dancing about architecture: Paperback Writers Essay

In 1964 , John Lennon published In His Own Write, a collection of stories, poems, and drawings, and the first work of fiction by anyone in the rock and roll business. Even amidst all the Beatlemania of the day, the event

got noticed: Lennon was a rock star with a capital R, and the publication of his book gave rock music a new level of respectability some might have thought it needed. Some fiction writers later became songwriters (Leonard Cohen, for one), so why shouldn't songwriters take a turn at being novelists or short story writers when they're not being rock stars? Here are a few reasons why, and a few more reasons why not.

As it happened Lennon was writing fiction before he ever picked up a guitar. He wrote most of In His Own Write and some of A Spaniard in the Works (1965) while in his teens. Nevertheless, his books were celebrated at the time of publication, with In His Own Write even winning a British literary award. Lennon's books are sometimes humorous and always irreverent. This sample is typical of Lennon's style: "It was little Bobby's birthmark today and he got a surprise. His very fist was lopped off, (The War) and he got a birthday hook! All his life Bobby had wanted his very own hook, and now on his 39th birthday his pwayers had been answered. The only trouble was they had send him a left hook and ebry dobby knows that it was Bobby's right first that was missing as it were. What to do was not thee only problem. Anyway he jopped off his lest hand and it fitted like a glove. Maybe next year he will get a right hook, who knows?"

In His Own Write has this type of wit on every page. Word-play is the order of the day, deliberate misspellings intended to amuse, limbs slashed away, the sick and the wheelchair-bound subject to ridicule, everything taking place in the theater of the absurd directed by a mischievous teenager. A Spaniard in the Works is more of the same only crueler. Reading these books 35 years later, it seems strange that each once garnered significant praise, but maybe this was due to the literary establishment's astonishment that a rock star could actually write something clever. The books' main appeal today are their total absence of political correctness, which admittedly is often the source of their humor. Yet most of the writing is inconsequential, something Lennon the songwriter rarely was.

The first songwriter of note to follow Lennon into the halls of fiction writing was Bob Dylan, who in his heyday was also voted the songwriter most likely to write a novel. His friend, Richard Farina, a folk musician of some renown, wrote a novel called Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me that was published shortly after his death at the age of 30 in 1965. With Lennon also putting his name on book bindings, Dylan wasn't going to be

left behind. He began writing a novel in the mid-60s, which was eventually published with the title Tarantula in 1971. It is rumored that he was forced to publish it. Tarantula is good for a paragraph or two, any paragraph, but reading more than two pages at a time highlights the book's repetitiveness and lack of characters or plot. Dylan's prose owed much to Kerouac, particularly the beat writer's automatic writing style (i.e., unedited), and some to T.S. Eliot with the pop culture references, and there are probably other influences in there, too, but not worth pursuing. Dylan had already displayed this style in the liner notes to Highway 61 Revisited. From the liner notes: "Savage Rose & Fixable are bravely blowing kisses to the Jade Hexagram-Carnaby Street & to all the mysterious juveniles & the Cream Judge is writing a book on the true meaning of a pear - last year, he wrote one on famous dogs of the civil war & now he has false teeth and no children ...". From the novel: "me? i made a special trip downtown to get some graveyard figures - but it wasn't raining & there were no buses going to baltimore/ just a broken jawed parking meter, a water logged pen & a bunch of old shirley temple pictures with her neck in a noose was all that i could find."

The liner notes on Highway 61 Revisited define the humor and rollicking nature of the album, but making a novel out of these liner notes was a mistake. Then again so were Self-Portrait and rabid fundamentalism, so it's not like this great artist hasn't screwed up elsewhere. Dylan has yet to write another novel, or else he has decided not to share it with the world this time no matter what anyone says.

Having written albums with narratives (and calling their creations "rock operas"), it was probably inevitable that Pete Townshend and Ray Davies would eventually write fiction. Townshend's book, Horse's Neck (1985), mixes stories about rock and roll with stories about voyeurism, horses, and precious tales of death and other spiritual matters. He wrote better rock operas. A story called "Horses" is as pretentious as anything on his album All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, which is saying something; "I wish it were really a dream. The village exists, the horse exists. I suppose I win in the end. How can I fail? With infinite dream potential I can believe in everything. This is a gift from God, a presentation of his grace. If it arrives with the package torn I can't argue. I'm ready to be humiliated, to suffer, to go through whatever I need to go through. I won't betray God or his world." Et cetera. The best stories are the ones about a rock star and his excesses, in which Townshend is following the rule of Write What You Know. It seems Townshend is another songwriter whose true prose medium is the liner notes form; check out Quadrophenia's brief but compelling tale in the accompanying booklet, which is far superior to anything in Horse's Neck.

Ray Davies seems to be following a writing rule of his own making, that of Write What You Have Already Written. Waterloo Sunset (2000) is a collection of stories that takes its name from Davies's most praised, if not most famous, song. Most of the stories involve an aging rock star name Richard, who has to contend with his lowlife manager, Les Mulligan, and with his often intrusive fans. All of the stories are based on Davies's songs, with his lyrics added in the middle or at the end of many of the stories to either explain the story behind the song or turn the song into a story. Either way it's ineffective and comes across as laziness, and even his best lyrics wouldn't survive without the music.

Davies once wrote songs that ranked with the best in rock and roll, but those days are long gone. Perhaps he would have written great fiction in the 60s when he was writing great songs, but Waterloo Sunset was published in the past year, and cynicism permeates the stories as it has Kinks albums for the past one score and five. The prose is nothing to savor either. Davies writes in a minimalist style, which is another way of saying he doesn't have one. A story about a songwriter who has lost his talents but continues to write anyway would have probably been poignant, and might have salvage Waterloo Sunset, the book; at least Davies would have known from where he wrote. "Waterloo Sunset" the song is available on Something Else by the Kinks, a more-brilliant-than-not collection of songs that tells stories worth hearing over and over again.To this reader, the less successful songwriters have written the better fiction, at least as of this date. Witness Graham Parker, who has been in the recording business for 24 years and has missed the charts in approximately 23 of those. He was never content simply being the great unknown rock singer; in 1978 he attacked his record company in a song for failing to properly promote him and called himself "the best kept secret in the west." Since that time his secret has become even better kept. With nothing but a cult audience to buy his records, Parker has turned his attention to fiction with Carp Fishing on Valium (2000), a collection of short stories that follows the life of Brian Porker from childhood through minor rock stardom (his big hit is a jingle for Wendy's restaurant) to stand-up comic, with a lifelong passion for birds (as in ornithology, not women, though he's fond of them too). Parker has always been a good lyricist, and he proves himself in this book to be a fine writer. From a deftly-written coming-of-age story to a near-perfect closing tale about a comic who saves a rare bird in a Cleveland garbage dump, Parker displays a passion for language. Subject matter includes a man who gets his large and noisy nose cut off by his wife, an audition for the Stones to replace the late Mick Jagger who was hit by a bus (rejected because Keith Richards decides that Brian Porker's "package" below the belt is too small for the role), and a drug that takes one back in time in order to again enjoy the evening's first hit of cocaine. Though Parker's place in pop culture will always be with his early records, his sense of humor and finely tuned sentences makes every one of these stories worthwhile. Given the high profile songwriters that preceded him to the field of fiction with their underwhelming efforts, Parker's success is both surprising and welcome.

Nick Cave's novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989), is a different matter altogether. Cave has barely even had a cult audience, whether as a member of the Birthday Party in the early 80s or for the last 15 years fronting his band the Bad Seeds. Where other songwriters were guaranteed publication based on name recognition alone, Cave's book had to find a publisher on its own merit. And the Ass Saw the Angel takes place in a gothic American South during the 20th century, and the mournful faces of tragedy are in the prose from the beginning. Here's the lead character, Euchrid Euchrow, summing up his life halfway through the book: "Born a mute, beside a dead brother, in a puddle of peel shine, in the back of a burnt-out wreck, atop of a hill of garbage – this was only the opening hand, a mere whiff of what destiny held in store for me. What maybe ah didn't know and mah dead brother did, was that we were two very sorry sprogs. One dumb and one good-as-dead, the sickly issue of truly squalid loins – unsightly urchins cast from her slum-womb into a wicked, wicked world, a world too cruel for such ill-begotten mites as we."

The horrors of the world continue to pour down on Euchrow, who lives in a valley filled with a fanatical religious sect, with everyone suffering through a rain storm that is lasting for years. Euchrow is an outsider, struggling to communicate with the world around him, but his frustration grows, and the novel hurtles toward a gruesome conclusion. Cave's obsessions with death and biblical matters were already evident on his albums at the time of his novel's publication, and on future records he actually recorded songs based on the novel. And the Ass Saw the Angel aims high and misses, but it doesn't miss by much. The unrelenting bleakness can be draining to the reader, though Cave's powerful prose sustains the book throughout. His writing style owes something to Faulkner, yet remains original in its mixture of Old Testament rhythms and southern dialect, and something else that might have its roots in rock and roll. Then again, maybe not.

Richard Hell at least has a very recognizable name in music circles. He is known for leaving the group Television too soon and then releasing a celebrated punk album, Blank Generation, in 1977. Following a brief period as a punk rock hero, Hell became a drug addict and for many years dropped out of the music business. He clearly drew on personal experience in his novel Go Now (1996), which concerns a punk rocker named Billy dealing with a serious drug problem. Whatever the autobiographical elements of the book, Hell succeeded in writing a compelling first-person tale of drug addiction and the struggle to escape it.

On the first page of Go Now is this classic sentence: "I've made the mistake of waking up again." This sets the tone, for Billy is an addict and he knows it. He gets an offer to fly out to San Francisco to pick up a car for a rock manager and drive it back to New York, and he accepts. It is an expenses-paid cross-country road trip, so Billy takes his photographer girlfriend along with him, intent on doing some writing while getting away from drugs. It turns out he is struggling with more than drug addiction; he is unfaithful to his girlfriend while on the road, and though she supports him in his quest to kick his habit, Billy continues to seek out drugs and other women. Near the end of the book they arrive in Lexington, Kentucky, Billy's boyhood home, where he discovers his demons are in full force as he awaits a shipment of drugs in the mail and considers seducing his aunt. On occasion Hell succumbs to writing purple prose, and a sex scene in the desert does nothing to disprove the adage that there are two things that cannot be described and one of them is sunsets. Still, Go Now is a strong novel, moving briskly along with punk music's nervous edge while adding a bit of pensive reflection. And a musician might as well write what he knows. There's a scene near the end of the book where Billy is alone in a hotel room, struggling to write. He has bought some tapes and is hearing music for the first time in two weeks – Hendrix, Aretha, Dylan, Howling Wolf – and he is suddenly astonished by how fiercely the music moves him.

"I guess it must have something to do with the way music comes to you, you don't need to go to it the way you do with words. Then it encompasses, more dimensional even than light, instantly, and not by force but sympathy. It changes everything. And songs: The series and combinations of notes and how they are played and the nature of the instrument producing them, those sounds, are direct emotion itself; unlikely as it seems that that could be, there's a pure correspondence, you could probably analyze it like a scientist, and something in the design is in fact mathematical, giving you purely abstract pleasure, too, and then that's all mixed with the possibilities of the message and purposes of the words, and the rhythm physically taking and compelling you, the whole mess shooting all around bruised and popping and breathing, threatening and begging, projected in minuscule waves that carom and vibrate so that you literally move inside it and are penetrated by it. And that doesn't even touch on the appeal of a given person's voice and how it is a friend or not, or a sex thing, or an oracle, smart, sweet, honest, or angry or tough - all the character that's carried in a voice exposed to where it gives you something you get nowhere but your most intimate intense relationships. It seems amazingly good of them to do this for us."

Now that's some fine writing about music, and a reminder that whatever limited success this lot has had with fiction, they have made their share of great rock and roll music, and it really has been amazingly good of them to do so. After all, Faulkner couldn't carry a tune, no one covers Melville anymore, and if Salinger ever recorded a decent album I've yet to hear it. And when it comes right down to it, Chuck Berry has had as much if not more to say in his songs than Norman Mailer has in his novels.