“This Town Is Nowhere,” On Sale Now

There’s probably bigger news out there somewhere, but around here the big story of the day is that “This Town Is Nowhere” is at long last on sale.

“This Town Is Nowhere” is a novel of our own creation, and we rather like it, so we feel entitled to a certain pride of authorship and another day off from our usual snide analysis of the news. It’s only an e-publication, available through Amazon and Kindle, and we remain steadfast Luddites who have never resorted to such newfangled gimmickry for literature, but there’s still a certain satisfaction in having put such an old-fashioned yarn somewhere out there on the new frontiers of technology.

It’s an odd piece of work, we will concede. After a compelling Old West prologue that has little to do with the subsequent plot, the novel opens on on the first day of the 1972-’73 school year at a second rate junior high in the middle of the country, where a fellow who had briefly been a popular rock ‘n’ roll guitar player in the ’50s is now grouchily teaching math, one of his typically stupid students is daydreaming significantly, and the guitar-playing math teacher’s brother, who had briefly been the singing star of the band, is still rockin’ and rollin’ out on the lost highway of American music. The typically stupid student awkwardly becomes a protege to the former brother, falls under the even more dubious influence of the latter, and between the two he gets wised up a bit as the brothers plod along toward their own disparate fates. Such a scant plot fills a couple hundred typewritten pages, and who knows how many electronic tablet pages, by meandering off on topics ranging from the jargon of public educators and the corresponding breakdown of the public education system to the frustrations of adolescence and the frustrations of middle to the unique combination of the Devil’s music and God’s music that has made American music such a troublesome and essential part of our national character, with some thoughts about our national character in general thrown in.

The structure is peculiar, too. An otherwise straightforward chronology and omniscient narration is occasionally interrupted by long monologues recalling preceding events, and some events are re-told from the perspectives of different characters. There are segments that seem short stories apart from the rest of the plot, others that are historical essays full of allusions to largely forgotten blues or country musicians and geo-political events, and others that sound like those chords tossed into a medley to get from one song to the next.

Our first novel, “The Things That Are Caesar’s,” which is still available on good paper, as God intended, also through Amazon, that all-important entity, was about similarly sleazy characters but focused on religion and politics and the occasional collisions of the two. It didn’t sell a lot but was well reviewed and earned us some invitations from local book clubs that had thought it was quite thoughtful and amusing, and we rather liked that one as well. Several enthusiastic readers described it as very “cinematic,” and it does sometimes remind of us those great cynical Preston Sturges movies from the ’30s and ’40s.. This one is more about the broader culture, with occasional digressions on how the decline of the culture has preceded a decline in politics, although of course God figures in it again. It’s a bit more literary, to the extent that any movie adaptation would be harder to come up with, but at our age and with the movies they’re making these days we don’t think that’s such a bad thing..

Lest “This Town Is Nowhere” sound a bit too highly literary, be assured there’s also plenty of violence and foul language and sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. The title and a basic premise for the story came to us many decades ago, when we were immersed in rockabilly records and chain-reading the works of Jim Thompson, the great Okie dime novelist and literary darling of all the fancy French critics, and we like to think that some of the bawdier scenes might recall his brilliance. There’s a certain P.G. Wodehouse affectation in some of the narration, and we owe much to the onomatopoeia and other descriptive language of the great Tom Wolfe for the musical interludes, and the basic idea of the old man and the boy is probably due to too much Robertson Davies, and there’s no way any real American can avoid the Mark Twain thing, but the story is set in the ’70s and the middle of the country so there’s no escaping a certain roughness in the story. Most of it comes from stories we’ve been told by white kids and black kids, including one ghetto-smooth fellow we met in D.C. one summer who smoked his first marijuana cigarette at the invitation of Cab Calloway, one of the all-time greats and the original “Reefer Man,” and a long-haired psychedelic guitar-player of our acquaintance who started playing bluegrass gospel to get off drugs and was quite accomplished in both styles of music, and wizened old folks in the country and our idiot peers in the suburbs, or what we’ve read of the epic battles between Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and Phil and Don Eberly and all the feuding siblings of musical history, or the incredibly cool Louis Prima’s even cooler brother staying home in New Orleans and never getting famous, or the great rockabilly bass-thumper Ray Campi teaching at a southern California junior high, or remarkable fellow who we once witnessed cleaning up a teenaged companion’s vomit off the floor of a bar just to avoid a fight, or  our own embarrassing encounters with real life along the lost highway. All in all, we think it’s a story about American music that could be true.

Though often bleak, we think a certain humor and hopefulness comes through the tale. In inflation-adjusted terms the story is for sale at about the same affordable price that Jim Thompson used to ask, and we’re not embarrassed to ask the same. There’s bigger news out there somewhere, but we’ll spend today on “This Town Is Nowhere.”

— Bud Norman

If I Had a Hammer

Etiquette requires a respectful silence about any less-than-exemplary qualities of the recently deceased, but an exception should be made in the case of Pete Seeger. The obituaries for the famed banjo-strumming folkie, who died Monday at the age of 94, have been all too adulatory.

Lionized in life and death by the likes of The New York Times as a “Champion of Folk Music and Social Change,” and honored by the President of the United States as a man “who believed deeply in the power of song” and “more importantly, believed in the power of community,” Seeger did indeed exert a powerful influence on America’s musical culture and politics. That influence was mostly baleful in both cases, however, and there’s simply no use hemming and hawing about it at the graveside. The hipper corners of the conservative press have already duly noted that Seeger was an unapologetic communist who long advocated changing society by Stalinist methods, a defining fact of the man’s life which the president and the more respectable media outlets have politely ignored, but it should also be noted that his main contribution to American music was reducing its most glorious traditions to mere pap and agitprop.

Seeger first came to the public’s attention in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s as a member of The Weavers, who achieved such widespread popularity with their smooth and polished renditions of old rural standards that they inspired an abundance of suburban hippies fancying themselves folk singers to converge in the remotest corners of Greenwich Village in the early ’60s and set off a “folk boom” that reverberates to this very day. This is considered an admirable achievement by Seeger’s more awestruck obituarists, but one can only wonder how many of them still subject themselves to the cloyingly precious and oh-so-political dreck that mostly came out of that scene. The local old-folks AM radio station that we listen to for Tony Bennett and Peggy Lee classics has an infuriating tendency to mix in Joan Baez and The New Christy Minstrels and The Kingston Trio and the rest of those buttoned-downed and well-pressed folk boomers, and it always causes us to hit the scan button in search of some right-wing talk radio host’s rant.

There was some good that came of the folk boom, as is bound to happen when you’ve got a million earnest young well-scrubbed white kids strumming guitars on every street corner, but it was rarely half as good as what it emulated. The Weaver’s sweetly-sung recording of “Goodnight, Irene” was a far bigger seller than the one by Leadbelly, the convicted murderer and barroom-brawler who authored the durable romantic tune, but it  lacked the rough edges required to make its romanticism truly heartfelt. A similar tendency is found in most of the so-called “folk music” of the ‘60s that followed the Harvard-educated Seeger, as most of the feisty young rebels from affluent families could never quite replicate the rough and rowdy sound of the sharecroppers and coal-miners and cowboys on whose behalf they claimed to sing. For the real deal American music you could listen to the oil patch Okies in Bakersfield and their Fender electric guitars, or the pimple-faced sons of Midwestern factory workers banging out industrial strength three-chord rock ‘n’ roll ditties in their two-car garages, or some zonked-out old black men in leopard-skin leisure suits playing the seedier bars of Memphis or Chicago, but that was all just a bit too authentically proletarian for the tastes of the collegiate and strictly-acoustic bohemians in Greenwich Village.

Real deal American music was thought insufficiently political, too, and we will never forgive Seeger and his many acolytes for trying to correct that. The rich vein of traditional American folk music that the folkies mined did include an occasional song about disgruntled workers and community action, but for the most part the American folk sang little about Bolshevism and a lot about love, and a disturbingly large amount of the time about death and natural disasters, with very patriotic and even jingoistic sentiments commonly espoused, and the biggest portion of the very best of the catalogue are songs expressing a fervent religious belief that a doctrinaire Marxist such as Seeger would have decried as the opiate of the masses. Songs of tragedy and faith have no use to a cultural movement openly dedicated to “social change,” however, and thus Seeger and his cover-artists tried to impose a political program on those private emotions of life that music can best address. Lavish tributes to Seeger by the likes of Bruce Springsteen and other recent stars demonstrate how his ideological approach has permeated every genre of American music, and this should not be counted as a success.

As with Walt Whitman’s epic “Song of Myself,” the very best of America music is a celebration of the creator’s individuality and an invitation to the listener to celebrate his own individual self. At its best American music is primitive and rustic and urbane and sophisticated, earthy and spiritual and rebellious and loyal, and always makes palpable the exhilarating freedom to choose from any or all of the mutually-exclusive options. The music that Seeger made in his long and lucrative career celebrated only the collective, was limited by its creator’s severely constrained view of life and America and life in America, and will be long forgotten in a far-off but long-awaited time when the real deal American music is still playing on the late-night airwaves.

— Bud Norman