Deep Cuts
I’ve got an Austin client, old friend, and what was always fun, for me? We crossed paths in Tempe, AZ — back in the day. We were both in the same city, within a mile or two, and yet never encountered each other. As part of that? For close to a year, just about every Tuesday night, and especially on the nights when I had the windows open? I could hear a certain pop/punk band, and their late leader, playing cover tunes at a dive bar, maybe half a mile away. Tin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak,” and then?
As a signature piece, I think it was Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” played with “Gilligan’s Island” lyrics.
Dive bars are gone; landmark institutions plowed under in the name of progress. The music remains.
Deep Cuts
In certain genres and from specifics times, I can be a master of the deep cuts, myself. The challenge with the novel? It involves music that I strayed from, and never returned. Might not have ever been involved. I’m suggesting that some of the referenced music, the lyrical refrains that carry the tunes? I might not know them, and therefore, might not be valid. I supposed, I was reading a library copy of the book, I could look this up as I went along, but that detracted from the experience. I recognize some of the music as essentially pop-alt — whatever the taxonomy — from years I didn’t pay attention.
It’s not part of my milieux, simply put.
But does that lessen the quality of the prose, the way the story is threaded together? Perhaps, I miss some of the allusions, references to pop or alt, or even some of the angry young man music from days gone by.
Deep Cuts
At the middle, or even past the middle, a third-act twist? This becomes a tortured love story.
Compares to Daisy Jones and the Six but more akin to The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers. High Fidelity comes to mind, also mentioned, late in the novel.
Writing about writing, or having a creative as the central protagonist always struck me as a little self-indulgent, and oftentimes over-the-top. Yet there’s a way this captures the absolute zeitgeist of the time, and being bi-coastal with its settings, captures the senses of that time.
Almost like a memory.
Deep Cuts
“With guitars!” (The Clash)
