POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“From Maggie May, 1981” copyright © 1987 by The Estate of Lester Bangs
“The National Anthem” copyright © 2004 by Jonathan Lethem
“Blue Guitar” copyright © 2004 by Amanda Davis
“Untitled” copyright © 2004 by JT LeRoy
“Dirty Mouth” copyright © 2004 by Tom Perrotta
“Hallelujah” copyright © 2004 by Tanker Dane
“Why Go” copyright © 2004 by Lisa Tucker
“All the Security Guards By Name” copyright © 2004 by Aimee Bender
“She Once Had Me” copyright © 2004 by Anthony DeCurtis
“Milestones” copyright © 2004 by Hannah Tinti
“Death in the Alt-Country” copyright © 2004 by Neal Pollack
“I Shot the Sheriff” copyright © 2004 by Toure
“A Simple Explanation of the Afterlife” copyright © 2004 by Victor LaValle
“The Eternal Helen” copyright © 2004 by Heidi Julavits
“Swampthroat” copyright © 2004 by Arthur Bradford
“Bouncing” copyright © 2004 by Jennifer Belle
“Graffiti Monk” copyright © 2004 by Ernesto Quinonez
“Smoking Inside” copyright © 2004 by Darin Strauss
“The System” copyright © 2004 by Judy Budnitz
“Four Last Songs” copyright © 2004 by David Ebershoff
“Dying on the Vine” copyright © 2004 by Elissa Shappell
“Rio” copyright © 2004 by Zev Borow
“King Heroin” copyright © 2004 by Nelson George
“The Bodies of Boys” copyright © 2004 by Julianna Baggott
MTV Music Television and all related titles, logos, and characters are trademarks of MTV Networks, a division of Viacom International Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8645-6
ISBN-10: 1-4165-8645-8
POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
contents
Introduction by Neil Strauss
Lester Bangs
“Maggie May” (1981)
Jonathan Lethem
“The National Anthem” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Speeding Motorcycle” by Daniel Johnston as performed by Yo La Tengo
Amanda Davis
“Blue Guitar” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Blue Guitar” by the Cowboy Junkies
JT LeRoy
“Unfitted” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters
Tom Perrotta
“Dirty Mouth” inspired by the music and lyrics from “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty
Tanker Dane
“Hallelujah” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen as performed by Jeff Buckley
Lisa Tucker
“Why Go” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Why Go” by Pearl Jam
Aimee Bender
“All the Security Guards By Name” inspired by the music and lyrics from “The Lobby” by Jane Siberry
Anthony DeCurtis
“She Once Had Me” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” by the Beatles
Hannah Tinti
“Milestones” inspired by the music from “Milestones” by Miles Davis
Neal Pollack
“Death in the Alt-Country” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Mama Tried” by Merle Haggard
Touré
“I Shot the Sheriff” inspired by the music and lyrics from “I Shot the Sheriff” by Bob Marley
Victor LaValle
“A Simple Explanation of the Afterlife” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Aluminum” by the White Stripes
Heidi Julavits
“The Eternal Helen” inspired by the music and lyrics from “I Found a Reason” by the Velvet Underground as performed by Cat Power
Arthur Bradford
“Swampthroat” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Highway to Hell” by AC/DC
Jennifer Belle
“Bouncing” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Graceland” by Paul Simon
Ernesto Quiñonez
“Graffiti Monk” inspired by the music and lyrics from “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
Darin Strauss
“Smoking Inside” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Remedy” by the Black Crowes
Judy Budnitz
“The System” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Way Down in the Hole” by Tom Waits
David Ebershoff
“Four Last Songs” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Four Last Songs” by Herman Hesse and composer Richard Strauss
Elissa Shappell
“Dying on the Vine” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Dying on the Vine” by John Cale
Zev Borow
“Rio” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Rio” by Duran Duran
Nelson George
“King Heroin” inspired by the music and lyrics from “King Heroin” by James Brown
Julianna Baggott
“The Bodies of Boys” inspired by the music and lyrics from “Spirit in the Night” by Bruce Springsteen
Author Bios
INTRODUCTION
neil strauss
There is a beautiful album from the ’60s called Odessey and Oracle. Recorded by the Zombies, it is one of the most meticulously arranged and stunningly executed albums of the rock era. It unfolds like a paper rose, each song twisted together by themes of memory, loss, love, and the changing of the seasons.
For years, I wondered what wondrous tale held all the songs together, what feat of conceptual derring-do lay behind the music. And then, one day, my chance to unravel the mysteries of the album came: I would be interviewing the Zombies for The New York Times. And so I asked the question: “What ties all these songs together?” The band’s answer: nothing. They are just songs, the members said, unrelated in any way.
I was stunned. I grappled with their answer for days afterward, until I came to a conclusion: They were wrong. Sure, they may have written and recorded the songs. But I had listened to them. I had the pictures in my head. They were mine now. And so, as I continued to listen to the songs, I wove them together into a fifty-page musical, a tale of murder and intrigue, heartbreak and betrayal. Zombies be damned.
There are some songwriters who don’t like to discuss the meanings of their lyrics or the intention behind them. They don’t want to interfere with the interpretations their fans have imposed on the music, they say. When I heard this answer in interviews, I used to think that it was a cop-out. But the beauty of music is that it is, as Marshall McLuhan would say, a hot medium. It occupies only the ears, leaving the imagination free to wander (unlike films or the Internet). The closest equivalent is literature, which occupies only the eyes. The intent may belong to the artist, but the significance is the property of the beholder.
Lit Riffs then are the synesthetic experience that occurs when the senses cross, when sound becomes text. The converse experience is far from a rarity: books have led to countless classic songs and albums. Some o
f the best work of David Bowie and Pink Floyd was inspired by George Orwell; Bruce Springsteen based a song on Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me; U2 brought Salman Rushdie to musical life with “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”; the Cure made Albert Camus a goth icon with “Killing a Stranger”; Metallica brought “One” into focus with Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. Cribbing from everything from the Bible to Yeats is a time-honored tradition among songwriters, as much a staple of the art as coffee and cigarettes.
Though there are exceptions (from Haruki Murakami to James Joyce), far fewer writers look to music as the jumping-off point for a story or novel. Yet the simple act of listening to most songs, even nonnarrative ones, triggers a narrative or imaginary video in the mind. For example, many can’t help but imagine a fist connecting with Britney Spears when she sings “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” even though that’s not even what the song’s about. It’s simply their personal interpretation (or perhaps, for some, it’s wish fulfillment).
Thus, twenty-four writers—from leading novelists to top music critics—were asked to riff on a piece of music. The authors included here were instructed only to choose a song, write a story inspired by it, and provide an explanation of their choice. They were free to choose whatever music they wanted—even if, as in the case of Darin Strauss’s Black Crowes-derived be-careful-what-you-wish-for tale, it wasn’t a song they necessarily loved. And they were free to interpret in any way they saw fit, even if, as in the case of Victor Lavalle’s story, a droning, lyric-less song by the White Stripes reminded him of Iceland, which made him think of ice cubes, leading to a haunting fable of death and decomposition that is far from simple White Stripes homage.
Some stories here, like the Lester Bangs piece that begins (and in fact inspired) this collection, and Neal Pollack’s dissection of alt-country posers, are music criticism disguised as narrative. Others, like Toure’s Biblical Bob Marley parable, take the lyrics literally and tell the story of a song in prose form. Many, like Elissa Shappell’s John Cale tale, riff on the metaphor, mood, and message of a song. Tom Perrotta mixes both the Tom Petty original and the Johnny Cash cover of “I Won’t Back Down” into a vignette capturing the strange, mixed-up feelings that arise in grade school when social and parental pressures collide.
In her wonderful tale of Vietnam vets and the misfit obsessed with them, Lisa Tucker takes not just a song—“Why Go” by Pearl Jam—but also the album, the genre, and the period of the music, and rolls it all into one memorable story. In the process, her tale manages to capture the reason why a sad song can actually be uplifting to listen to—because it lets listeners know that they are not alone in their feelings, that there is someone else in this world who understands them.
Elsewhere, Anthony DeCurtis places the music of the Beatles squarely in his story, as a backdrop to the narrative. Julianna Baggott flips the script on Bruce Springsteen, exploring the point of view of one of the female characters, Crazy Janie, who tramps through his songs. Jennifer Belle writes a prequel to Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” Tanker Dane finds his “Hallelujah” not just in the version by Jeff Buckley, but in his tragic death. And Ernesto Quiñonez finds his inspiration the furthest afield, basing his elegy to the heyday of tagging on the aura of the video for “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.
While rock fans tend to be obsessed with lyrics, basing their stories on words, Hannah Tinti looked to the music—the modal interplay, the harmonic innovation, the high-flying solos—of a Miles Davis composition in order to structure a poignant moment intertwining a man falling with a man ascending.
Taken together, all these stories, interpretations, and points of view make up the greatest compilation album you can’t listen to. Of course, all of the above story analysis is my own, and has nothing to do with the actual intent of the author (just as their interpretations have nothing to do with the intent of the actual songwriter or performer). Perhaps I would have been better off writing a song based on these lit riffs and completing the circle.
Of course, due to greedy music publishers, the lyrics to each song could not be printed in their entirety, which is an advantage in many ways because you should be experiencing the original inspiration as music (instead of text) anyway. In fact, just download the songs and, if so inspired, come up with your own lit riff. And if you ever happen to run into a former member of the Zombies, remember to tell him that he was wrong. Those songs do mean something.
MAGGIE MAY
lester bangs
Wake up Maggie
I think I got something to say to you.
“Maggie May”
Rod Stewart
Years later, flipping idly through his collection of ten thousand albums, he settled on an original mono copy of Sonny Boy Williamson’s Down and Out Blues on Chess, slid it on the turntable, then lay back in his pasha’s throne of a chair, contemplating the irony of it all: the wretched ragged wino on the cover of the LP, and what on earth he would do with a fourteen-year-old girl if she spread her legs before him, begging to be fucked. The wino might do better, he chuckled to himself. After all those Vogue manikins, the would-be Bardots, next year’s Lorens and closing-time pickups; with some of them he’d been so drunk he’d never be able to say with absolute certainty that … no, there was just no way. Right now he’d rather be sipping this hundred-year-old brandy and digging Sonny Boy running down those same old lines he first heard when he was living on mashed potatoes than fuck anything. Sonny Boy was juicier than Brooke Shields would ever be. It had been better to sit and starve, nursing his desperation till some kinda break came his way. When it came, it wasn’t the kind of break he’d had in mind. Which only figured.
* * *
This fictional piece was inspired by the song “Maggie May,” by Rod Stewart and Martin Quittenton, but not by the lives or activities of any real person. Nothing herein is based on any actual circumstances or events, or meant to impute actual conduct, motives, or intentions to any real persons.
It was 1966. There she was, the Perfect Slattern, propped atop that barstool ugly and coarse as only far-gone alcoholics can be, forty if she was alive but still looking all there in a leathery kind of way that surprised him, that turned him on, but here he’d somehow ended up, ditched by a friend who unlike him had enough money to keep on drinking, and he looked at her and she at him and a pact was thereby sealed before a single word was spoken on either side—now is that true love, or what? Mutual convenience perceived through alcoholic fog was more like it. He walked over and slid up onto the empty stool next to her, and she took one look at him—his hair, his clothes, his hangdog face—and immediately knew who was buying the drinks. She asked what he’d have, he ordered a shot of rum and a pint of Guinness. He wanted to court blackout or at least unaccountability before he had a chance to think about what he might be getting into. He drank so fast even she was a little surprised, laughing and drawling something like, “Surely I can’t look that bad—Christ, I just came back from the powder room. Or is Art really that agonizing?” And she threw back her brass mane, opened those full lips, and laughed again, a true healthy hardehar this time, nothing self-effacing or ingratiating about it. She had him, and she knew it, and somehow his position as Henry Miller-style roué without a sou to his still unfamous name, living off his wits and special Way with the Ladies, did not seem to save much face or cut too far into her cynicism. He was just too pathetic, anybody could have him for a meal, but she was the one willing to take him out of sheer strumpet benevolence if nothing else—and since she now owned him dick to dorsal he might as well get an equivalent eyeful of his Owner: she looked good. Damn good. Better, in fact, at least to him at that moment, than all those damn ersatz Twiggies flitting around Carnaby Street on Dexedrine scripts and boyfriends in bands with first albums just breaking the U.S. Top 100, the kind of girl you saw everywhere then and he’d fucked enough of to know he didn’t really like them, because anorexia somehow just failed to light his fuse, ninety pounds of speed
-nattering Everybird, never read a book in their collective lives beyond Shrimpton’s Beauty Tips, less soul than Malcolm Muggeridge’s mother, just sitting there waiting for someone to happen but sufficiently plugged into the Scene to let them in on which name it was gonna be hip to drop next week. He always thought when he fucked them he oughta come away with purple bruises on each hip, war trophies of the ’orrid bone-bangin’ he’d endured just ’cause some poof on the telly told them all that you just could never be too thin….
Now, here, next to him, sat a middle-aged slut with bulging reddened alkie eyes, leering through rotten teeth, just beginning to go to fat in a serious way. He began to get a serious hard-on, and he wondered for a second if he had some kind of Mother Fixation, then decided that he couldn’t care less. He got harder with the decision to stand his ground, incest be damned. Looked straight at all of her, as she at him: he estimated size 38 tits, beginning to sag a bit but that was all right, the way of nature wa’n’t it?, globes that heaved up from a rather low-cut frock even for that neighborhood, and like the rest of her those breasts might reek but retained just a pinch of that pink, plump, girlishly buxom crèmecast of milkmaid tenderness, and gazing rapt and rigid he could not help but wonder awestruck at just what manner of pagan secrets might lie deep in the pit of cleavage. Surely there was something down there, one had but to dig breastplate-deep to dredge up treasures untold (the Twigs, of course, had no tits whatsoever and were all prissily proud of it), perhaps jewels and musks she’d carried all the way from the narcotized dens of the mystic East, where she’d spent her girlhood tremulously awaiting the needs of some fat sheikh who was so stoned and overstocked fuckwise he never even got around to her, so in revenge she stole into his inner sanctum and purloined his most prized rubies, opals, amulets, and blocks of pure hash and opium, hiding them in the handiest place, and though the master didn’t catch her at theft he did find her encroaching on his hophead den and in punishment booted her ample ass clean out of his fleet of tents and into the molten Sahara sands, a white-hot sea where she’d’ve roasted like a squab had she not hitched a ride from missionaries, whose camel deposited her on the outskirts of Tangiers, where she sold her virgin essence to some stogie-smelly Yank robber baron who came quick anyway, but after he OD’d on absinthe she picked his pockets clean, netting not only enough money to keep her off the streets and in the bars for a while but a ticket to London via Luxury Cruise, in the course of which she enjoyed a brief affair with the son of a famous American expatriate or so he claimed, but then he apologized for his rather pallid passions explaining that Dear Old Dad had bequeathed him a palpable preference for boybutt. She didn’t believe a word out of his mouth and they both had the time of their lives getting drunk like Boer War vets on the anniversary of the Big Battle, forgetting all about sex for the nonce. Landing on Blake’s native soil, she made a beeline for the seediest part of London Central, renting a crummy room she decorated with a reproduction of Man Ray’s famed Box with Two Peaches in the Sky taped up on one wall, which cheered her up no end.
Lit Riffs Page 1