Lotion and Pynchon

[Richard Romeo]

fyi.  rich

Copyright 2001 The Hartford Courant Company
THE HARTFORD COURANT


October 14, 2001 Sunday, STATEWIDE

SECTION: ARTS; Pg. G8

LENGTH: 988 words

HEADLINE: GOOD ROCK STARS WRITE BAD BOOKS;
SWITCH FROM COLLABORATION TO ISOLATION THEIR UNDOING

BYLINE: WM. FERGUSON

BODY:
I had a dream that Rick Moody, the author of "The Ice Storm," was in the 
band Jethro Tull. Now, this dream is ridiculous on many levels. First of 
all, Moody would have been about 10 years old when Jethro Tull released 
"Aqualung," the band's defining moment. Second, Rick Moody is a cunning and 
successful novelist. And, as everyone knows, no musician ever wrote a good 
book.

This may sound impossible, but I think it might be true. I challenge anyone 
to name a serious writer who first made a mark in music. I came up with Paul 
Bowles, who wrote "The Sheltering Sky" and still considered himself a failed 
composer. There's also John Barth, a founding father of the postmodern novel 
who supported himself by drumming in jazz bands. (I spoke with Barth, and he 
seemed to recall that Ralph Ellison might have played trumpet and that James 
Joyce once considered a career as an opera singer.) But shouldn't there be a 
whole pantheon of these guys? It isn't for lack of effort. In 1993, Pete 
Townshend outraged the British publishing world when he was granted a 
position as editor at Faber, which put out his book of short stories, 
"Horse's Neck." Townshend has since returned to writing rock operas. More 
recently, Graham Parker, Ray Davies, Mike Nesmith, Greg Kihn, Steve Earle, 
and Nick Cave -- all respected rock figures-- have published works of 
fiction. The reviews have been hostile: Earle's book is "clumsy, mawkish, 
and preachy," Parker wallows in "self-pity and curdled fancy," and, compared 
with his work with the Kinks, Davies' book is simply "superfluous."    Why 
do good rock stars write bad books? For one thing, they're not exactly
encouraged to write at all. John Lennon, the first of all rock-star authors,
was allowed to publish only under the broadest qualifications. Lennon's 
first
book, "In His Own Write," came out just before the Beatles released "Rubber
Soul." This witty homage to Lewis Carroll is hamstrung not only by its dust
jacket -- "The writing Beatle!" it helpfully suggests -- but also by the
Library of Congress, which files the book under "Nonsense Literature,
English." The border between music and literature is poorly guarded, but
those who take this as invitation to sashay back and forth do so at their
peril. Literary tourism, it turns out, isn't cool.
   For example: I played bass in a band called Lotion for most of the '90s. 
We
did OK, had a song on the radio for a while, but I still kept my day job
working for magazines. And then, through weird happenstance, the band met
Thomas Pynchon, the reclusive author of "Gravity's Rainbow." For reasons
that still aren't clear to me, he agreed to write liner notes for our second
record. We thought it was a really funny and incongruous situation, and he
evidently did, too. He was so generous about the whole thing, visiting the
studio while we were recording and flattering us by occasionally taking out 
a
note pad to jot something down, that we were ignorant of our transgression. 
We
flew too close to the sun, and nobody else in the world thought it was funny
or charming or generous. The alternative press, almost without exception,
lavished its derision on the 200 benign words that Pynchon wrote. Mainstream
magazines, sensing an avenue to the great man, treated the band with the
clinical distaste of a doctor examining a patient with just the most
interesting disease. How ever was it contracted?
   But more than the will of the critics preserves the separation of 
musicians
and authors. "Writing," Barth points out, "is essentially a solitary act."
To this day, Barth still needs to cram wax in his ears before he can write 
(a
habit that survives from when his children were small).
   Writing demands an intense focus, and the rewards come only at the end of
the process. Music, on the other hand, gratifies the easily distracted. Mike
Doughty, who was the singer for the band Soul Coughing and who now performs 
on
his own and writes a column for the New York Press, figures musicians need 
to
have a lot of time on their hands. "Songwriting is the sort of thing you can
do eight hours a day," he says. "You kind of sit around waiting for that
third verse to finish itself. And it does."
   This is not the case with writing. Nobody ever whiled away an afternoon
noodling on a typewriter and staring at clouds. Even the most insignificant
piece of prose is excruciating. Trust me. And yet, we love books, and we 
love
music. Can't we make this marriage work? I think so. For one thing, the most
recent generation of fiction writers grew up listening to college rock,
literate artists like Talking Heads, R.E.M., Elvis Costello and the like. I
can detect this very sensibility, gently out of true with the mainstream, in 
a
number of recent writers. The finicky, hilarious over-explication of Dave
Eggers had him pegged as a fan of They Might Be Giants long before Eggers
actually collaborated with the band. (TMBG composed a "soundtrack" to the
recent issue of McSweeney's, the literary journal that Eggers edits.) And 
for
the record, Eggers claims to listen to music every moment when he's working.
Can it be long before members of bands like Belle & Sebastian or Tortoise 
grow
disenchanted with the rock life and sit down at the computer to render the
human condition?
   As for Barth's legend as a musician, he estimates that he possessed "a
not-bad amateur flair" for drumming. And yet his brief career in music -- he
hoped to be an "orchestrator" -- had a lasting impact on his writing,
particularly in his reworkings of mythology. "I take a received melody
line," he says, "and arrange it to new purposes."
   See there? The seed of postmodernism itself lies in a kernel of jazz
syncopation.

   Wm. Ferguson played bass in Lotion. His writing has appeared in The New
York Times Magazine, Esquire and The New York Observer.




GRAPHIC: PHOTO: (b&w), CHRIS BUCK / SPINART RECORDS
PHOTO: (b&w)
; BILL FERGUSON, second from left, played bass with the rock band Lotion 
before turning to writing.

LOAD-DATE: October 15, 2001

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