I started listening to Turned Out a Punk, Damien Abraham's podcast, sometime this fall. An entire post should be written about the podcast but suffice to say, Brix Smith was one of the first guests that I wanted to hear. Her episode probably made me want to read this book. I'm very glad that I did. While it is not a perfect book and will not make the Best Books list, parts of it are so incredible that make it worthwhile. I could not agree with Abraham that it was the best book I had read that year. It was however, extremely entertaining and highly readable, at times. As a huge fan of the Fall going back about 14 years, it was a totally amazing experience. On both the podcast, and in this book, Brix references being classmates with Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis at Bennington College in the early 80's. She does not aim for the heights of The Goldfinch, but sometimes lapses into Ellis-styled prose. That is, her life could be one of his novels, particularly with the ending in the fashion industry. What she ends up doing is completely her own. It may not generally be as artful, but I personally found that I could identify with Brix very closely. We are all Brix Smith, or Brix Smith is all of us.
I re-listened to the episode today, and forgot the two other Bennington classmates she mentioned--Jonathan Lethem and Jill Eisenstadt. Apart from that there is not much else to mention--you can listen to the podcast yourself. I will note that Brix has one of most unique accents I have heard--British valley girl. She was born in L.A. and spent her childhood there, and splitting time between there and Chicago in her teen years. She now lives in England.
The stuff about Chicago is fantastic. On the podcast, Brix mentions that her first concert was at this outdoor venue outside of Chicago, where people have picnics, Rav-en-ia, where she saw the Carpenters and Neil Sedaka on a double bill. Having recently seen Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons with my family at Ravinia, I found it touching.
Most notably, there is the story of where and when she met Mark E. Smith:
"On Saturday 23 April 1983, Lisa and I paid the $6 ticket price and entered through the front doors of Cabaret Metro, 3730 North Clark Street." (144)
This was within a week of my birth, not very far away, so I have one more reason to feel connected to the band and this book.
Brix writes compelling stories through the first 75% of the book. In truth I lost some interest after she left the Fall, and it was briefly exciting when she rejoined for a couple years in the mid-90's. The opening of the book confused me--it's an account of her grandmother seemingly losing it behind the wheel and driving from the Disneyland parking lot through the main gates and into the park before plunging into the lagoon at the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride. I thought it was real, but Brix later reveals it to be a dream. I wonder how many other people have that reaction. It seems like it could have happened, because so much of the rest of her life has been crazy that anything seems possible. Her stories about her father are both hilarious and horrifying. There are so many things I would excerpt from this book it's not even funny. On that note, I should perhaps vault it into Best Books territory, but I think it is instructive to compare it to the other recent female rock musician memoirs that I've read.
If pressed, I have to say that it is better than both Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band and Carrie Brownstein's Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. Both are excellent books. All three of these books are fantastic and totally worth reading, but Brix's is the heaviest. To be sure, Kim Gordon's account of the dissolution of her relationship with her husband and bandmate, Thurston Moore, is the most powerful piece of writing in the bunch. This is not to say that Carrie Brownstein's account of the dissolution of her romantic relationship with bandmate Corin Tucker is weak. In fact, Brix's account of the dissolution of her relationship with husband and bandmate, Mark E. Smith, is the least evocative, in part due to the inscrutability of the man it involves. Now I love Mark E. Smith but this book definitely sheds some light on him in an unflattering fashion. It feels fair, though, because there are also moments of extreme vulnerability, humanity, and cuteness.
There are some parts of this book that are tough to read. Yet even during the most atrocious moment, Brix offers some levity and resists victimization. As I said, there are many quotable excerpts in this book, so I have to include one about Mark E. Smith that almost made me want to start crying:
"One night, a few months later, there was a knock at the front door of my apartment. I opened the door to find Mark E. Smith standing there. He was drunk and held a half-empty bottle of whiskey. He begged me to let him in, and was in a state. He told me he had made a mistake leaving me. I let him in and tried to calm him down. He asked if he could sleep over. He was emotional. I was torn. Part of me was happy he'd come to his senses and realised what he'd lost in leaving me. The other part of me was cold and shut down. After having experienced the attentions and kindness of other men, I was no longer attracted to him.
But still, I felt connected to him. That would never go away. He had been my soulmate. The songs we wrote together would forever be a testament to that. I allowed him to sleep over, in my bed. I made it patently clear he was not to touch me. As he lay next to me, I felt sad. The next morning, it would be years before I ever saw him again." (267-268)
The stories of the songs were surprising. It always seems like the Fall are singing about conspiracies or manifestos but in truth are just slices of life. For example, Brix writes about her sleeping problems and reliance on pills in "US 80s-90s":
"My mother's pills came in the prescription bottle with her name on it. When we landed in Boston, immigration singled us out to be searched --this happened often, being in a rock group; when we came through carrying guitars and music gear we set off internal klaxons inside officials' heads; we practically had stickers on our foreheads saying 'Search me' -- and the customs officials were aggressively questioning us about the prescription pills not in our name. This experience led us to write our version of a hip-hop track, 'US 80s-90s': 'Had a run-in with Boston immigration/to my name they had an aversion/Nervous droplets due to sleeping tablets....' In the airport the signs would read, 'Welcome to the United States of America', but we would always get tormented by security and feel like we were entering a police state. In the song Mark proclaims, 'I am the original white (big shot) rapper', and it's not hyperbole." (222)
She writes often about "Hotel Bloedel" and "LA." She seems to consider these her best songs. She wrote a lot of great songs with the band and I think most people consider the "Brix era" to be the second-greatest period in the Fall's catalog (behind the Hex Enduction Hour era). Certainly she brought the band in a more accessible direction. Other noteworthy song inspirations include "Carry Bag Man" (about how Mark E. Smith likes to carry around his stuff in plastic bags). Actually, her causal dismissal of The Frenz Experiment (the last album she would record before re-joining the band as his ex-wife) is worth capture:
"'Carry Bag Man' is fine, and chugs along, but is a phoned-in effort from Mark, a song about how he likes to carry plastic bags. 'Get a Hotel' is just annoying. 'The Steak Place' is boring and conjures images of gross food, the kind of restaurant that might have photos of the food on their menu. The most annoying song I ever had to play on was 'Oswald Defence Lawyer.' I think it was the worst song we'd done since I'd joined the band. It was interminable, and when we played it live I watched the audience switch off. It makes me cringe today, just thinking about it. I was expected to really belt it out, but it just sounds irritating and grating: 'Oswald Defense Lawyer embraces the scruffed corpse of Mark Twain.' It was cool to name-check Twain, though." (238-239)
Brix writes a fair amount about her post-Fall band, Adult Net, and I was dismayed not to be able to find anything on Spotify or Amazon Music. I would definitely have listened to The Honey Tangle if I could. Maybe Brix realizes that streaming services will net her approximately zero and that her fans will seek out old copies of the album. Or likely it's the record label's fault.
I don't want to give away too many details about the book but can say briefly that Brix's parents divorced when she was young and her mother moved to Chicago and she moved around in fairly fancy places with her father in L.A. There is more than a fair share of celebrity name-dropping in this book. It's not always totally necessary, but if I was writing my memoir, I would totally do the same thing. It's the tangents that usually end up being memorable, such as the story of her professional soccer player friend who soils himself on the field and fakes an injury, or the friend at her bachelorette party with a crazy party trick.
She goes back from her father in L.A. to her mother in Chicago multiple times through her teen years. She does not have kind things to say about Chicago, but her account of working at Marshall Field's in the Loop was especially charming (sometimes I like to reflect on the significance of being in the same place as another person in recorded history). She meets Mark E. Smith at Smart Bar after seeing the Fall in concert at the Metro. What happens is the definition of a whirlwind romance and is completely insane and showcases the true spontaneity of Brix. She quickly decides to move to England, move in with Mark, and get married. She becomes a member of the Fall and stays with them for another four years. This will be the highlight for the majority of readers. However, Brix's life outside the Fall is arguably more interesting. For example, her section about being an aspiring-actress-waitress in L.A after being left by Mark and effectively kicked out of the band is especially compelling. She meets Nigel, a classical violinist, who is apparently quite a sensation, and is led into a different world, seemingly a little more refined but no less debaucherous. In fact, I'm sorry, but I have to give a snippet of her encounter with Courtney Love, who invites her to audition for Hole:
"....But as I went to sleep, I had a sixth sense that something was wrong. A bad feeling. Something was burning. I got up, out of bed and rushed to Courtney's room and pushed open the door to the master bedroom. In her room, she had a selection of candles and incense burning. Two sticks of incense had fallen over and caught fire. The carpet was aflame and I caught it just in time. Had I been five minutes later I dread to think what would have happened. I put out the fire by smothering it with a blanket and stamping on it. Courtney was in bed, slumped over her computer. I fleetingly clocked that she had been mid-conversation with Billy Corgan, of The Smashing Pumpkins.
She said, 'Get into bed, sleep on Kurt's side.' So I did. It was really weird, but I felt honoured to be asked to sleep there, in her bed, on his side. Courtney was warm and kind. I feel she's often misunderstood. She is a complex person, as we all are. At times she has been her own worst enemy, but when you get down to it there is kindness and warmth to her, that is not often talked about." (362)
She then proceeds to talk about how Courtney turned her onto Rohypnol, in one of the more outrageous habits detailed in the book. Later on, she rejoins the Fall briefly, and then meets her current husband, who then opens a fashion store with her in London. She also co-stars briefly in a reality series, Gok's Fashion Fix, which sounds like it would be amazing to see. She has an amazing kitchen and is in love with her pugs.
That is pretty much the whole story, but Brix's mysticism is also worth noting. She seems to have some sort of otherworldly presence. One could easily write off her ramblings as hippie-ish, vaguely drugged out, but the realities she has known are so insane that I am inclined to believe her if she says she believes in ghosts. The precognitive powers of Mark E. Smith are also referenced poignantly, in a story I had read before, about the origins of the song, "Disney's Dream Debased." The story is that she had taken Mark E. Smith with her to Disneyland and they got in line for the Matterhorn and while waiting he said he didn't like the ride, that it was evil, and that he didn't want to go on it. They rode it anyways and left. A few minutes later, there was a commotion in the area, and Disneyland employees came out from hidden elevators and Disney characters tried to distract parkgoers' attention from the Matterhorn. It came out that a woman was killed when she fell out of her car at the unloading zone onto the track, and the next car could not be stopped from dismembering her. It's a horrifying story and it would be interesting to know what became of the incident legally, whether Disney has publicly acknowledged that it occurred.
There is another truly insane story about Disneyworld (Brix always goes to Disneyland, but goes to Disneyworld for the first time in her late 20's or early 30's) and how Mickey Mouse may or may not be trying to ask her on a date or hook up with her. This story appears to be in there solely to detail the breakdown of Brix's mind at the time (it is a weirdly hallucinogenic chapter), but she later brings it full circle when she becomes one of the very few to get Mickey Mouse to appear at an event for her fashion store. Her comment on the usual gender of the person wearing the Mickey Mouse costume is poignant.
I could go on a lot longer and pick out more passages, but I think I've said pretty much everything I wanted to say about this. It's a great book, but it occasionally feels like Brix is going through the motions, telling the story because she has to and not necessarily because she wants to. The grammar is correct and proper, but the writing is not especially complex and definitely devolves into purple prose at times. However, I would want any friend of mine to read it, regardless of whether they liked the Fall or not. I think it would make a great movie--"Scenes from Brix" or something, like Moonlight and three different periods in her life. Not everyone wants to sell the movie rights to their life, but really, you would do it if you could, wouldn't you?
The stuff about Chicago is fantastic. On the podcast, Brix mentions that her first concert was at this outdoor venue outside of Chicago, where people have picnics, Rav-en-ia, where she saw the Carpenters and Neil Sedaka on a double bill. Having recently seen Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons with my family at Ravinia, I found it touching.
Most notably, there is the story of where and when she met Mark E. Smith:
"On Saturday 23 April 1983, Lisa and I paid the $6 ticket price and entered through the front doors of Cabaret Metro, 3730 North Clark Street." (144)
This was within a week of my birth, not very far away, so I have one more reason to feel connected to the band and this book.
Brix writes compelling stories through the first 75% of the book. In truth I lost some interest after she left the Fall, and it was briefly exciting when she rejoined for a couple years in the mid-90's. The opening of the book confused me--it's an account of her grandmother seemingly losing it behind the wheel and driving from the Disneyland parking lot through the main gates and into the park before plunging into the lagoon at the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride. I thought it was real, but Brix later reveals it to be a dream. I wonder how many other people have that reaction. It seems like it could have happened, because so much of the rest of her life has been crazy that anything seems possible. Her stories about her father are both hilarious and horrifying. There are so many things I would excerpt from this book it's not even funny. On that note, I should perhaps vault it into Best Books territory, but I think it is instructive to compare it to the other recent female rock musician memoirs that I've read.
If pressed, I have to say that it is better than both Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band and Carrie Brownstein's Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. Both are excellent books. All three of these books are fantastic and totally worth reading, but Brix's is the heaviest. To be sure, Kim Gordon's account of the dissolution of her relationship with her husband and bandmate, Thurston Moore, is the most powerful piece of writing in the bunch. This is not to say that Carrie Brownstein's account of the dissolution of her romantic relationship with bandmate Corin Tucker is weak. In fact, Brix's account of the dissolution of her relationship with husband and bandmate, Mark E. Smith, is the least evocative, in part due to the inscrutability of the man it involves. Now I love Mark E. Smith but this book definitely sheds some light on him in an unflattering fashion. It feels fair, though, because there are also moments of extreme vulnerability, humanity, and cuteness.
There are some parts of this book that are tough to read. Yet even during the most atrocious moment, Brix offers some levity and resists victimization. As I said, there are many quotable excerpts in this book, so I have to include one about Mark E. Smith that almost made me want to start crying:
"One night, a few months later, there was a knock at the front door of my apartment. I opened the door to find Mark E. Smith standing there. He was drunk and held a half-empty bottle of whiskey. He begged me to let him in, and was in a state. He told me he had made a mistake leaving me. I let him in and tried to calm him down. He asked if he could sleep over. He was emotional. I was torn. Part of me was happy he'd come to his senses and realised what he'd lost in leaving me. The other part of me was cold and shut down. After having experienced the attentions and kindness of other men, I was no longer attracted to him.
But still, I felt connected to him. That would never go away. He had been my soulmate. The songs we wrote together would forever be a testament to that. I allowed him to sleep over, in my bed. I made it patently clear he was not to touch me. As he lay next to me, I felt sad. The next morning, it would be years before I ever saw him again." (267-268)
The stories of the songs were surprising. It always seems like the Fall are singing about conspiracies or manifestos but in truth are just slices of life. For example, Brix writes about her sleeping problems and reliance on pills in "US 80s-90s":
"My mother's pills came in the prescription bottle with her name on it. When we landed in Boston, immigration singled us out to be searched --this happened often, being in a rock group; when we came through carrying guitars and music gear we set off internal klaxons inside officials' heads; we practically had stickers on our foreheads saying 'Search me' -- and the customs officials were aggressively questioning us about the prescription pills not in our name. This experience led us to write our version of a hip-hop track, 'US 80s-90s': 'Had a run-in with Boston immigration/to my name they had an aversion/Nervous droplets due to sleeping tablets....' In the airport the signs would read, 'Welcome to the United States of America', but we would always get tormented by security and feel like we were entering a police state. In the song Mark proclaims, 'I am the original white (big shot) rapper', and it's not hyperbole." (222)
She writes often about "Hotel Bloedel" and "LA." She seems to consider these her best songs. She wrote a lot of great songs with the band and I think most people consider the "Brix era" to be the second-greatest period in the Fall's catalog (behind the Hex Enduction Hour era). Certainly she brought the band in a more accessible direction. Other noteworthy song inspirations include "Carry Bag Man" (about how Mark E. Smith likes to carry around his stuff in plastic bags). Actually, her causal dismissal of The Frenz Experiment (the last album she would record before re-joining the band as his ex-wife) is worth capture:
"'Carry Bag Man' is fine, and chugs along, but is a phoned-in effort from Mark, a song about how he likes to carry plastic bags. 'Get a Hotel' is just annoying. 'The Steak Place' is boring and conjures images of gross food, the kind of restaurant that might have photos of the food on their menu. The most annoying song I ever had to play on was 'Oswald Defence Lawyer.' I think it was the worst song we'd done since I'd joined the band. It was interminable, and when we played it live I watched the audience switch off. It makes me cringe today, just thinking about it. I was expected to really belt it out, but it just sounds irritating and grating: 'Oswald Defense Lawyer embraces the scruffed corpse of Mark Twain.' It was cool to name-check Twain, though." (238-239)
Brix writes a fair amount about her post-Fall band, Adult Net, and I was dismayed not to be able to find anything on Spotify or Amazon Music. I would definitely have listened to The Honey Tangle if I could. Maybe Brix realizes that streaming services will net her approximately zero and that her fans will seek out old copies of the album. Or likely it's the record label's fault.
I don't want to give away too many details about the book but can say briefly that Brix's parents divorced when she was young and her mother moved to Chicago and she moved around in fairly fancy places with her father in L.A. There is more than a fair share of celebrity name-dropping in this book. It's not always totally necessary, but if I was writing my memoir, I would totally do the same thing. It's the tangents that usually end up being memorable, such as the story of her professional soccer player friend who soils himself on the field and fakes an injury, or the friend at her bachelorette party with a crazy party trick.
She goes back from her father in L.A. to her mother in Chicago multiple times through her teen years. She does not have kind things to say about Chicago, but her account of working at Marshall Field's in the Loop was especially charming (sometimes I like to reflect on the significance of being in the same place as another person in recorded history). She meets Mark E. Smith at Smart Bar after seeing the Fall in concert at the Metro. What happens is the definition of a whirlwind romance and is completely insane and showcases the true spontaneity of Brix. She quickly decides to move to England, move in with Mark, and get married. She becomes a member of the Fall and stays with them for another four years. This will be the highlight for the majority of readers. However, Brix's life outside the Fall is arguably more interesting. For example, her section about being an aspiring-actress-waitress in L.A after being left by Mark and effectively kicked out of the band is especially compelling. She meets Nigel, a classical violinist, who is apparently quite a sensation, and is led into a different world, seemingly a little more refined but no less debaucherous. In fact, I'm sorry, but I have to give a snippet of her encounter with Courtney Love, who invites her to audition for Hole:
"....But as I went to sleep, I had a sixth sense that something was wrong. A bad feeling. Something was burning. I got up, out of bed and rushed to Courtney's room and pushed open the door to the master bedroom. In her room, she had a selection of candles and incense burning. Two sticks of incense had fallen over and caught fire. The carpet was aflame and I caught it just in time. Had I been five minutes later I dread to think what would have happened. I put out the fire by smothering it with a blanket and stamping on it. Courtney was in bed, slumped over her computer. I fleetingly clocked that she had been mid-conversation with Billy Corgan, of The Smashing Pumpkins.
She said, 'Get into bed, sleep on Kurt's side.' So I did. It was really weird, but I felt honoured to be asked to sleep there, in her bed, on his side. Courtney was warm and kind. I feel she's often misunderstood. She is a complex person, as we all are. At times she has been her own worst enemy, but when you get down to it there is kindness and warmth to her, that is not often talked about." (362)
She then proceeds to talk about how Courtney turned her onto Rohypnol, in one of the more outrageous habits detailed in the book. Later on, she rejoins the Fall briefly, and then meets her current husband, who then opens a fashion store with her in London. She also co-stars briefly in a reality series, Gok's Fashion Fix, which sounds like it would be amazing to see. She has an amazing kitchen and is in love with her pugs.
That is pretty much the whole story, but Brix's mysticism is also worth noting. She seems to have some sort of otherworldly presence. One could easily write off her ramblings as hippie-ish, vaguely drugged out, but the realities she has known are so insane that I am inclined to believe her if she says she believes in ghosts. The precognitive powers of Mark E. Smith are also referenced poignantly, in a story I had read before, about the origins of the song, "Disney's Dream Debased." The story is that she had taken Mark E. Smith with her to Disneyland and they got in line for the Matterhorn and while waiting he said he didn't like the ride, that it was evil, and that he didn't want to go on it. They rode it anyways and left. A few minutes later, there was a commotion in the area, and Disneyland employees came out from hidden elevators and Disney characters tried to distract parkgoers' attention from the Matterhorn. It came out that a woman was killed when she fell out of her car at the unloading zone onto the track, and the next car could not be stopped from dismembering her. It's a horrifying story and it would be interesting to know what became of the incident legally, whether Disney has publicly acknowledged that it occurred.
There is another truly insane story about Disneyworld (Brix always goes to Disneyland, but goes to Disneyworld for the first time in her late 20's or early 30's) and how Mickey Mouse may or may not be trying to ask her on a date or hook up with her. This story appears to be in there solely to detail the breakdown of Brix's mind at the time (it is a weirdly hallucinogenic chapter), but she later brings it full circle when she becomes one of the very few to get Mickey Mouse to appear at an event for her fashion store. Her comment on the usual gender of the person wearing the Mickey Mouse costume is poignant.
I could go on a lot longer and pick out more passages, but I think I've said pretty much everything I wanted to say about this. It's a great book, but it occasionally feels like Brix is going through the motions, telling the story because she has to and not necessarily because she wants to. The grammar is correct and proper, but the writing is not especially complex and definitely devolves into purple prose at times. However, I would want any friend of mine to read it, regardless of whether they liked the Fall or not. I think it would make a great movie--"Scenes from Brix" or something, like Moonlight and three different periods in her life. Not everyone wants to sell the movie rights to their life, but really, you would do it if you could, wouldn't you?
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