When he remembered to put people in his movies, George Lucas directed American Graffiti, the best rock & roll movie ever made. He focused not on musicians, whose stories have proved startlingly hard to tell well, and instead showed how music fit into the characters’ lives, and rather than sensationalize the disc jockey, Lucas showed a self-effacing Wolfman Jack eating a melting popsicle.
In literature, the closest equivalent is Nick Hornby’s excellent 1995 novel High Fidelity, which sells out every guy who loved British punk and pop at the beginning of the Eighties. With traitorous accuracy, he reveals the pretensions and poses tied to a leather jacket and a pair of black jeans, leaving many of us feeling naked and more than slightly silly.As painful as it is to be so exposed, it is much worse to read Elmore Leonard name-drop haphazardly in his new book, Be Cool. Too often it seems better not to see the pathetic attempts to deal with rock & roll culture in the popular art forms, but when people get it right, the results are illuminating. In It’s Only Rock and Roll: An Anthology of Rock and Roll Short Stories, editors Janice Eidus and John Kastan collect writers who manage to get it right.
Of course, there’s nothing “only” about rock and roll. It shapes our imaginations, so when a teenager wants to impress a girl in Kim Herzinger’s “The Day I Met Buddy Holly,” he does so by lying and telling her Holly gave him his wingtip shoes when they met on a railway platform.
The combination of celebrity, talent and pleasure that uniquely reside in musicians makes them far more effective tools for self-aggrandizement than encounters with scientists or traditionally important people, and this doesn’t apply only to teenagers. When Holly goes to the station’s diner, adults crowd in to feel a little more important, but when his train comes and he leaves, the narrator says sadly, “Buddy Holly had been there, and now he was gone, and we were back to being what we’d always been.”
Anyone honest who likes more obscure bands will admit to feeling a little smarter than the poor slobs genuinely satisfied by contemporary alternative-God, I hate that term-rock.Cool is measured by being obscurer-than-thou, and Linda Gray Sexton explores the relationship between music and knowledge in “Over the Line.” In a story of a girl’s sexual awakening, Sexton shows 14 year-old Reenie impulsively going out riding with the older Jesse, whose knowledge and’ worldliness is suggested by the CD collection in his car that included Metallica, the Beastie Boys, Ice Cube and Jimi Hendrix among others. When she finds a Primus album she likes, she’s a part of the more mature world his collection hints at, but she also realizes she faces “Too many choices,” thinking then of his collection, but in time Jesse introduces her to the world of choices that maturing brings.
When Sexton lists the bands in Jesse’s CD collection, she does so in such a way that suggests she knows the music; though spelling “Sound Garden” as two words and leaving the final ‘G’ from Snoop Doggy Dog suggests she might not. The bands named, though, are not simply names; their albums can and do exist in the same record collections across the country, and in It’s Only Rock and Roll, this sort of real awareness of rock & roll culture is the strength of many of the stories.
In Jodi Bloom’s “Shrine,” a religious girl’s fear of the spiritual place Kurt Cobain occupied in her sister’s life is driven by an awareness of the bizarre spectacle of Cobain becoming the unlikeliest rock star. The recollection of the two-year period during which Cobain was a teen dream poster boy whose face was almost inescapable gives Bloom the ability to make credible the sister’s shrine, and the piece gains irony when the reader considers the likelihood that the sympathetic sister’s affection for Cobain helped create the pressure that drove him to suicide.
The more ambitious pieces try to mimic rock & roll, and they are a mixed bag. “The Unfinished Business of Childhood” by Lee K. Abbott, the longest story in the anthology, is reminiscent of Tommy or The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in that the story is too improbable to work, but it is surprisingly entertaining anyway. Like Ziggy Stardust, “The Unfinished Business of Childhood” is the story of a rock star, and like Ziggy Stardust, it’s a “glam” story.
Abbott’s writing is as much a celebration of his materials—language—as glam was a celebration of the electricness of guitars, and it’s hard to believe Mick Ronson enjoyed power chording “Suffragette City” more than Abbott enjoyed describing an orgy by writing, Bobby saw tongue and root and, after an hour, a flank of such delectation his lungs withered with a wheeze. Other attempts to “write” rock ‘& roll are less successful, but they invite readers to think about what the writer was going for -and how they relate to the music.
Too often rock & roll has appeared in modern entertainment the way your parents use slang; they get the words right, but the tone and context are all wrong, and in the process they made themselves seem more out of touch than ever. This is a shame, because writers like Kathleen Warnock-whose “Elvis In Wonderland” is erotica for women old enough to remember Presley way back when-and Jill McCorkle-whose “Final Vinyl Days” shows how music is used to organize memory-and the other writers collected in It’s Only Rock and Roll demonstrate that rock & roll is a central part of our culture’s language.
Rock’s rebel mythology may mean the marriage of fiction and music will never be an easy one, but the stories Eidus and Kasten collect show that fictional representations of the roles rock & roll plays in our lives are not only possible, but valuable when done well.
