that renders its condemnations by illuminating not merely the cruelty of such a system, but its utter absurdity, all the while keeping in view the tragic price people must pay for resisting. A brilliant, inventive, laugh your ass off and get scared at the same time book.
The Violence of Organized Forgetting by Henry A. Giroux
The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine by Henry A. Giroux. For a deep cultural, economic, and political analysis of our current inability to act in our own best interests, Giroux has no equal. Maybe being Canadian helps him; maybe he can see the mess clearly by looking over the backyard fence. People may be familiar with him in his role as a political commentator on the web at Truthout.
The Last Interview: James Baldwin
The Last Interview: James Baldwin. Melville House Publishing brought together four substantial interviews with Baldwin here, including his last, with Quincy Troupe in France in 1987, the year Baldwin died. I think it is amazing how much Baldwin in conversation sounds like Baldwin in his essays: his voice is his voice. It makes me wonder how writing and speaking influence one another throughout a writer’s life. There’s clearly some kind of feedback loop. Both his talk and his essays are a perfect balance of the spontaneous and the carefully considered. His presence, his integrity, his anger, warmth, humor, and defiant wholeness knock me out. It’s something to aspire to, I can tell you that.
Something Crosses My Mind by Wang Xiaoni
I read a lot of poetry, but I know a lot of poets and as I said above, I’ll not name any of my friends or colleagues. Maybe I’ll stick to work in translation. One book I’ve enjoyed immensely is called Something Crosses My Mind by the contemporary Chinese poet Wang Xiaoni, translated by Eleanor Goodman. She writes of contemporary China in a way that de-exoticizes it for a western reader, there is enough of the observational (think Frank O’Hara,) the classical, and the epigrammatic, plus something that is the poet’s own, to make this a book of poems to read slowly, each one several times, for their resonance, their beauty, and their ability to reveal themselves a bit more with each reading.
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Sobbing Superpower by Tadeusz Rozewicz
Light Everywhere by Cees Nooteboom
Each Day Catches Fire by Bitite Vinklers.
I’ve also enjoyed reading the selected poems of the Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz, Sobbing Superpower; Light Everywhere by the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, who is known more as a novelist in the west (translated by Joanna Trzeciak), and I’ve just finished a remarkable little book of poems by the Latvian poet Imants Ziedonis, Each Day Catches Fire, translated by Bitite Vinklers. I became aware of this poet when I read on a bill with Vinklers for The Manhattan Review. He is unique in that he writes, literally, fabulous poems, but ones that always begin and end in the real world. Many of his poems are short bursts of prose, and many of them manage to talk about writing under censorship without, of course, writing about living under censorship. More than that though, they are a delight. In one poem he writes, “Along with the moths tonight, love runs into the windowpane./ (‘Turn off the light, or we’ll have no peace.’)”
(Citizen 7083921848)
Thomas Wickersham Thomas is the event maestro at the hallowed independent bookstore, Brookline Booksmith.I came to know of him through his mother Joan who mentioned him in a conversation I had with her upon the occasion of her wonderful story collection,The News from Spain. Thomas has been astute enough to invite me to chat with David Gates and Don Winslow during their appearances at Booksmith last summer.
Below are nine of my favorite books published or reissued in 2015 and a tenth bonus pick from the past. The books are in no particular order and the list could change tomorrow.
The Cartel by Don Winslow
I had impossibly high hopes for this sequel to one of my all-time-favorites, The Power of the Dog. Winslow miraculously delivered. Together, these two books are a stunning documentation of the 40+ year history of the Mexican-American drug conflict. Injected with political urgency while while remaining a page-turning thriller, The Cartel is epic in scope, yet heartbreakingly intimate. This is not a crime novel- it is a tale of war.
The Whites by Harry Brandt
Richard Price (writing as Harry Brandt)- The Whites
I draw a distinction between mysteries with a police protagonist and “cop novels.” While there is a mystery at its heart, The Whites ranks with Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choirboys and Kent Anderson’s Night Dogs as one of the finest cop novels I’ve ever read. Its stark naturalistic world of Night Watch policing is a living breathing nightmare land. Cops guzzle energy drinks and take selfies with murder victims. Evil is not the enemy so much as the absurdity of the streets.
GBH by Ted Lewis
Ted Lewis- GBH (Originally published in the U.K. in 1980. First U.S. printing 2015.)
I read GBH exactly one year ago, almost to the day, and it has haunted me since. It is the story of a gangster in hiding. There are no nice people in this book. There are no happy endings. And yet, there is an intoxicating quality to the alternating storylines of terror and gloom. A cold sheen of glamor clings to the pervasive danger.
Fat City by Leonard Gardner
Leonard Gardner- Fat City (Originally published in 1970, but reissued by NYRB in 2015)
Nominated for the National Book Award against Slaughterhouse Five and Them when it was first released in 1970, Fat City was woefully out-of-print for years. Nominally a boxing novel, it’s truly a book about desperation and hope. Again and again it captures the disconcerting emotions you didn’t realize you had. The best prose I read all year
The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America by Colin Quinn
Colin Quinn- The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America
Based on his experiences growing up in ethnically-mixed Brooklyn, Colin Quinn tells the history of New York City through personal stories rich with laughs and rife with self-effacing humiliations. The Coloring Book is a memoir of one comedian’s formation, a celebration of what makes us different, and an ode to the life and death of American cities.
Peter Swanson- The Kind Worth Killing
A diabolically twisted web of double crosses that echoes Strangers on a Train. Sinister, but packed with sly irony, it is the most queasily enjoyable and ingeniously plotted thriller I read all year.
Those We Left Behind by Stuart Neville
Stuart Neville- Those We Left Behind
Stuart Neville has become a master at tackling psychological trauma. As an avid reader of crime fiction I am aware of my complicity in what is essentially violence for entertainment. For me, the “cozies” (The Kitty Who Painted a Poisoned Pie at the Beach) are in worse taste than graphically realistic police procedurals. Stuart Neville is by no means preachy or dry, but he doesn’t let you forget the cost of violence on victims. Reading Neville is the last time that a book literally made me miss my train stop.
Gang of Lovers by Massimo Carlotto
Massimo Carlotto- Gang of Lovers
Massimo Carlotto is my favorite writer going for straight crime fiction. His Alligator series echoes many of the tropes of modern Private Eye novels. You have the melancholy music-loving heavy-drinking detective aided by his two friends: the techie and the honorable triggerman. Yet there is still a jarring unpredictability and lack of morality to the books, no doubt greatly influenced by Carlotto’s own wrongful imprisonment for murder. The Alligator series is a fine place to start (though Gang of Lovers is a direct sequel of sorts to Bandit Love), but The Goodbye Kiss and At the End of a Dull Day are the Carlotto masterpieces.
A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar-
Lavie Tidhar- A Man Lies Dreaming (comes out in March 2016 in the U.S. but already released in Britain)
A Man Lies Dreaming is the most audacious perversion of the private eye novel ever written. Alternate history, revenge fantasy, or sorrowful daydream; each element of this book brilliantly forms a whole as mysterious for its structure as its plot. Approach it with as little foreknowledge as possible and never forget.
The Sluts by Dennis Cooper-
Bonus: Dennis Cooper- The Sluts (published in 2004, but on this list as the only book in 2015 that I read in one night)
* editor’s note—I forswore heavy-handed editing and graphic consistency, except to attempt to eliminate most ,if not all, graphic and grammatical infelicities. To paraphrase Voltaire, “Perfection is the Enemy of the Good.” And m st the time the Good is the best that I can do.
My first record purchase was a 45 rpm single by young hot singing sensation known as Elvis Presley, circa 1956. I didn’t buy another record until 1960 — The Cannonball Adderly Quintet, Live in San Francisco. And I now believe that moment marks the beginning of my intense attachment, the almost seamless integration of music and sound into my perception of the world. Such was my commitment to listening to music that I did not for a long time interest myself (much) in the back stories and inside baseball stuff of the music culture and business. In fact, despite being both an omnivorous reader and having an appreciation of a wide swath go musical genres and also having spent a years of living a dimly mean spirited year as a local record promotion guy in Chicago, up until recently the only books I have read about music are David Hadju’s brilliant bio of Billy Strayhorn ,his book about early Bob Dylan and friends, Dylan’s loopy but compelling Chronicles,Crystal Zevon’s well executed oral biography of Warren and Peter Guralnick’s excellent profile of Sam Cooke, and a sadly under appreciated survey of soul music Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music
by Arthur Kempton, and A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen by Liel Leibovitz.
These days I have developed a taste for music history, especially American Regional music. Coincidentally in the last few years the quality of such narratives seems to have upgraded from the hagiographic and fan’s notes to deeper and more telling stories. A few years ago the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown gleaned one of the better stories to come out of the Motown music machine. In addition to give much deserved attention to the previously unheralded studio cats, Motown founder Berry Gordy’s commercial genius was credibly exhibited.
A couple of years back the Oscar winning documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom chronicled the lives of a few of great voices Darlene Love, Judith Hill, Merry Clayton, Lisa Fischer, Táta Vega, Jo Lawry and a few more, who sang back up both for super star bands and a large cache of hit records.
The Wrecking Crew by Kent Hartman
As a kind of bookend to the above mentioned Motown story, Kent Hartman’s The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Best-Kept Secret,filled in a vital piece of music history, putting the spotlight on a small cadre of West Coast studio musicians aka The Wrecking Crew reputedly known in the record business as “the secret weapons behind the top recording stars— included Glen Campbell, Leon Russell, guitarist Tommy Tedesco,drummer Hal Blaine,keyboardist Larry Knechtel as well and non-pareil bassist, Carol Kaye.
Legendary session bassist Carol Kaye
The hit records to which these players contributed, not to mention in some cause created — from Derek & the Dominoes Layla, Simon and Garfunkle’s Bridge Over Troubled Water virtually all the Beach Boys Records to Frank Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night are a greatest hits discography of the 60’s and 70’s. Hartman’s diligence is evident from the wealth of first person citations and collection of engaging anecdotes. M<y favorite is the story of how Ray Charles appearing in segregated Birmingham Alabama managed to pass off his Jewish guitar player.
Currently there is a serviceable documentary, The Wrecking Crew in the theaters produced and directed by Denny Tedesco, son of Tommy Tedesco. A bit to hagiographic for my tastes, it does give you some visuals for Hartman’s narrative.
A most transcendental music story is gracefully told in a lovely film ,Muscle Shoals, about that legendary, magical recording venue deep in backwater Muscle Shoals, Alabama and the extraordinary assemblage of solid gold musicians (Barry Beckett on keyboards, Roger Hawkins on drums, Jimmy Johnson on guitar, and David Hood) that Fame Studios founder Rick Hall attracted, nurtured, shepherded and goaded. Its equal parts biography, travelogue, anthropological study, business gossip and visual feast.
The short interviews and commentary by Etta James,Bono, Keith Richards, Stevie Winwood, Aretha, Wilson Pickett, Rich Hall, Jerry Wexler, Greg Allman and more are illuminating —almost all sharing a mystical view of what made Muscle Shoals a very special place. Alicia Keyes ends the film with a competent performance/ contemporary recording of Bob Dylan’s beautiful gospel song “Pressing On,” backed by the Swampers, Fame’s original session band— an understandable if miscast attempt to bridge the history to the present.
Post Script
Poster for the film “Get on Up”
I first saw James Brown live at the Regal Theater in Chicago in 1966 and continued listening to him through subsequent decades — by my tastes he never lost his infections groove. Brown put the soul into soul music and the biopic Get on Up with a jumping performance by veteran actor Chadwick Boseman (who gave a fine performance as Jackie Robinson in 42) makes a plausible and riveting
narrative whether you are or not inclined to give credence to the facts of Brown’s complicated life
As much as I love music I can count on one hand the number of books that I have read about music and musicians— David Hadju’s Lush Life, a brilliant biography of Billy Strayhorn, Crystal Zevon’s oral biography of her one time husband Warren Zevon, I’ll Sleep When I am Dead, Charles Mingus’s autobiography Beneath the Underdog and Peter Guralnick’s Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke and Arthur Kempton’s rhythm and blues devotional Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music.
Which not to say that I am oblivious of the books being published as I will display by pointing out three recent notable books—each shining a clear light on a different aspect of music.
One half of the famed song writing Rodgers and Hart, lyricist Lorenzo Hart is well accounted for in Gary Marmorstein’s A Ship Without A Sail: The Life of Lorenz Hart (Simon & Schuster). If you aren’t familiar with songs such as “Blue Moon, ” “Where or When, ” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Isn’t It Romantic?,” “My Romance,” “There’s a Small Hotel,” “Falling in Love with Love,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and much more you probably won’t care about the life of brilliant homosexual alcoholic who lived entire short life with his mother.
The Jazz Standards by Ted Gioia
Whatever defines a jazz “standard” jazz historian Ted Gioia (The History of Jazz) has selected 252 songs to The Jazz Standards A Guide to the Repertoire (Oxford University Press) on which to comment, including composer details and a listen guides that references about 2000 recordings.
David Ulin points out that
“to call “The Jazz Standards” a work of history, however, is to miss at least half the point; it is also a work of criticism, and Gioia is not afraid to offer pointed commentary…
…” What is the book, after all, if not an extended improvisation, beginning with its framing of the repertoire? Such a repertoire is fluid, and if in recent years it has undergone a “process of codification,” his approach can’t help but be subjective, defined by his experience and sensibility. To read “The Jazz Standards,” then, is not unlike listening to Gioia play his way through this music, sharing not just what he likes (and dislikes) but also what he knows.”
What the video that accompanies the Sonny Rollins’ version of “We Kissed in The Shadow” above, means or its connection with this great piece of music has me stumped but the Rollins track (From the LP East Broadway Rundown) is so evocative and mesmerizing I had to include it
Just as I was more simpatico with the Beat movement than much of its literature I found Punk Rock’s anarchical ethos and do it yourself values more interesting than most of the music it spawned. In any case,in Punk Rock: An Oral History (PM Press) John Robb, a punk rocker himself, collects about 150 interviews with seminal figures such as John Lydon, Lemmy, Siouxsie Sioux, Mick Jones, Chrissie Hynde, Malcolm McLaren, Henry Rollins, and Glen Matlock.Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren elucidates,
It was not necessarily a plan to play art colleges first and avoid the pub. I hated beer. And that’s all you got in those stinking pubs in Anglo-Saxon land. Art school preached a noble pursuit of failure. It was part of the legacy laid down by William Morris: art for art’s sake. which we attempted to create and indeed succeeded at one level. We made ugliness beautiful.
Punk Rock An Oral History by John Robb
Currently reading The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (Knopf)
I hadn’t thought of Aretha (need I use her surname?) for some time when I chanced to see that silly candy bar commercial where the notion of diva is bandied about— I think the message is that eating this confection in some way returns the consumer to a state of normalcy.
Then as such things happen Bob Herbert wrote a bittersweet appreciation of the soulful songstress which brought back vivid memories of stirring times long past. Also, he imparted the news that Aretha was “recovering nicely” from a surgery related to her pancreatic cancer. Sad news indeed.
But still, to be reminded of her glorious songbook and the voice Rolling Stone wrote was a “gift from God” was powerfully moving and I suspect ever so. Herbert quotes music lover and scribe Peter Guralnick, “Aretha staked out a claim for the ecstatic transcendence of the imagination.” Whatever that means it sounds true enough.
Watch Aretha perform this signature song Ain’t No Way, written by her sister Carolyn. “Ecstatic transcendence” starts to make sense…
![Peter Guralnick [photo: Robert Birnbaum]](https://ourmaninboston.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/s0455220.jpg?w=490&h=368)
![Peter Guralnick [photo: Robert Birnbaum]](https://ourmaninboston.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/s0465226.jpg?w=490&h=653)
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