Books Aloud – September 2005

Big Star: The Short Life, Painful Death, and Unexpected Resurrection of the Kings of Power Pop
Rob Jovanovic
Chicago Review Press
Street: 09.28.05

What do artists as disparate as Teenage Fanclub, The Replacements, Jeff Buckley, R.E.M. and The Bangles have in common? They all share a mutual love for cult icons, Big Star. As does writer Rob Janovic, whose self-proclaimed reason for becoming a writer was to share the winding story of his favorite band with the world, and be the first to do so. Over ten years and four books later, he has succeeded. Big Star’s legacy, much like that of The Velvet Underground, will live on via word-of-mouth from dedicated fans who stumbled onto their records from friends or die-hard music journalists, not by any of their cherished radio hits or chart-toppers, because, like The Velvet Underground, they had none. (The closest they would ever come would be Cheap Trick’s reviving of “In The Street” as the theme song for That 70s Show). Janovic chronicles almost every Big Star related occurrence he could dig up, from Alex Chilton’s time spent with the Box Tops to his production work with The Cramps and his short stint with Tav Falco’s Panther Burns and all of the girl trouble and drug problems in between. (Although, he did omit Chilton’s producing The Gories’ second album, but that’s a minor complaint and not a hindrance). Big Star is littered with exemplary amounts of band drama, including fights, an ever evolving line-up and eventually, the unexpected death of singer/songwriter/guitarist Chris Bell. As much as the book might sound like a drama-filled soap opera, in reality it is an account of how four people were able to overcome their inner-tension and churn out three brilliantly diverse albums of beautiful, yet skewed power-pop. –Jared Soper

The Collected Short Fiction of Marianne Hauser
Marianne Hauser
Fiction Collective Two
Street: 02.02.05

The fiction of Marianne Hauser comes at a time when she has outlived most of her contemporaries (Anais Nin and Henry Miller come to mind when talking about her work). In the introduction to her collected short fiction, Hauser reminisces about what it means to be 90 years old and it isn’t a finality of any means but a continuation of life, love, and sex; basically the tenets of her earlier years. With a lucid, uncomfortable, and sometimes awkward eye toward human foibles, weaknesses and exploitativeness, Hauser criss-crosses the intimacies of the human experience. While reading story after story within her lovely and languid prose, one gets a sense of displaced sensuality for her characters. It is as if they know they are only human and no one is an antagonist or a protagonist but just tied together as humans living in a humanistic world. One would be hard pressed to find a more down-to-earth, surprisingly lovely, and almost subaltern truth elsewhere within the written word. Intimate and bold, rich and dreamy, it is well worth its weight in gold. –Erik Lopez

Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and EMO
Andy Greenwald
St. Martin’s Griffin
Street: 11.15.03

The history of the emo movement has finally been written. After attending a Dashboard Confessional show at the world famous CBGBs in New York in 2001, Andy Greenwald saw dollar signs and started writing a book about the genre. His history starts at the birth of hardcore and straightedge with Minor Threat and continues to the sold-out stadiums and large groupie ensembles of Jimmy Eat World. As I read the book I thought, “How can this guy link the underground archetype Ian MacKaye to the sold-out bullshit which is squeezed between 50 Cent videos on today’s MTV?” Greenwald had me convinced that he was going to pull it off when he spent the first 63 pages giving an incredibly insightful history of the rise and fall of the early 80’s Washington DC hardcore scene. His persuasive writings had me looking up bands that I hadn’t heard of before, like Rites of Spring and Texas is the Reason. He continued mapping out the progression of emo through bands like Jawbreaker, Sunny Day Real Estate, and he even dedicated an entire chapter to Weezer’s Pinkerton album, which he hails as the most important “emo” album of the nineties. However, after the Weezer chapter, the book took on a fanzine tone as he drooled over Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional. He overanalyzed their lyrics and did his best to ensure that he and Chris Carrabba would continue to be friends after the book was published. I really enjoyed 85% of this book and the only time I got pissed was when he ripped on Pavement for their abstract lyrics. Come on Andy, does every band need to cry when they sing? –Alfred Quinn