Hello and welcome to Piano Fighter, brought to you today from the Milwaukee airport as I try for the second day—feeling, as they say, defeated and depressed—to get home.
Thanks for subscribing. The name, of course, comes from the great Warren Zevon song, of which I only acknowledge the live version as canonical. The fact that the Chickering grand on which I took lessons now lives at my dad’s is only one detail which appeals to me.
My plan is to use this newsletter for longer-form writing, outtakes from the books, process talk about songwriting, workings-out of ideas, full versions of some of the interviews from Band People, and other mostly-writing. You can expect it on the first and 15th of each month. Next installment, I think, will be my discussion with the great guitarist Nels Cline.
I’ll kick it off with one of the more substantive cut passages from Someone Should Pay For Your Pain, reproduced below. I had the rather pretentious idea that the book should start with a kind of invocation in the classical sense (“Sing, O Muse,” etc.). This would function as an introduction of the themes of ineluctable, fatalistic circling, as a way of underscoring that the story should be read as allegory rather than autofiction, and as a way of elevating the grubby story of a not-particularly-successful musician into a parable about a community. Joyce, of course, does this with the Odyssey and bourgeois Dublin; the pun on the opening of the Iliad and its story of a peripatetic exile establishing, after a lengthy picaresque, a new life, was irresistible. If the epic is a way of articulating the shared values and mythology of a community becoming a nation, I suppose the assertion here is that the world of touring musicians and band people is, itself, a kind of (dispersed) national identity.
As I said, pretentious. But as I’ve written elsewhere, “pretentious” is that sort of insult that contains a kind of compliment: whether or not the target reached it, the speaker admits, at least they were aiming for something ambitious—and why not try?
Also, too, the preface is in a rhetorical pitch that doesn’t otherwise appear in the book, purple verging on overwritten. Purple, though, is another maligned critical category for which I have a certain sympathy (like my musical affinity for melodrama). Nabokov said something to the effect that the superfluous and merely decorative in nature (e.g. butterflies) is the place one senses the divine, and extended that to the purely decorative (“show-offy”) in prose. The baroque is a register like any other, useful in its place.
In the end—like some other moments in the novel—I recycled the good bits for song lyrics.
Thanks again for subscribing and reading, and see you next time.
Best,
Franz
We’re going into green time. That’s what we called the primal hours, when too late turns imperceptibly into too early. The fecund green, the fertile green, the green that embodies the impossibility of decay. The long hand of the clock hides, we wait for it to start ticking; we watch for it, but never see it start. The bright cold high-focus high-depth high-definition high-light of the leftover sunrise. The light that eliminates interpretation, eliminates analysis, everything just what it was, in all its gruesome consequence. Our senses start to hiss and crackle around the edges. Sitting on low-tide driftwood, sitting on the high street bench. Thrust the machete-point into the loam, scrape the paint with a jackknife. The first hints of the grown-up sadness. The film speeding up and beginning to circle. The hub of the wheel the colonnade, shedding and flaking; the melting scattered shards; faces appear and are obscured, emerge aged and torn, posing, grinning, looking away: I shall reign, I reign, I have reigned, I have no kingdom. The column a blind scarecrow, terrificatio, migratory birds circling, drawn to, then repelled from, the fertile fields. The gravitational whirl that attracts; the spin that scatters. The flyposting intern mixing paste in the pre-dawn. A new face, an ivory hand, slap swipe, the unaccounted missing. Palimpsest of those who put themselves forward, and of the mu’tazalites, those who withdrew.
I sing of bars and the man, the scars and the bands; the barchipelago, scattered dots on a map and the Morse code highway lines that connected them, the punk rock telegraph; the license, the settled surety; the family, the fetters and the fastening; links of influence and chains of consequence; issue and generation; clans chosen and not chosen; those who roam and those who return; the albatross and the cormorant; those who grasp and those who give in; the usurpation, the exile, and the unredeemed; the indicative, the subjunctive, the conditional, and the imperative; shame, frenzy, sorrow; contrition, confession, penance; the sin of pride—and others besides.
I am, we wish, we would, I must.
Did we want? We did.
Did we know envy? We did.
Would we find meaning? We would.
Were we thoughtful? We were.
Were we thoughtless? We were.