Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements - Bob Mehr (2016)

My first exposure to Paul Westerberg came when I was about 9 when my older sister would play "Dyslexic Heart" (and to a lesser extent, "Waiting for Somebody") off the Singles soundtrack.  She introduced me to Pearl Jam and the Smashing Pumpkins and Vanilla Ice.  She did not introduce me to the Replacements but she gets tremendous cred for this. 

About 9 years later I met a girl at NYU my freshman year, which is when I met the most girls, which is when many of us would try to turn our crushes on to bands we liked in the hopes that they would say they liked them too and it would signal that we liked each other without being too awkward. One of the bands she told me to check out, in passing, was the Replacements, downloading "Can't Hardly Wait" from Audiogalaxy for me. Now I had seen the movie Can't Hardly Wait and actually liked it even though I thought I wouldn't, but the song didn't pop out at me.

A couple years later I read Our Band Could Be Your Life and became vaguely interested in the Replacements. Some other friends seemed to like them too, so we'd put on Let It Be or Pleased to Meet Me when we'd hang out. Another friend burnt me CDs of "All for Nothing/Nothing for All" (a greatest hits/rarities collection) and Stereo/Mono by Grandpaboy, the then-current Westerberg solo project. I thought they were all fine, I liked them, but still, they weren't my favorite band or anything.

A couple years later, I'd buy a CD copy of Tim and get Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash from a friend.

11 years later I read Trouble Boys and now terribly regret missing them play in Chicago a few years ago.

Sometimes I read a book and I finish it and I just go, "Fuck.....best books." At least I did with this. It's the most epic book I've ever read about a band (Everett True's Nirvana is in similar territory, but this is a greater labor of love). It's nearly 500 pages.  I'd heard about it when it came out, and I knew Pitchfork had put it on a year end best list or something, but I figured I'd get around to it eventually.  In this case it was because of listening to an episode of The Best Show that had Bob Mehr and "Replacements Steve" on.  There it was lauded as one of the best books ever written about rock and I have to concur that it really is quite an experience to be taken in.   

It opens up with the scene of guitarist Bob Stinson's death in 1995, and circles back to that point almost 400 pages later.  Deep biographies of each band member emerge, generally starting with the origins of their grandparents.  After getting into trouble with the law and shuttling in and out of several homes for troubled youth, Bob Stinson starts learning how to play music as an outlet for his anger.  He truly had a horrific childhood, marred by a father that left and a stepfather that abused him psychologically, physically, sexually, verbally, and emotionally.  This stepfather was his brother Tommy's birth father.  Tommy is about seven years younger than Bob, and Bob essentially forces him to learn how to play bass so they can play in a band together.  Tommy is like 10 or 11 when they form their first band, and he is like 12 when Paul Westerberg and Chris Mars join them and the Replacements are formed.  

This book is much more about Paul Westerberg than Tommy Stinson.  It is arguably more about Bob Stinson than Tommy Stinson.  Several themes emerge, foremost amongst them the band's obsession with alcohol.  Almost every rock band is affected in some way or another by the excesses of alcoholism, but they take it to another level.  There are a lot of outrageous scenes in this book.  A story about a really legendary, insane show (where Bob Stinson misbehaves incredibly) is told in Our Band Could Be Your Life and not repeated here, signalling that Mehr has certainly digested those source materials and given the reader something they haven't read or heard about before.  That kind of attention to detail and audience is one of the reasons it belongs on the Best Books list.

This could be a really long review if I wanted it to be but I'll just say what this book meant to me.  It made me listen to Don't Tell a Soul and All Shook Down.  I am glad for the former, and sort of indifferent about the latter.  This is my ranking of Replacements albums:

Pleased to Meet Me 
Let it Be
Tim
Stink
Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash
Hootenanny
Don't Tell a Soul
All Shook Down

I don't want to get into all my justifications for this, but it colors my experience because the only real stories about the band I knew came from Our Band Could Be Your Life, and stopped after Let it Be.  The recording of Pleased to Meet Me is one of the highlights of the book, and I think it cements the album's place in the band's oeuvre.  It's such a short album and it's so densely packed and represents every style the band would run through in its time: loud fast punk, ballads, attempted pop singles, and genre experiments.  

So it got into that, and it also referenced the heavier demo version of "Kiss Me on the Bus," which is now on the Tim expanded edition, and is significantly more awesome than the album version.  It tells of how they came to jam with Tom Waits in a studio sometime in about 1990, partying late into the night (unfortunately there is no tape).  It tells of celebrity encounters with Keith Richards and Tom Petty and their rivalries with Husker Du and R.E.M.  It tells of Peter Jesperson.

Peter Jesperson is the unofficial "fifth member" of the Replacements, though he never played.  He is co-founder of Twin/Tone Records which put out all their albums through Let it Be (basically the first half of their career).  He tours with the band and cheers for them in the crowd and parties with them and manages them.  He develops his own drinking problem, and the chapter detailing his breakdown that led to rehab is another highlight (or perhaps "lowlight" is more appropriate).  Recently the only critique I had for a book was mentioning the same thing twice, with the second time acting as though the first had never happened.  This is probably an editorial oversight (and a nitpicky thing to criticize).  Many may not mind such repetitions, as they tend to freshen one's impressions.  Yet they stand out to me as a thing that is easy to fix, and a clear example of addition by subtraction.  In this case, it only happens once, and it's about the last time Tommy Stinson and Paul Jesperson speak for very many years:

"When he showed up at the bar, it was just Paul and Tommy there.  
'One thing I remember was Tommy, he was smirking a little bit before Paul dropped the bomb,' said Jesperson.  'He was sitting there like, "I know something you don't know."  We were so tight, and had been such close friends.  I harbored a really deep resentment towards him after that.'" (214)

Then much later:

"Much as the pain of being booted out of the 'Mats' inner circle lingered, Jesperson had been hard-pressed to totally avoid the band.  By the time of Don't Tell a Soul, he'd built back up a tentative friendship with Paul Westerberg.  However, he remained estranged from his former 'little brother' Tommy Stinson.  He simply couldn't shake the image of Stinson's smirking face that day at the Uptown when they'd dumped him.  'I held a grudge against Tommy for a long time because of that,' said Jesperson.  (392)

This is a pretty soul-shattering event and this supposed editorial oversight may be forgiven where (as here) the language is not identical.  It's a significant betrayal and it bears reiterating 170 pages later.  If it had been a few pages later, it might be less forgivable. 

My favorite phrase to come out of the book is "putting himself on the line emotionally" to describe what Paul Westerberg was not willing to do:

"The next day, at the band's hotel, Rieger got into a heated discussion with Westerberg, telling him: 'This car-crash mentality is something you have to move away from.  You write these amazing songs.  Why are you sabotaging your own songs?'
Rieger's platonic ideal of a performer was Bruce Springsteen: someone who wrung emotion out of every lyric, put himself on the line with each show, and gave 100 percent night after night.  That's what he wanted out of the Replacements.
'I'm not giving you a hundred percent,' replied Westerberg.
It had become his refrain, practically a mantra, during Please to Meet Me.  When Westerberg said it to Jim Dickinson, it was a question of trust; as he acted it out with the record company, it was a matter of insecurity.  But as he spit out the words again to Rieger, it went far deeper.  'I can't mean it every night,' admitted Westerberg, meeting Rieger's eyes. 'I just can't fuckin' mean it every night.'
Westerberg viewed performing, as he did everything, in stark black-and-white terms.  He could live with drunken insouciance or bored incompetence, so long as it was real.  What he couldn't do was fake it.  And he wasn't willing to put himself on the line emotionally.  'For him there was no middle ground,' said Rieger.  'That's part of the reason people gravitated to him as an artist.  It was all or nothing.'" (277)

On the podcast episode that may or may never be released, I talked about how this book did not mention a specific outrageous concert mentioned in Our Band Could Be Your Life and I read the short excerpt of it from that volume we were discussing.  And I also talked about some of the things in here, like lighting their money on fire and throwing toilets out of tour buses.  So perhaps one mention of that before the end will be in order.

The podcast episode arguably centered around the Replacements as an excuse for me to talk about this as well.  And I mainly talked about how the book made me reassess Don't Tell a Soul and gain a deeper appreciation for (read: no longer completely ignore) it.  My guest said that he preferred All Shook Down and I told him I disagreed.  This was perhaps the highlight of the episode.  I do think he is wrong about this.

The book goes some pretty unseemly places and that is probably why it categorizes itself as unauthorized.  This precisely the problem my guest referenced about Azerrad's earlier "authorized" biography of Nirvana, Come as You Are (still a pretty good book from what I recall).  I believe we agreed that Everett True's Nirvana was the superior book.  We also talked about the ways in which Paul Westerberg was similar to Kurt Cobain.  Now I think that Kurt was a big Replacements fan as well (though they are hardly cited as an influence along any of the same lines as Melvins, Black Flag, Black Sabbath, Pixies, Wipers, etc.) and I do believe this book captures the one and only meeting between them.

Actually, there are 3 pages that reference Cobain and this first one had a better first-ever meeting story, with Prince:

"Although seemingly polar opposites, Prince's and the Replacements' sense of showmanship had a common root.  'We experienced the same weather and a lot of the same things growing up,' said Paul Westerberg. 'Minneapolis audiences are mighty reserved, and learning to command an audience in a place where people are notorious for being quiet will either make you a wallflower, quiet artist, or it will make you a really boisterous, aggressive, or flamboyant, which is what it did for both of us.  I really think a lot of his flamboyance came from the suppression of the place that we live.  It's a cold place to live in more ways than one.'
The 'Mats genuinely admired Prince.  On one occasion, Tommy Stinson was watching Prince perform from the wings at First Avenue while standing next to Ric Ocasek of the Cars, who were also at their pop chart zenith that year.  After the Purple One peeled off a breathtaking Hendrix-like solo, then danced his way across the stage and into a leg split, Tommy slapped Ocasek on the back hard, pointed at Prince, and said, with a measure of Minneapolis pride, 'Let's see ya top that, buddy!'
Prince was rumored to have lurked in the shadows at some of the Replacements' shows at First Avenue, but it was in the bathroom of a club in St. Paul where Westerberg finally ran into him.
'Oh, hey,' said Westerberg, seeing the dolled-up singer standing next to him at the urinal. 'What's up, man?'
Prince turned and responded in cryptic fashion: 'Life.'" (152-153)

Actually it is Bob Stinson who becomes fixated on Kurt Cobain, not Paul Westerberg, and it is true that they perhaps have more than a few things in common.  But there are definitely a ton of parallels with Westerberg.  The excerpt probably says everything that need be said:

"Pundits would suggest Nirvana had picked up the proverbial torch that the Replacements had fumbled away.  'Cobain sings and writes about romantic complexities and youthful apathy with much of the intensity and insight of...Paul Westerberg,' wrote Robert Hillburn of the Los Angeles Times.  'Cobain, indeed, could be the Paul Westerberg of the 90's.'  But Westerberg thought they had little in common: 'I guess I wore a plaid shirt, and yes, I played real loud,' he said, 'but Nirvana sounds to me like Boston with a hair up its ass.'
Cobain and Westerberg would cross paths just once, in late 1992, in San Francisco.  Westerberg was in town recording, Cobain was there producing an album for the Melvins, and they were both staying at the Triton Hotel.  One evening they rode up an elevator together in awkward silence, exited on the same floor, walked to neighboring rooms, then shut their doors without acknowledging one another.
Days later, Westerberg would dash out a song called 'World Class Fad' ('You wax poetic about things pathetic, as long as you look so cute/Don't be sad, you're a world class fad') that many, including Cobain, interpreted as a diss.  'I never respected Kurt Cobain enough to write something about him,' said Westerberg.  'Maybe he felt he was a world class fad.'" (404)

That seems like a harsh choice of words, but okay!  In any case, this is a great book if you want to justify all sorts of bad behavior to yourself, if, for example, your ex is in the process of replacing you, and you think about the nature of your replacement, and the Replacements, and what it really means to be faithful.  Infidelity is casually strewn about without major drama, though there would also be divorce. There was one passage I wanted to excerpt.  But actually I couldn't find it, and it's probably for the best because its not a very appealing thing to highlight unless you get excited by the idea of two guys deciding to make out so they can follow through with a partner-swap more readily.  There are certainly better things to highlight.  From the very beginning, Flying Houses has endeavored to only excerpt the most beautiful writing from each book it documents, and perhaps we have lost sight of that lodestar over time.

Suffice to say, incredibly bad behavior has its place in the lives of the pantheons of culture.  Few bands today could do what the Replacements did in the 80's (and 90's) and get away with it. Notably I remember it being mentioned that Robert Christgau gave Stink an A+.  Here is just one quick example of how they lived:

"The band's first vehicle--the Chevy van financed by Tom Carlson--quickly wore out.  They replaced it with a beat-up Ford Econoline that they dubbed Otis, after the drunk on The Andy Griffith Show.  It didn't take long for the 'Mats to turn it into a second home, ripping out its seats and staining the interior with beer, trash, and urine.  (The band was constantly pissing out of the step down to the side door, which came to be called 'the trough.') Its walls were soon marked with all manner of lewd graffiti and inside jokes.  Westerberg insisted that an image if the van's guts adorn the back cover of Let It Be:  'To give people a sense of what life with us was like,' he said. (144)

There's little more I could add to the topic, so we'll leave it there.  Give yourself a good couple weeks to finish this, though it also reads very quickly.  It's hard to find the time to read a lot these days.  Easier to listen.  Give the Replacements a listen and if you're not interested at all, maybe you won't care at all about the book.  Or don't listen to them at all and just trust me when I say this is a great book and give it a chance and then give the Replacements a listen and totally alter your interpretation of them.  This book may be long, and at time obsessive, but I think everyone who encounters it will acknowledge that it is a great achievement and that they will never think about the band the same way after reading it.  In a good way.  

Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground - Michael Azerrad (2001)

Published in the waning years of nu-metal and the TRL teen pop revolution, and shortly before the NYC rock renaissance, Our Band Could Be Your Life charts the progression of 13 legendary, lesser-known bands in the US in the 80's. It's one of my favorite books and I hadn't read it since the mid-2000's. A lot of it was memorable, a couple minor paragraphs revealed themselves anew, and overall it cemented itself into its rightful position on the Best Books list. [Ed.-Or maybe not?]

It is pretty much impossible to write a thorough review of this book without skirting over a few of the bands, so it will be the subject of one of our first (and hopefully not only) podcast episodes. For now, it will suffice to mention a few quotable paragraphs and briefly run through the subjects.

Black Flag

Greg Ginn founded Black Flag in the late 70's and they cycled through a few different singers until Henry Rollins emerged and recorded their landmark debut LP Damaged. Damaged is definitely in the top 100 albums of all time and is frequently cited as the essential hardcore document...I'll just excerpt it:

"Released in January '82, Damaged is a key hardcore document, perhaps the key hardcore document.  It boiled over with rage on several fronts: police harassment, materialism, alcohol abuse, the stultifying effects of consumer culture, and, on just about every track on the album, a particularly virulent strain of self-lacerating angst--all against a savage, brutal backdrop that welded apoplectic punk rock to the anomie of dark Seventies metal like Black Sabbath." (33)

Ginn and Rollins are polarizing figures but time has been more kind to Rollins. Ginn has reformed Black Flag and released an execrable comeback. Even though What the....is terrible, it's still worth hearing. Ginn is a guitar virtuoso, probably the 2nd most iconic featured in the book after J. Mascis.  His best work is in the past, but there are still moments on the new album where he unloads that same vicious squall. 

Ginn also founded SST records which is probably the only entity that pops up in every single chapter. Apparently, he is kind of an asshole. Regrettably, Henry Rollins cannot bring himself to sing with them again, because it would undoubtedly be one of the best reunion shows out there. Rollins is loaded and has become an almost saintly figure. Everybody loves him now but he was definitely an asshole too at one point, as this chapter conveys. Ginn probably comes off more sympathetically back in 2000.

The Minutemen

The Minutemen are the 2nd weirdest band profiled in terms of sound. They're not a punk band, but they are. They're a jazz band with really short songs. They are pretty out there. Their philosophy is righteous, however, and they cut inspiring historical figures. D. Boon unfortunately left us all far too long ago in an accident that appears to have been unnecessary and preventable, but what a mark he left on this world. Mike Watt continues on with their legend and retains cache as one of the leading elder statesmen (dinosaurs?) of the scene. Of course he later played with the Stooges and Iggy is the ultimate dinosaur (after the Rolling Stones front duo). 

Double Nickels on the Dime is another SST classic album. It's not as tight as Damaged though. The Minutemen probably have some of the best lyrics of any of these bands but they also have the most threadbare sound. That may be intentional. They're not one of my favorites but they're worth a listen. "This Ain't No Picnic" is amazing, as are at least a dozen others. It's also very amusing to hear their first couple albums when they do like 10 songs in 7 minutes (Paranoid Time or The Punch Line, see "Fanatics" off the latter).

Mission of Burma

Founded in the late 1970s by the same trio that would never shift (their "fourth member" Martin Swope would eventually get replaced by Bob Weston), this band came out of Boston and was never "big." They're noteworthy in that when their story ends in this book, basically no one still knows who they are--a final tour stop in Chicago yields an audience of six. 

And yet they were one of the very first to reform, almost immediately after the publication of this book (some 17 years after their demise due to Roger Miller's hearing loss). They are Next Level, but I think their post-2000's albums are weaker than their first two (Signals, Calls and Marches and Vs. are pretty much impossible to top, in their defense). They're not the most interesting personalities. Roger Miller had tinnitus and Clint Conley had a slight drinking problem and Peter Prescott just seemed rambunctious.  Azerrad refers to Prescott screaming like a "traumatized drill sergeant." (106) This is not the only time he compares a punk vocalist to a drill sergeant, but there's a different adjective the second time.  Conley's comments on how he doesn't like talking about his own lyrics are most interesting.  But overall this is just kind of an encyclopedia entry about a band that more people should hear and know.

Minor Threat

Re-reading this book led me to revisit a lot of this music, and Minor Threat's first two 7''s (15 songs) are, I think, perfect. Damian Abraham recently commented that the Bad Brains were "uncoverable" (because no band could do a better version of their songs) and maybe that's the case for Minor Threat, but it doesn't stop me from wanting to start my own tribute band, Mid-Age Threat. 

Ian Mackaye reappears in the Fugazi chapter, but that is probably the least necessary in this book because the whole story is here. Fugazi is about doing things their own way. Minor Threat is about DC hardcore and straight edge. Also, "Straight Edge" is awesome.

Husker Du

When I first read this book, Husker Du were one of the bands that I hadn't heard, that I got turned onto, and that I loved instantly. Zen Arcade is another classic SST album (actually released on the exact same day as Double Nickels). They were heavily referenced in Try, which I had read in Fall 2003, and I came to them with some expectation of their grandeur. 

They're 1/2 of the Minneapolis scene detailed here (I would say 1/3 but Prince is only mentioned in an aside or two). They're the less accessible, more serious and visionary band of the two. I liked them a lot more before but I kind of got worn out after a while. Also Michael Azerrad wrote Bob Mould's memoir with him so this chapter sort of eventually became it's own book.  

Sadly, Grant Hart died last year, so there cannot be an actual reunion, but it seemed like there was plenty of time to do one, and who knows why they didn't. Maybe Bob Mould was like, "just see us solo, we'll play a few old hits." His new stuff is very good in its own way too, and his band can execute the old ones well too, but it's just not the same.  I hadn't heard "Eight Miles High" or "Sorry Somehow" until after I read Mould's book and my life is more complete because of them.

The Replacements 

The other Minneapolis 1/2 is probably the most accessible band in the book (or "most mainstream-sounding"). Not the case for their early work, but Azerrad notably gets off the train when they go major.  I'm reading Trouble Boys right now so I'll have more to say about the Replacements later. Suffice to say this is a good quick primer on them. An argument can be made that all of their work, save perhaps their last two albums, is almost perfect (in a very imperfect way). Let it Be is classic, but for me, "Kids Don't Follow" is their best song. 

Sonic Youth

Here we get to one of my favorite bands of all time. Admittedly, I haven't listened to them very much since their demise, and I had plenty of material to explore in the post on Kim Gordon's memoir, Girl in a Band. Who would know what the future had in store for SY back in 2000?

No one! They hit a low point with NYC Ghosts and Flowers and only went up from there, eventually imploding in divorce and sad vibes. THEY COULD STILL GET BACK TOGETHER, but I don't think anyone would find that necessary. I saw them more than any other of the bands featured here, and they played enough shows over their 30-year history to satisfy most of the listening public.

This is actually one of the most boring chapters because none of them have drug problems and though they are avant-garde and outre and experimental and no-wave and "pigfuck," this does not always translate into a compelling story. I think an argument can be made that they're "boring" musically also. Anybody who has seen them live knows that seeing them drone on a feedback jam for 10 or 30 minutes is essentially witnessing experimental free jazz-induced aural torture. Yet their power cannot be denied and they will always be one of my favorite bands, as well as one of the greatest of all time.

Butthole Surfers

Not really sure what to say about this group.  I got Locust Abortion Technician on something of a whim a long time ago, and it's okay.  They're more of a performance art experiment than a rock band.  Musicianship sounds rudimentary, and seems to take a backseat to the lyrics and overall message of the sensory experience conveyed by the songs.  They really do seem more like a traveling circus or freak-show than an indie band, and this chapter is consequently an outlier.  It is undoubtedly the most outrageous part of the book, and occasionally compelling.  

It seems like drugs are a pretty essential accoutrement to consumption of the Butthole Surfers music.  Moreover, like many of the bands in this book, their full majesty may only be adequately understood by those that saw them live.  Without getting too deeply into their personal mythologies, Gibby Haynes is their front man and his professional situation imbues their narrative with a sharp philosophical bent:

"'I can't believe we lived through that,' Leary [co-founder] continues.  'Man, I'll tell you what, I'm glad to be alive--it kind of seemed like we were in a constant state of suicide the whole time.  It wasn't like, "Gee, we're going to become successful and make a lot of money."  It was more like, "Man, we're going to have a lot of fun before the end comes and we all hit the can." I didn't think there was any way out.'
They were eventually reduced to scavenging for cans and bottles so they could turn them in for the nickel deposit.  It was quite a comedown for Haynes, who was all set to be a successful accountant just a couple of years before.  One day some prankster ran up and kicked all the bottles out of Haynes's bag.  'Gibby and the rest of us were on our knees, scurrying to collect the bottles again,' says Coffey [drummer].  'And I looked in Gibby's eyes, and he was about to cry.  It was just so pitiful--this big, strong guy like Gibby being reduced to tears because here he was on the streets of New York, groveling for bottles.  But good god, we needed those bottles.'" (287)

They do go on to command a pretty sizable fee for their concerts, and it is amazing they are one of the bands whose latter history is not covered because they got signed to a major label.  They're a curiosity for sure, and we all probably need a good dose of them given how "safe" so much artistic expression has become in recent years.

Big Black

Along with the Butthole Surfers, Big Black explored dark lyrical territory with an added dose of meanness.  Musically, however, they are much more listenable.  Big Black is basically Steve Albini, who is an island unto himself.  It is also Santiago Durango, who played in Naked Raygun and later went to law school and now works as an appellate defender in Ottawa, IL (once I used his name as a pseudonym for a legal writing assignment).  Jeff Pezzati and Dave Riley each did stints on bass. "Roland" (the drum machine) supplied the beat.  Notably this is the only Chicago band in the book.  

Most people know Albini without knowing they know Albini by virtue of the albums he's produced for other bands over the past 30 years.  The rest of us know him for his way with words and the sound he can wring out of his guitar.  I never got into Big Black until I had a friend play me his vinyl copy of Atomizer.  Atomizer is probably universally-recognized as their high watermark, but it's far from accessible.  Their first EP, Lungs, is weaker, but if you listen to Pigpile, their posthumous live album, the songs are given a new life.  Pigpile is probably their most accessible release and serves as a kind of greatest hits collection.  Its versions of "Passing Complexion" and "Cables" are highlights.

I saw Big Black play four songs back in September 2006, I think, at the Touch and Go block party.  They played last, and then segued straight into a Shellac set.  I don't remember much about it.  I go through periods of rediscovering old bands I used to like.  This happened with me for Shellac in 2014 when they came out with Dude Incredible.  I think a lot of the characters from this book have changed over the years, not just from the early 80's to 2000, but also from 2000 to 2018.  Albini is just as intimidating as ever, but he seems to have toned it down.  He still clearly does not care if you like him or not, but appears less outwardly confrontational.  He and his wife do amazing work for the homeless.  If I had to point to examples of lives well-lived, his would be up there. 

For what it's worth, of the book Albini said, "It was written by a guy who wasn't there when any of it happened.  I naturally think Azerrad's perspective is skewed by hype, publicity, and reputation, and he swallows some pretty burnished bullshit regarding motives for various embarrassing episodes.  A lot of what he says sounds like mistaken critical perspective to me, but that's inevitable given the sentences I typed right there.  It's never taken well when somebody tries to school a monkey about bananas."    

Dinosaur Jr

This is one of the few bands I knew pretty well going into the first reading.  They are just J. Mascis, Lou Barlow and Murph (Lou Barlow gets fired after Bug and Azerrad skirts over pretty much everything after Green Mind).  Lou Barlow started Sebadoh pretty early on, and they had their own impressive run of albums, but they were not exactly primed for arena rock in the same way as Dinosaur.  I saw Sebadoh in 2004 at Maxwell's and interviewed Lou Barlow for an imaginary zine that I would never put out and I asked him about reforming Dinosaur and he said they had a friend that was trying to make it happen.  SO I KNEW.  It didn't happen for another year or so, but I would get to see them at Lollapalooza in 2005 and several other times over the next ten years.  

I thought this was a kind of boring chapter on previous readings, but this time it struck me for the inter-band tension.  In view of their reformation, the anecdotes seem almost quaint.  Dinosaur stand out musically in this book because of J. Mascis and his guitar pedals: 

"And after Dinosaur's tour, a whole wave of English groups, dubbed 'shoegazer bands,' sprang up in their wake, playing folk chords through phalanxes of effects pedals to make swirling, deafening music; they uniformly adopted a nonchalant demeanor and paid lip service to Neil Young and Dinosaur Jr." (366)

I think My Bloody Valentine had been formed around the same time as Dinosaur, but their sound did evolve, and it is not unlikely that Dinosaur were an influence.  Mascis is the #1 guitarist featured in the book (and there are many great guitarists in this book).  You're Living All Over Me is classic, and Bug is pretty good, but Mascis admitted that it was the album he was least happy with.  Now, everybody says their later albums are good (Pitchfork has gone 8.4 on Beyond, 8.5 on Farm, 7.9 on I Bet on Sky, and 7.5 on Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not) and while I agree they are good, I don't think they're quite as good as those two.  I think they are better than their debut, but they're not better than Where You Been.  I think they're on par with Green Mind and Without a Sound and Hand It Over.  Then again, Barlow's presence as a songwriter elevates them into higher territory.

It's also worth noting that they are featured in The Year Punk Broke, but post-Barlow.  Their two songs were always the highlight for me.

Fugazi  

Somehow I hadn't realized that Guy Picciotto had another band besides Fugazi and Rites of Spring.  This reading turned me onto the pleasant curiosity that was Happy Go Licky.  Apart from that, it was much of the same, and not much of a revelation for a person who owned the Instrument DVD.  Fugazi certainly belong in this category, yet this chapter seems about half as long as most of the others, probably because we already know all about Ian Mackaye.  It seems to end rather abruptly.  Most of the chapters end when the band signs a major label deal or break up.  Fugazi released their last album in 2001, and there may or may not have been intimations of that experienced by Azerrad during his interviews (it feels like there were not).  This is the way the chapter ends:

"Despite the alternative gold rush, Fugazi didn't release a follow-up to Steady Diet of Nothing until June '93, when they released In on the Kill Taker, which actually made the lower rungs of the Billboard Top 200 album chart.  
Although Fugazi's legend grew even larger in the Nineties, Brendan Canty feels the band's early days tell its truest story.  'People might look at us and think we're this icon,' he says, 'but at the time there was just a couple hundred people coming to the shows and it wasn't huge and nothing had potential.  It was just important to do it.  And the fact that we all wanted to go on the road and work as hard as possible, and that we were able to, is in itself its own success story.  It doesn't necessarily have to be about getting anywhere, but about getting through the process of fulfilling your own possibilities.'" (409-410)

Way to skirt over Red Medicine, End Hits, and the current state of the band (The Argument) as of 2000.  Okay, this is definitely one of the best books, but that doesn't mean I don't have criticisms, or think maybe the writing's a little clunky at times and it's purely in the Best Books category just because it's a bunch of great anecdotes.  It reads like it should be an oral history.  Azerrad's exposition is often stark and humorous.  Sometimes he sounds like an imitation Lester Bangs when describing the particular feeling a certain song can make.  At times, these are perfectly on point.  Take this description of the guitar sound in Black Flag's "Depression":

"The songs took fleeting but intense feelings and impulses and exploded them into entire all-consuming realities.  So when Ginn wrote a chorus like 'Depression's got a hold of me / Depression's gonna kill me,' it sounded like the whole world was going to end.  'That was Black Flag: when you lose your shit,' says Rollins.  The music was the same way--blitzkrieg assaults so completely overwhelming, so consuming and intense that for the duration of the song, it's hard to imagine ever listening to anything else."  (33)

Other times, they sound obtuse, such as this description of Flip Your Wig:

"Except for the two instrumentals tacked on to the end, every song sounds like a hit in some alternate world where the rivers run with an equal mixture of battery acid and honey." (189)

What?  I digress.  Anyways, late era Fugazi is great.  Still this gives the feeling that they're a boring band that didn't really change because they're pretty much all stable, upstanding, principled and sober individuals.  

I wrote a paper in college for a Writing about Popular Music class about Ian Mackaye and Calvin Johnson and read it out loud to the class.  They all seemed to like it (it drew from material in Our Band Could Be Your Life and other things in its bibliography).  However, one or two of them suggested that Ian Mackaye was no longer straight edge, that he had allowed himself to drink alcohol.  It's pretty amazing that we still don't really know.  Ian Mackaye and Guy Picciotto today are mysterious figures that have laid low, though I believe the Evens are still active and Guy has been spotted at a Washington Wizards game.  Everyone wants them to play together again (even if it was just like what the Replacements did), and it feels almost a little bit cruel, like they don't want to capitalize, or they think it's boring and regressive to play old songs.  Maybe there's another reason.  In any case, they are notable in that they stopped pretty much when the book was published and haven't done anything since.  Almost every other band had some sort of life after 2001.  The Fugazi Live series of bootlegs perhaps counts.       

Mudhoney

Mudhoney might as well be considered a chapter on Sub-Pop.  This chapter is as much (or more) about Sub-Pop as it is the band.  Mudhoney is Mark Arm and Steve Turner, and others.  The chapter starts off being about Green River.  A lot of people talk about Green River because Jeff Ament was in it and later in Pearl Jam.  Mudhoney is framed as the precursor to Nirvana.  

The chapter is as much about Mark Arm and Steven Turner as it is Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman.  Actually the most dramatic moments involve the label and not the band.  They are treated as the sort of flagship Sub Pop band.  There is high drama in their relationship:

"'I remember seeing Steve the next day and trying to talk to him and being so at the end of my rope that I broke down and started crying,' says Pavitt.  'What hurt me more than anything was that he felt like I didn't respect him.  I didn't care if they went to a major--whatever.  But the fact that he would misread what I was trying to communicate...I was simply trying to be honest.  It was such a low point for me, just standing there crying in front of this guy.  I just said, "I'm sorry"'" (450)

At the end, Mark Arm remarks that Mudhoney may be regarded as a footnote in history.  They're probably the only band in the book that has remained active all this time.  The Lucky Ones is one of the earliest posts on this blog.   So perhaps that estimation has changed as their longevity has shown, yet they are still probably best known for "Touch Me I'm Sick."  In an interview a couple years ago, when asked how it felt to have inspired a generation of up-and-coming bands, Arm replied, "I think it would be presumptuous of me to claim that we inspired anyone."

Beat Happening

The last band in the book is one of the strangest and most influential.  Beat Happening is Calvin Johnson, Heather Lewis and Bret Lunsford.  This chapter is mostly about Johnson and K Records.  They have a lot in common with Dischord, but their bands tend to have more of a twee sound.  None of them really knew how to play their instruments very well and they rarely rehearsed.  

I used to listen to Beat Happening a lot and I don't as much anymore.  Johnson's style is confrontational and magnetic.  I was luckily able to see him once solo in a showcase of K bands.  I think I bought a copy of a Halo Benders album from Phil Elverum.

Because Beat Happening prove that you just need passion to start a band, not talent, they are one of the most inspiring bands featured.  Several of their songs are sung acapella, and Johnson once recorded an album of a bunch of random people around Olympia, WA singing.  Their musical skills were rudimentary, yet they managed to record several classic albums that became increasingly complex.  By the end of their run at You Turn Me On in 1992, they hit a musical peak and sound almost like masters of their style.

So that's it.  I really love this book.  However, I just finished reading Trouble Boys.  That is going on the Best Books list.  This took Azerrad three years of nonstop work.  Trouble Boys took Bob Mehr eight years, though he must have been doing other things too.  This is more of an overview than a deep dive, and it will be as educational to most readers as it will be entertaining.

  

In the All-Night Cafe: A memoir of Belle and Sebastian's formative year - Stuart David (2015)

While I can attest to being a casual fan of Belle & Sebastian, over the first couple years when I was aware of them, perhaps 2001-2003, I tended to agree with my friend that introduced me to most of the indie rock that I would later consume endlessly--that they were "boring."  I should never dare to utter this condemnation aloud, however, because I mostly became exposed to B&S at NYU.  They were quite popular at the time, and many swore by songs like "Get Me Away from Here I'm Dying," and If You're Feeling Sinister in general.  I found it pleasant, but only for a particular mood, like studying or crying.  Well, not crying so much.  I was more into music to cry to at the time, and B&S were not emo, but fey or twee.  Then Dear Catastrophe Waitress came out, and I liked it a bit more, but still found parts a bit boring.  Recently, due to this book I had cause to discover "Your Cover's Blown," which is a B-side from that era, and it's amazing.  Perhaps that was leading into the direction of The Life Pursuit which became my favorite album by them.  I think their last two albums are pretty good, too.  I mention this because, I was embarrassed by not liking B&S enough between 2001-2003.  And it doesn't seem good enough to be a casual fan--they have no casual fans.  I would say this sentiment changed generally if one thinks they've gone more mainstream in the mid-to-late aughts, or they haven't been as good, or lost part of what made them special in the first place.  In any case, if they were into B&S, they were way into them.  

And I mention this because the person who had occasion to recommend this book to me says he does not even like them very much.  He said he thought I should read it because something about it reminded him of my writing.

So naturally, I looked for the thing that was reminiscent of my own work, in style or substance.  First, there was the beginning of the book, which describes an unusual public subsidy, a sort of extremely disorganized music course, that doesn't seem possible in places like the U.S.  I wrote a story (http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008/07/failure-inc.html) which imagined a similar "job in the production of creative art."  Second, the attention to the sometimes mundane and seemingly unremarkable detail.  In my case, they are simply unremarkable details, but in Stuart David's case, they seem to indicate a deeper theme of the book.

The first passage that merits mention is something from the beginning of the book, because it is easily one of the most hilarious portions of it.  But there is a touch of something wondrous about it too, that David captures:

"I looked down the list of courses again, even more desperately this time, and it remained a sorry selection: flower arranging, dog grooming, car mechanics.  But then, just when I was on the verge of giving up all hope, something seemed to materialise near the bottom of the page--a late addition, in tiny writing.  A course in Glasgow that appeared to have something to do with popular music.  I thought I might be hallucinating.  I called the flipchart man over and asked him about it.  He took the piece of paper from me and stood starting at it blankly.
'Hmn...' he said after a while.  'I didn't know that was on there.  That sounds strange.'
Then he wrote my name down, said he would look into it for me and sent us all home." (6)

But that is a description of how he came to sign up for it, and it is funnier when he describes what it was actually like:

"One thing that particularly intrigued me, though, as I wandered around, was the poster which hung on at least one wall of every room I went into.

It was a poster of a band, but a band I'd never heard of and they looked like a cross between The Commitments and Take That, if such a cross is possible.  There were seven or eight of them in the photograph, most prominently a woman with pineapple hair who had a saxophone strapped around her neck, and a guy in a vest who was lying on the floor in front of them all, propped up on one elbow, staring seductively into the camera.  I wondered if they were a real band, or if the poster was a fake, rigged up to give the detention centre the illusion of being a music course for the benefit of the inmates.

Time dragged.  All day, nothing happened.  No one played any music, no one even picked up an instrument and held it just to pose.  There didn't seem to be any musical instruments anywhere in the whole building, except for a drum kit with no h-hats and no cymbals in a corner of the freezing-cold live room.  I started to think the day would never end, but then, late in the afternoon, a woman came out of the main office and called me and two or three other people who had started the course that day into the studio control room.  I instantly recognised her as the person holding a saxophone in the band poster plastered on the walls." (11)

Soon, Stuart David meets Stuart Murdoch, and they play with a couple other people, in a couple one-off gigs as bands with different names.  Eventually they settle on the name of Rhode Island, and then finally become Belle & Sebastian.  This is in the mid-1990's in Scotland, so the brit pop scene looms large, and the sound of the band is quite different.  They have always had an original sound.  Murdoch's voice is unmistakable, and nobody sounds like him, though I suppose he sounded a tiny bit like Nick Drake (I only use the past tense because one must acknowledge that B&S are not the same band they used to be, though it does appear that it has always been defiantly Murdoch's).

I had a couple other passages to excerpt, both of which are sort of ensconced in 90's ephemera, but there were two main things I wanted to say about this book.  First, there is the cover.  This looks exactly like a cover of any of the other B&S albums, instantly recognizable and iconic. In that sense, it's a perfect cover.  Second, while it doesn't remind me exactly of Our Band Could Be Your Life, it reads a lot like one of the chapters about the bands in that book.  It takes place in the U.K. in the 90's, not the U.S. in the 80's, but it's definitely indie rock, and a lot of the same influences are in play.  There's also the added element that it is written by an insider and not a journalist or friend of the band.  It's also obviously a lot longer than one of those chapters, but a pretty short book in general.  The main thing that reminds me of it, though, is how it is just about the beginning of the band, and stops after the release of Tigermilk, basically at the point where If You're Feeling Sinister was being recorded.  I believe Stuart David left the band shortly thereafter, but there is no indication of any of the reasons why he would do so--except for it being "Murdoch's band."

There was one other famous group that came out of the same Beatbox recording studio space, and though I had never heard of them, many others must ostensibly have:

"The boy band themselves never seemed to be there.  There was a rumour that they were from Newcastle, and only ever came in at weekends when the course was closed.  But we did see them once, being hurried up through the corridor with towels thrown over their heads to hide their identities.  Before they reached the studio, though, they removed the towels, and they drew a stark contrast with the musicians on the course, the lazy figures sitting on the floor with their backs up against the wall, or lying on the punctured sofas dotted about the place.  They seemed to have come from a different world, a world of airbrushing and plastic moulding.  It was as if they already existed in the world of photographs, even though they were in the corridor.

And then they were gone, ushered into the sanctuary of the control room, and we all agreed that they were going nowhere, destined to disappear into the same oblivion as the band in the posters on the wall.

Their name was 911.

Over they next five years they sold ten million records." (90)

David does mention his love for the band Momus, and how he bonds with another person at Beatbox over him.  His anecdote about listening to his music on the internet is pure nostalgia, though an experience that many probably have not had:

"Semple was another Momus fan, an obsessive on the same level as I had become since Stuart brought me the mixtapes when I was ill.  Momus was probably one of the first artists to have his own website, and he was certainly one of the first to have his songs on there.  Or at least clips of his songs, which even at thirty seconds long stretched the internet to the limit of its capabilities in 1995.  Semple's patience for sitting on the sofa in the office, quietly smoking cigarettes, was limitless--and it needed to be for the specific task of listening to the clips on Momus' website.  When I found out what he was doing in there, I decided I had to get in on it too, and I got permission from Neil to have internet lessons.  This involved me sitting on the sofa beside Semple, while Neil's laptop sat on a desk in a far-off corner of the room, plugged into the phone line and blocking all incoming and outgoing calls to and from the office, while we waited upwards of a quarter of an hour for our next Momus clip to download.  

We were addicts, anxious to hear clips of songs we'd never heard before, and it didn't matter that the quality was so low they sounded as if they were being played to us over the telephone in the 1920s, or that each one cost more to download in phone bill charges than it would have cost to buy the whole album in a shop.  We lived for those thirty seconds of lo-fi magic, sent to us by science fiction from the future, when each one had to be erased from the hard drive before the next one was downloaded because there wasn't enough room to store two of them at once." (115-116)

In summary, this book should please both the hardcore and casual B&S fan, as well as those just looking for a relatively quick and rewarding read.  David's attention to detail is exceptional, and many will be encouraged (or at least entertained) by his story.  

See a Little Light - Bob Mould (with Michael Azzerad) (2011)

I first became aware of Bob Mould and Husker Du in late 2003.  I forget what spurred me to ask for Our Band Could Be Your Life for Christmas that year, but it had only been out for a couple years, and I tore through it rapidly.  My memory must be off because I recall also getting Mission of Burma's Vs. and Husker Du's New Day Rising on that day.  Whatever, it was basically my junior year of college that I got into them.  I had also been aware of them via the Dennis Cooper novel Try, in which the main character is a real fanboy.

Soon after New Day Rising, I got a burnt copy of Zen Arcade.  About a year later, after college, I picked up Flip Your Wig.  Not long after that, I saw Bob Mould play at the Metro in Chicago, on the Body of Song tour.  Of course during this time I was clamoring for all of the OBCBYL bands to reunite so I could see them live.  Mission of Burma did, and soon after so did Dinosaur Jr.  Husker Du never did, and apparently never will, even though rumors will always continue to swirl, such as last year when they decided to reissue some of their merchandising.  Bob Mould just plays some Husker Du songs live, and that will be as good as it gets.

The chapter from OBCBYL on Husker Du is one of the best.  Most chapters would make me want to listen to the band in question, if I hadn't heard them before.  Their music fit my taste: loud, fast, angry/anguished.  Perhaps more intriguing is that 2 of their 3 members were gay.  They were sort of a mysterious band to me, and I was really into them from about 2003 through 2007 (though I've always listened to their albums), then my ardor sort of faded.  I'd check out the last few Bob Mould albums, but a true reunion was the only thing that would have really excited me.

Enter Mould's latest album, released a little over a month ago in late March 2016.  It was probably the Pitchfork review that did it, reminding me that he had actually released a memoir.  I remember hearing about it when it was released, but I guess I was distracted in law school or whatever in 2011.  Anyways I put a hold on it at the CPL, and voila, it arrives quickly and now continues along our path of indie rock memoirs after Kim Gordon and Carrie Brownstein.   

It's hard to compare the three.  I don't want to say any single one is the best.  The most obvious thing is that Mould's is the biggest.  It's definitely the longest, around 380 pages, and it feels more revealing than the other two, even though one could not call either Gordon's or Brownstein's opaque.  Here is the best way I can differentiate them: theirs are more poetic and impressionistic; Mould's is more intricately detailed and informative.  One might say that Mould's is less edited, but the book is credited "with" Michael Azzerad, who is, of course, the author of OBCBYL.  So yeah, maybe it is a little more bloated, but I found pretty much the whole thing entertaining.  I guess him and Kim Gordon have been active in the music scene for roughly the same amount of time, but the kinds of songs they write are quite different, and that translates to different styles of memoir.  But enough with the comparisons--most people are not going to blindly pick up See a Little Light, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, or Girl in a Band unless they're already familiar with the artists.  All three are great.

If what was previously known about Husker Du was mysterious, then this book changes everything.  Mould is completely open and honest throughout the entire narrative, and he provides very detailed accounts of his entire musical journey, from his early upbringing, through Husker Du, his early solo work, Sugar, his shift to electronica, and back.  Perhaps sensing that he is kind of a unique figure in the larger scheme of gay rights, he writes quite eloquently on the topic.  Obviously, apart from interband tensions (only a small portion of which overlap with such themes), this is the major "drama" of the memoir.  Most of the passages I would like to quote, the most compelling portions of the text, are on this topic.

But also, like OBCBYL, this book made me rediscover some older material.  I had never really heard "Eight Miles High," a cover song that I would probably rank in their top 5.  I had never really explored Candy Apple Grey or Warehouse either--not even Metal Circus to be honest.  I had Land Speed Record but I still haven't really heard Everything Falls Apart.  As for Sugar, the only thing I previously heard was File Under: Easy Listening, which I bought in the summer of 2007 on my road trip through the U.S. from some random record store in the Midwest for a few bucks.  Copper Blue and Beaster seem to be the more definitive releases, and Mould mentions the Beaster track "JC Auto" several times, and yes, it is a really intense and awesome song.  Also interesting is that "Gift" from FU:EL, which I considered that album's best song, features a guitar pedal that Kevin Shields lent to Mould, the same one used on "You Made Me Realise."  Mould was also heavily influenced by Loveless at the time of its release.

Mould also moved around the country a lot.  Off the top of my head, he is born and raised in a small town in upstate New York, then moves to Minneapolis for college, and lives there until Husker Du becomes big enough that he can purchase a home in a rural suburb, where he lives through their end.  After that, he moves to New York City (being something of a pioneer in Williamsburg), then Austin, then back to NYC, then Washington D.C., and finally ends in San Francisco.  I feel like I'm missing a couple places in there, but whatever.

***

Anyways, I've finally returned from a weekend away in which I neglected to bring the book and reflected upon it in absentia.  I went to see my sister graduate from college and I brought way too much stuff for a two night stay as it was.  Here is one of the aforementioned promised quotes.

First, I would quote the whole opening of Chapter 17, but its not necessarily poetic.  It just tells the story of how Dennis Cooper interviewed him for Spin:

"The writer Dennis Cooper was a huge Husker Du fan.  He'd even touched on the band in one or two of his novels.  Now he was trying to build a name for himself as a journalist.  Dennis Cooper is gay.  So in the summer of 1994, Spin magazine asked Ryko, How about we send Dennis Cooper down to Austin to spend some time with Bob?
I knew what was about to happen.  This was to be the "Bob is gay" story, and I could do this the easy way or the hard way.  I wasn't thrilled about it for a number of reasons, beyond personal ones.  My first concerns were that this news would make it tough for my family, and that my fans and peers would recontextualize everything I had done with my work.  I also knew that the press was always going to write whatever they were going to write.  I could try to steer the story the way I wanted it to read, but ultimately, editorial always wins out.  It's the business."  (221)

Okay, I'm having trouble locating the one really poetic passage about how people might start interpreting the meaning of the songs differently after they found out he was gay.  He writes about how the themes of his music are universal and apply regardless of gender and sexuality.  Except for one instance, which comes amidst the description of side two of Zen Arcade:

"A lot of side two is my blind rage and self-hatred, my failed relationships, and my confusing sex with love.  That whole side was a blur while recording.  It sounds like someone is being pounded into a gigantic pile of broken glass.  Some of the words and ideas seem misguided now, but history has proven they're made of a lasting substance.  Gay people have always pegged "The Biggest Lie" as a gay song, and it is, seeing as it was informed by a sexual misadventure with a straight friend.  It was about me hoping an awkward physical tumble would turn into something more, and it not happening." (90)

Later, Mould mentions that the only part of his oeuvre that he will not revisit is this part of Zen Arcade and it is upsetting to think that we will never get to hear "I'll Never Forget You" performed live again.

Mould also tells the surprising story of how he briefly worked for the WCW in the late 90's.  He also fairly casually mentions how he started taking steroids after four weeks on the job.  He doesn't seem to mention stopping them, though one presumes that was the case.  He also tells the fairly insane story of the wrestler Chris Benoit from his perspective.

But it is the stories of his relationships with Michael and Kevin that are ultimately some of the most painful:

"I had been faithful to Mike, faithful to Kevin, and now I was single.  Everything was open and new.  I'd been unhitched for one month in the last twenty-one years.  Now I was learning the ropes of dating and casual sex in D,C.  I had my freedom, but I knew I had to be somewhat cautious.  I said to Rich, keep an eye on me and tell me if I start acting stupid.  I don't think I ever got too crazy." (333)

The ending of the book pretty much tells the story of how he never really embraced the gay community or the gay lifestyle until this period in his life.  The story of how he meets up with another gay blogger is "both comical and sad" and quite endearing, such as his disappointment with the dude being heavier than his pictures looked, but still being intimate despite a few other sketchy details.

Along the way there are some pretty good stories about other indie rock luminaries, and reflections on what it means to be "out" and his life's work (up to age 50).  He ends the book by saying that it has been a pretty good first 50 years and he is excited for what is to come.

Are you jealous?

Sure.  After reading this book, try and tell me that you could have a more interesting and entertaining life.  Not necessarily everyone wants and interesting and entertaining life, and I'm sure many would not want to have the experiences Mould has had.  The book is brimming with trauma, but I suppose that's the sort of material that makes for the best writing.

Take, for example, people who would never smoke:

"I started smoking a pack a day at the beginning of college, and by the end, I was up to three packs a day.  Smoking had become both the centerpiece and timepiece of my life.  Every cigarette was six minutes long, and I could practically mark out the whole day with smoking, like a sundial.  Six minutes on, nine minutes off.  Repeat sixty times a day.  It was like playing Scrabble: when it's your turn, you turn over the egg timer and start thinking.  I have an innate sense of time, but smoking was this additional timekeeper, like a wristwatch." (258)

You see, some people smoke and are just lazy, and other people that smoke are like super successful and amazing.  In short, while I could never say there is any "right" way to smoke, using it as a timekeeper through sporadic bursts of energy sounds nice in theory, but I don't think that's normally the way it is in practice.  Mould quits when he is 37, and also starts to make other changes in his life.  It's the focus on these kind of personal details that make this memoir so well-rounded.

There is not much more to say except that Mould is playing the Metro again, two days from now!  I just found this out a day or two ago.  Though it is sold out, I may try to go.  His newest album is very good, as have been his last few.  I'd imagine he can build a pretty strong setlist with his entire discography.  So, I guess this book came around at the perfect time for me, just in time to remind me that I should go.

Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk - Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (1997)

I first read Please Kill Me about 9 or 10 years ago, right after I graduated college.  I decided to read it again when I finished my last couple books quickly and the newest one hadn't arrived at the library yet.  I am very glad I did this, and it seems really cliche at this point and non-prestigious, but I must anoint this yet another one of the Best Books reviewed on Flying Houses.  This book is not perfect--it's maybe 50-100 pages too long, but once you start to get wrapped up in the characters, you would probably go on another 200.  I mean, this book never got boring to me.  There were some parts that just aren't as well told as others, but there is so much detail and vulnerability in these pages that no reader can encounter this text without becoming unmoved.  Not everybody is into punk rock music, but everybody should read this book.  Most people like some kind of music, and this book hits on most genres anyways.

There are a lot of similarities to Lexicon Devil (also on the Best Books list), and perhaps one could accuse me of being a sucker for the oral history genre.  I mean, I also really liked Rant.  But it's more than the format, or the concept of a book devoid of exposition, operating purely on dialogue.  The genre just tends to elevate storytelling to a higher level, accentuating unique details from shared memories and sensory impressions.  More obviously, none of these books are PC.  They describe experiences that never should have been allowed to happen.  Please Kill Me positively revels in this material.

Still, it's not an endorsement of a dissolute lifestyle, and focuses a little bit more on the music than Lexicon Devil.  Now this may be because the Germs were a terrible band who seemed to actively avoid improving their chops.  But the other book this calls to mind is Our Band Could Be Your Life.  Where Please Kill Me leaves off (late 70's/early 80's), Our Band Could Be Your Life pretty much picks up.  The format is different, but the attitude is similar.  OBCBYL feels a little bit more academic, and is probably not as engaging a read because once you finish the story of each band, you're done.  I think ultimately what makes Please Kill Me so special is the power of its story.

The story starts in 1965 with Lou Reed and ends in 1992 with the death of Jerry Nolan.  The interviews that comprise this "oral history" seem to have started in the late 70's with Punk magazine and wrapped up with more comprehensive, authoritative, and "sober" interviews in 1994 and 1995.

Before moving on, I want to note that this book is ripe for a re-issue, with new material.  The final section of the book (the epilogue) is titled "Nevermind: 1980-1992."  Now, when this book was published in 1997, one of the most fucked up periods of popular music was ascendant, and few would anticipate the backlash to that era, or the revival of the so-called "CBGB scene."  Almost all of the artists in Please Kill Me made "comebacks" (to varying levels of success), and many others have died.  To recognize such occurrences, I would include a "post-epilogue" and title it "Cashing In: 2003-2015."  Apparently, a 20th anniversary edition will be released next year, so my predictions are not far off.

The book starts off on an impossibly high note with its material on the Velvet Underground.  Straight out of the gates, it is immediately apparent that nobody is trying to maintain a squeaky-clean PR image.  Lou Reed is basically at the center of the depravity.  There are PLENTY of juicy excerpts that I could include here, but I will leave them to be sought out by discerning readers.  Instead, I will try to focus on the historical import of the artists described.

Now, most people will say punk rock started with the Ramones.  Some say the Stooges.  Others say the Sex Pistols.  The authors contend that they invented the term themselves.  Sometimes I say that the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" is the real beginning of punk rock.  But truly, honestly, the Velvet Underground embodied everything that came to define the genre (except the faster tempos):

"Lou Reed: Andy Warhol told me that what we were doing with the music was the same thing he was doing with painting and movies and writing--i.e., not kidding around.  To my mind, nobody in music was doing anything that even approximated the real thing, with the exception of us.  We were doing a specific thing that was very, very real.  It wasn't slick or a lie in any conceivable way, which was the only way we could work with him.  Because the first thing I liked about Andy was that he was very real." (7)

Danny Fields makes his first appearance here, and describes how he convinced Lou Reed and John Cale to cut "the Exploding Plastic Inevitable" from their live show (which was a kind of S&M performance with lights and film projections) and to leave Andy Warhol for a better manager, to "make it" as a band.  Fields is practically a non-stop presence throughout the book and tells many of the best stories--though the reader tends to wonder if some of these stories are more "legend" than "fact."  Actually, there are several points in the book where the speaker (or interviewee) draws a distinction between the story everyone hears and the reality that happened.  One of them is the famed meeting of Jim Morrison with Nico and Andy Warhol, indelibly portrayed by Crispin Glover in The Doors:

"Danny Fields: I've never had any respect for Oliver Stone, but after seeing his version of the Morrison/Nico meeting in the Doors movie--'Hello, I am Nico, would you like to go to bed with me?'--the reality of it couldn't have been more different.
What really happened was that I met Morrison at the Elektra office in Los Angeles and he followed me back to the Castle in his rented car.  Morrison walked into the kitchen and Nico was there and they stood and circled each other.
Then they stared at the floor and didn't say a word to each other.  They were both too poetic to say anything.  It was a very boring, poetic, silent thing that was going on between them.  They formed a mystical bond immediately--I think Morrison pulled Nico's hair and then he proceeded to get extremely drunk and I fed him whatever was left of my drugs that Edie Sedgwick hadn't stolen." (29)

Right after this early section about the Velvet Underground with passing references to the Doors, the Stooges are introduced.  Now, the Stooges are one of the major elements of this book, and almost all of the anecdotes about them are mind-boggling.  I particularly appreciate the story of Iggy Pop's first experience with weed:

"Iggy Pop:...I realized that these guys were way over my head, and that what they were doing was so natural to them that it was ridiculous for me to make a studious copy of it, which is what most white blues bands did.
Then one night, I smoked a joint.  I'd always wanted to take drugs, but I'd never been able to because the only drug I knew about was marijuana and I was a really bad asthmatic.  Before that, I wasn't interested in drugs, or getting drunk, either.  I just wanted to play and get something going, that was all I cared about.  But this girl, Vivian, who had given me the ride to Chicago, left me with a little grass.
So one night I went down by the sewage treatment plant by the Loop, where the river is entirely industrialized.  It's all concrete banks and effluvia by the Marina Towers.  So I smoked this joint and then it hit me.
I thought, What you gotta do is play your own simple blues.  I could describe my experience based on the way those guys are describing theirs...
So that's what I did.  I appropriated a lot of their vocal forms, and also their turns of phrase--either heard or misheard or twisted from blues songs.  So 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' is probably my mishearing of 'Baby Please Don't Go.'" (38-39)

The MC5 are also introduced around this section.  Together, these two bands (along with the Dead Boys, who come along towards the end) comprise the entirety of bands based outside of New York City.  While this is a book about the origins of punk rock, it is also a vivid portrait of NYC in the 70's.  The material on MC5, I can take or leave.  I've tried listening to them, and just can't really get into it.  The music just sounds more dated to me, for some reason.

The New York Dolls come next.  Now, I actually saw the Stooges and the New York Dolls for the first time on the same day, at Little Steven's Underground Garage Festival on Randall's Island in August of 2003 (maybe '04, I can't remember).  Syl Sylvain had just died, and the New York Dolls were the third to last band.  They seemed a bit like a nostalgia act, but David Johansen was energetic and enthused and the crowd loved them.  The Strokes then played next, a very efficient, no-frills, solid set.  The Stooges closed, and to date remains one of the best performances I have seen.  Mike Watt was on bass, but both Asheton brothers were in, and Iggy (then in his mid-50's) seemed as potent as ever.

Really I'm skipping around though.  There's a section before the New York Dolls that introduces Patti Smith.  The material on Patti Smith in this book is essential.  It might as well be Patti Smith's book.  After I finished it again, I watched a performance from the Primavera Sound Festival in May 2015, and while I was slightly let down when I saw her at Lollapalooza in 2005, she seemed like she has tapped into a more powerful energy of late.  Her rendition of Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" (despite screwing up the words) is an emotionally devastating experience that should make you cry in the most beautiful way.

There are several "hearts" of this book, and Patti Smith is one of them (Iggy is another).  The success of her memoir Just Kids has fueled a late-career renaissance, and I hope to read and review that book in the near future on this site.

Jim Carroll, another one of the several characters in this story that recently passed away, is introduced near this point.  So is David Bowie:

"Cyrinda Foxe: David Bowie and his wife Angela had a very open marriage.  They were sleeping with anybody they felt like sleeping with.  David and Angela and I had a menage a trois for about five minutes, but then I made her leave because David and I were gonna play.  Angela was fucking David's black bodyguard, and David and I used to get down on all fours and peek in their keyhole and watch them fuck.  I was sort of like a new toy for David on the Ziggy Stardust tour.  But while we were in San Francisco, David asked me, 'Are you in love with me?'
I said, 'No.'  I wasn't about to say, 'Yes!' I was still tripping around.  I had no flies on me then.  No salt on my tail.  I didn't want to get tied down.  Besides, Tony DeFries wanted everybody to be this Bowie thing.  I didn't want to cut my hair like that.  So I wasn't impressed with them.  I mean, okay, I get to go on a plane and go somewhere, but that's all I thought it was.  So when David Bowie asked if I was in love with him, and I told him no, he left me there." (134)

Soon after, Patti Smith and Television take center stage.  At this point, Richard Hell was still in the band, and perhaps because of his "literary" background tells some of the best stories.  This one explains the book's title:

"Richard Lloyd: Richard Hell had designed a T-shirt for himself that said Please Kill Me, but he wouldn't wear it.  I was like, 'I'll wear it.'  So I wore it when we played upstairs at Max's Kansas City, and afterwards these kids came up to me.  These fans gave me this really psychotic look--they looked as deep into my eyes as they possibly could--and said, 'Are you serious?'
Then they said, 'If that's what you want, we'll be glad to oblige because we're such big fans!' They were just looking at me, with that wild-eyed look, and I thought, I'm not wearing this shirt again." (173)

The Ramones come into the picture, and are introduced by their infamous song about street hustling, "53rd and 3rd," with background history supplied by Jim Carroll.  There is also an interesting story about the song "Chinese Rocks," which sheds light on one of the lines to the song ("Is Dee Dee home?"):

"Richard Hell: Dee Dee called me one day and said, 'I wrote a song that the Ramones won't do.'  He said, 'It's not finished.  How about I come over and show it to you and we can finish it if you like it?'  So I believe he brought an acoustic guitar over.  And I had my bass.  Basically the song was done, but he just didn't have another verse.  I wrote two lines.  That's all.  It was basically Dee Dee's song, though I think the lyrics, the verses I wrote, were good.
Dee Dee Ramone: The reason I wrote that song was out of spite for Richard Hell, because he told me he was gonna write a song better than Lou Reed's 'Heroin,' so I went home and wrote 'Chinese Rocks.'
I wrote it by myself, in Debbie Harry's apartment on First Avenue and First Street.  Then Richard Hell put that line in it, so I gave him some credit." (213-214)

After this, the story jumps over to England briefly and covers the Sex Pistols.  There is one story that made me smile (anybody that has run with a crew of "punks" should be able to relate):

"Bob Gruen:...I didn't see Johnny with a girl until the last night.  He left the last show with some girl who was backstage.  It was kind of a surprise, because from the first minute I met him, Johnny didn't seem to ever like anything.
He just seemed to be in a really bad mood from day one.  You know, everything sucked.  He was so cynical and sarcastic about everything that he would always point out the derogatory aspect of everything.  That's why I was so surprised when I saw him leave the Winterland gig with a girl on his arm and half a smile on his face.  It was the most human thing I ever saw, because it was something so out of character to see him enjoy a moment of life." (331)

The book ends with a few interesting stories: Phil Spector's production of the Ramones album End of the Century, the deaths of Sid & Nancy, Nico and Johnny Thunders, and a lot of stuff about the Dead Boys...I could quote more (obviously the Phil Spector anecdotes are priceless)--but I've gone on long enough in this review and it's time to wrap it up.  I want to include one final quote that I found very punk, and certainly pertinent one month after the blockbuster SCOTUS decision:

"Legs McNeil: Gay liberation had really exploded.  Homosexual culture had really taken over--Donna Summer, disco, it was so boring.  Suddenly in New York, it was cool to be gay, but it just seemed to be about suburbanites who sucked cock and went to discos.  I mean, come on, 'Disco, Disco Duck?' I don't think so.
So we said, 'No, being gay doesn't make you cool.  Being cool makes you cool, whether you're gay or straight.'  People didn't like that too much.  So they called us homophobic.  And of course, being the obnoxious people we were, we said, 'Fuck you, you faggots.'
Mass movements are always so un-hip  That's what was great about punk.  It was an antimovement, because there was knowledge there from the very beginning that with mass appeal comes all those tedious folks who need to be told what to think.  Hip can never be a mass movement.  And culturally, the gay liberation movement and all the rest of the movements were the beginning of political correctness, which was just fascism to us.  Real fascism, more rules.
But as far as being homophobic, that was ludicrous, because everyone we hung out with was gay.  No one had a problem with that, you know, fine, fuck whoever you want.  I mean Arturo would regale me with these great sex stories.  I'd be going, 'Wow, what happened then?'
What was great about the scene was that people's curiosity seemed stronger than their fear.  The time was rife with genuine exploration, but not in a trendy mass-movement way.  And I was always fascinated by how anyone made it through the day, what they really did when the lights were out, to keep their sanity, or lose it." (275)

In short, if you read this book, not only will you understand me better, but you will also understand yourself better.  How you react to some of the more salacious stuff can act as a barometer of the types of art you appreciate.  I always prefer the real, the raw, and the honest truth: psychological realism.  It seems that most all of the artists on display in this "bible" think along similar lines, and I can only state that they have been powerful influences.