Book Review: This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began: Essays, by Joe Bonomo

Text (c) Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2015

Images from the Internet

 

This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began: Essays
By Joe Bonomo
Orphan Press (Cordova, TN), 2013
249 pages; USD $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-615-75545-8
It can be ordered HERE

 

Joe Bonomo is a name that is definitely becoming better known in the music historian field. He’s had, in part, books published about the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, AC/DC (for the prestigious 33-1/3 series), and the definitive biography (okay, the only one) of the Fleshtones. I’ve read and reviewed just about everything he’s written (just search this blog), and Joe’s the real deal.

 

This book, however, takes a autobiographical non-fiction (yes that is a genre, though I prefer the term creative non-fiction) look at his life, in a semi-chronological approach. Rather than a series of anecdotes or a deep analysis of what things mean, this is an artistic look at what makes him tick; not about music, but his formation into what it is he has become.

 

Over the years, Bonomo has been published in numerous creative writing journals, such as the prestigious The Fiddleback, Creative Nonfiction, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and New Ohio Review. These pieces have been collected (and updated; i.e., re-edited) into this anthology of his work; he is certainly not a One Topic Pony, even within the autobiographical framework.

 

From discovering girls as a youth in a strict Catholic school through becoming an academic at Northern Illinois University, Bonomo bars no topic of internal conversation, but rather with fluidly and prose language examines key moments, often unsentimentally but rather as facts, as they are true to his memory, and the formation of himself.

 

While topics such as lost friendships, substances (e.g. booze) and first crushes are clearly and sharply displayed, as he gets older and previous events start to build, that’s when you start to connect the dots and see seminal events in his life, both small and writ large. Not all of it, of course, is fresh and pretty. For example, a discussion on male gaze – especially his own – is strongly evident as he attended strip clubs as a young man:

But as the clothes come off a different cloak is draped. Witness the growing bulge of the strippers G-string – nothing less than her money belt – as she pockets more and more control flowing from these men’s wallets. The sign remains the same for strippers of either gender, the body’s topography cunningly similar to value: for a male stripper, a bulge signifies power, masculinity, control, domination; for a female stripper, a bulge signifies power control, domination – and so, masculinity. … (pp. 91-92).

 

It isn’t until near the end that specific music show up at all, such as a mention of the use of Gary Glitter and the Ramones at ball games, though in “Student Killed by Freight Train,” he talks right up my Media Theory mindset:

 

“I wonder if before the invention of movies we heard sentimental orchestral strings in our minds when we read sad passages in novels, or a wave of triumphant music when, say, little Sylvia perched atop a fir tree first spotted the prized heron’s nest. In 1793 while a dying man gazed far ahead or far back in his imagination, did the edges of his perception grow poignantly fuzzy in a cinematic dreamscape?” (p. 183).

 

We are taken through parts of his life in New York, Maryland, Washington, DC and finally Illinois, where he is currently a professor. In fact, Bonomo almost uses places as a substitute for music as the axes of his life. He will talk about a topic, and pin it to the map by mentioning not only the location, but the building, e.g., such and such a store on this particular street. It’s more than a memory; it gives a stranger a foundation, and someone familiar with the local a mental pinpoint equivalent to a smell that brings back a memory.

 

Location, by fixing it so precisely, presents a form of the cycle of eternity, showing how some things change, but others become both fixed in time and only in memory, so even if they are no longer there, on some level they linger in mind, so they exist yet. He addresses this head-on in “Colonizing the Past”:

In autobiographical nonfiction, place is elastic, no firmer than smoke. Nostalgia carries with it the desire to return and memory its own mindfulness, less the urge to go back than the desire to stay put and try to understand… Google Maps allows me now to fly over my hometown, to revisit in three dimensions an atlas precision the places I’ve rebuilt (or halted the growth of) in my heady imagination. We don’t yet know the effects of this on the culture value of memory: the dream-engine that hovers over the past now competes with digital bits of verifiable information, cartographic certainties, calendar truths.” (pp. 134-135)

 

One of the focal points is Bonomo’s Roman Catholic upbringing, and what one could argue are the sins that normalize into nearly everyone’s life. In the case of Bonomo, including as I mentioned, there is girls and then women (lust), neighbors (envy in some cases, perhaps), self (pride), drink (could be gluttony), and prayer (I might argue as sloth, as in asking for another – God – to do for you rather than earning).

 

Covering both small moments that change one’s perspective and larger events, Bonomo meditates on not just the what, but the wonder of it. For example, in one of my favorite moments, in a piece called “Into the Fable,” he contemplates on a moment in his life where an acquaintance does a questionable, yet not normally memorable thing as a child, but Bonomo ponders why that moment has stuck with him for his whole life, and “why I can’t shake it. John has entered the fable. He’s become a literary figure. He’s become fabled. Does that mean that I invented him? He’s now fabulous. He’s now somewhere, not thinking of me” (p. 234). If I may be so presumptuous, we’ve all had moments like that, where certain events become like a television rerun playing inside our heads, for reasons that shake the internal head of reason. He does kind of answer that earlier in “There Was the Occasional Disruption,” where he states, “What begins as rumor can never circle back to fact, instead moves inevitably toward myth.” (p. 175)

 

Not just because we both worked at a Baskin-Robbins at one point in our lives, I feel a kinship of some kind. Bonomo has lived a very different existence than mine, but there are so many moments that were aha flashes of understanding and on occasional level clear identification. For example, he mentions that “…entering a church, I always felt as if I were entering a movie in the middle. It was a story I felt left out of many times.” (208) This is often how I felt going to synagogue as a youth, and something just didn’t jibe to me; I especially feel it now when I regularly take a relative to a Lutheran church. And don’t get me started on “Spying on the Petries,” a treatise on one of my favorite shows growing up (in repeat form), The Dick Van Dyke Show.

 

While being a non-poetic form of prose, Bonomo tells stories and thoughts without getting overly philosophical, rather staying within the realm of thought and more often than not, the marvel about his life and the events that brought him to the present. The book is an enjoyable read that is exceedingly accessibly without talking down to its reader; both fun and thought-provoking. In short, it’s a good read.

Book Reviews: Conversations with Greil Marcus, Ed. by Joe Bonomo

Text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2013
Images from the Internet

Conversations with Greil Marcus
Edited by Joe Bonomo
University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS)
Literary Conversations Series
217 pages; 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61703-623-1
Upress.state.ms.us

Greil Marcus is… well, if you don’t know who he is, and you regularly read blogs like this, you should be ashamed of yourself. His wide-ranged knowledge of history and culture fueled through music as a foundation is unique and inspiring, whether or not you agree with his conclusions. I have read three or four of his books, which still remain on my shelf, and I even had the pleasure to see the off-off-Broadway mounting of the play, Lipstick Traces, based on his tome of the same title.

I picture Marcus as sort of the anti-Lester Bangs. The work of Bangs was intelligent, but his stream of consciousness reviews – a large share of which I am going to posit were foisted by an indulgence of mind-altering substances – were of the moment and full of instantaneous fervor. Marcus, on the other hand, is an author of careful measure and import, even when he starts in one place and meanders through time and space, as he does in most of his books, covering diverse topics and managing to tie them into a larger picture. Ironically, Marcus also edited the works of Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic (1988). Another polar difference between the two writers is that Bangs would always include himself as part of nearly any story, whereas Marcus prides himself as keeping his work and personal life as two separate entities. But more about this later.

Joe Bonomo

As Marcus did with Bang’s work, this one is edited by music scholar Joe Bonomo, who has also written books on such diverse subjects as the Fleshtones, Jerry Lee Lewis and AC/DC. Here, we are introduced to a collection of interviews conducted over decades of Marcus rather than by him. The sources vary from printed works, on-line questions from various music fans, and Canadian radio (transcribed by Bonomo). Each interview chapter is listed chronologically over three decades, done in Q&A fashion.

One of the many reasons this book is important is that Marcus has pride, as he states in this book’s prologue written by Bonomo, in that he keeps himself and his non-music life as separate entities. Of course, there actually is no such thing as objectivity, as all observations are filtered through our own experiences (in the same way that all films and novels about the past and future are actually about the present). In fact, Marcus states, …I think there’s a tremendous amount of showing off that goes on, a lot of self-promotion. I think that if you want to use the word “I” in a piece, you have to earn the right. I don’t mean that you have to be around a long time. I mean that in terms of the writing of a given piece, you have to justify leaping out, and you have to see that somehow the authority is backed up. You can’t just assume that the reader ought to give a shit about you or anyone else. You have to earn the reader’s attention, you can’t take it for granted. (42; 1988) Of course, the “I” was one of Lester Bang’s fortes. But I digress…

Part of what makes this collection so important is that Marcus is the interviewee, rather than the topic originator, so he gets to go beyond the academic and can discuss his personal drives and motivations. He explains, I’ve lived a very conventional life. I was never a hippie, I was never into drugs. I was married when I was twenty-on and I’m still married. I have two kids, I live in a house, I’ve made my own career. I don’t work for a company, I’m an independent writer. I’ve been really lucky…. (26; 1984) I don’t waste my time writing about why I hate Journey, or why the Jefferson Starship is beneath contempt, or why I haven’t listened to a Grateful Dead album for God knows how many years. There’s just so much interesting stuff to write about … Kenny Rogers might be interesting in a sociological sense, he’s not interesting musically. I have to have both: If can’t write about music in a purely aesthetic manner. It doesn’t intrigue me. (5; 1981) …I know there’s all kinds of stuff there I never really caught. I never really heard. Well, I’d rather spend three or four weeks listening to Pere Ubu, and missing being knowledgeable about a whole load of stuff that wouldn’t matter to me. It would mean eventually I’d be able to write something interesting about Pere Ubu, rather than something that is ultimately meaningless about a whole lot of other stuff. (95; 1994)

Marcus further posits: My role as a critic is to intensify the experience other people might have with a given incident or object. That’s not how all critics see their roles. My role is not to tell people what’s good and what’s bad. I don’t want to make too big a claim for it. (27; 1984) I know that I have always worked on the assumption that I have no power. I don’t want any power. I just want to figure out what it is I have to say, and find a good way to say it. (30; 1988) I’ve basically always said that if I have any concrete role at all, or goal, it’s to expand the context or dimension in which people listen music, so that music can be understood as an integral part of any person’s life, rather than as a sideshow, or compartmentalized aspect, or just as symbols, or meanings of sounds. (33; 1988) … You make a fool of yourself when you say, “Mick Jagger wrote ‘Gimme Shelter’ he meant…” Who cares what he meant? The point is, what’s happening to that song when it is out there in the world being heard? (33; 1988)

There is no denying that Marcus has a sharp mind funneled through a life experience out of San Francisco in the 1960s, and writing about some of the most revolutionary music in modern history, from Dylan to the psychedelic, to his own pet topic, the rise of punk rock in England. His specialty is what Marshall McLuhan referred to as viewing life through an extreme rear view mirror. He finds the connections of diverse and seeming disengaged movements from the further past that meld into what we now know as modern culture. Some of it is reporting how Malcolm McLaren was influenced by the Situationalists, leading to the Sex Pistols, and others are wild and imaginative intellectual jumps, such as seeing a correlation between Elvis and Bill Clinton.

Likewise, this book casts a wide net over topics. One, in particular, has Marcus discussing what it was like to go to college as protests and riots occurred regularly around him, while he fulminates elsewhere on the phoniness of some of its leaders, such as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. But just as he describes that all of his work, no matter how diverse, originates from the music, that is where much of the direction of conversations touch on, if not directly focused, throughout the many Q&As in this book. It’s clear that as much as he is a music critic, he is also a social analyst and historian, easily flowing through all the topics and tying them together in a unique way that is the core of Greil Marcus’s work.

Apparently, much of his writing is split into two time periods, seemingly separated in the mid-1970s. For the 1950s and ‘60s, his focus was on the origins of rock and roll, and a fondness for Bob Dylan. But in the mid-1970s, his focus (much like fellow critic Robert Christgau) turned to Europe and especially the British Isles. He states, I first heard about punk turning on the television one Sunday afternoon, it must have been in January of 1977, maybe it was late ’76, and there was a little news feature and the essence of it was, Teenagers do even weirder new things in London, and it showed pictures of kids with strange hair and safety pins through their cheeks, and stuff like that, and said [adopts a newscaster voice], “This is a new cult known as Punk, the leaders are called the Sex Pistols.” And so I said, “Oh that looks pretty strange.” And I forgot all about it, until “Anarchy in the U.K.” arrived in my local record shop a week or so later for five dollars a single, and I said, “Why is that so expensive?” and they said, “It’s been banned in England,” and I said, “Oh, it’s been banned. I better hear it.” (79; 1993)

This is the point where I disagree with him wholeheartedly, in both an academic and emotional way. He claims that I always found the British stuff, and some of the European stuff, a lot more gripping, more interesting than the American stuff. In fact, it took me a number of years to get over my anti-American prejudice, and appreciate groups like X for what they really were. …But in general, I found the New York stuff a tremendous bore. Whether it was the Ramones, or Television, or Richard Hell, or Talking Heads – their early records were of no interest to me whatsoever – the New York Scene had nothing to do with what went on with the Sex Pistols, the Clash, X-Ray Spex, the Adverts, the Slits, and all the other groups I love. I still don’t find it all that interesting. They had the same name, and I suppose they shared a certain minimalist back-to-basics attitude, but I think they came from a very different direction. I never heard anyone say, “I heard Tom Verlaine and Television, and suddenly I knew that I could play too.” (37; 1988) In plain fact, what he refers to as punk (British) would never have existed in the both literal and figurative fashion if it were not for what the English bands heard coming over from New York, and Malcolm McLauren’s “borrowing” the styles from Richard Hell (safety pins) and the Ramones (ripped clothes), not to mention Tish and Snooky Bellomo from the Manic Panic store and Natasha with her outlet on St. Mark’s Place (hair dye, clothes, etc.). My belief is that the Pistols would have been just another failed noise band if they hadn’t built on the foundation of what was going on in New York.

But I also believe it is okay to disagree with even the strongest of critics, including those with the solid and vast credentials of Marcus. This come across in that somehow, I get the feeling that he has a very keen sense of humor, which is very dry (perhaps that’s why he has such a strong affinity with the British?) and subtle. Two chapters are a collection of questions sent to him on the Internet, and I found many of his answer quite amusing, sometimes in their handling, and other times in the brevity (for example, after a paragraph question about why no one talks about the band The Fall, his entire response is They never did anything for me.. For a man who goes to amazing lengths to explain the Situationalists and Dadaists in relation to the Sex Pistols, this is quite a commentary in a mere six words.

One of the things I respect about Marcus, even when I don’t agree, is that he is confident in what he believes, and holds nothing back. For example, when discussing the projections of the mentality of rock and roll singers through the years, he theorizes that: …the original figureheads weren’t supposed to act very smart. They were supposed to be extraordinary polite, as both Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis were, or they were supposed to be extremely circumspect, as Chuck Berry was. If Berry, as a black man, said half of what he was thinking at any given moment, he might have been lynched…The Beatles were the first group of people to come along who didn’t pretend to be stupid. They acted and talked as intelligently as they actually were. They allowed the Rolling Stones to come along and then be as cool, as obnoxious, as bohemian, as “fuck you,” as in-your-face as they wanted to be. (110; 1997) Johnny Rotten was someone who really schooled himself on James Joyce and Graham Greene and his sense of being an outsider because he was Irish and being just astonishingly smart and vehement and impatient. (112; 1997) I don’t think there’s any question that for over twenty years the Ramones have inspired countless people to do all kinds of things. They inspired the Sex Pistols and the Clash. I didn’t like them. I always thought they were a bunch of twits…Television as an arty version of the Grateful Dead. To me, it was just a new form of rock and roll. It was all just a downtown New York bohemian scene. It was a local story. I still believe that. This was local must as far as I was concerned. I don’t believe that the reason that punk came to life again and again all over the world is due to anything that happened in New York. (114; 1998)

Perhaps I’m wrong, but it seems he contradicts himself in that last piece. First he says that New York was not important to the music scene in England, and then he states elsewhere that the Ramones had an influence on the Pistols and Clash. But here is the thing, if you bear with me. Social critic Neil Postman once told me that the problem with being published is that people will reference a theory that “Postman says that…” Neil stated that over time, ideas changed, but the book doesn’t, so even if the idea has evolved, the writer is still locked into that printed page. And this from a man who firmly believed in the published word.

Likewise, this collection covers nearly 30 years, and in that time, new thoughts may see their way through. For example, at some point Marcus discusses how it wasn’t until his teenage daughter pointed out what was great about the band X that he started to appreciate it, many years later.

That’s not to say that I am always opposed to what Marcus is stating, and in fact I agree with him quite often, such as with his explaining that, When punk began playing with the swastika, first here [England], and then picked up as an imitation in the United States, the first explanation of it that I read was that these kids were too young to know what the swastika really meant, and they just knew it was a sort of bad symbol, and so they used it to show they were bad, and that they didn’t respect the pieties of society and art. I didn’t believe that for a minute. Everybody knows what the swastika is. It means Hitler, it means extermination, it means mass murder. There’s no secret about what the swastika means, and no one is too young to know that. (99; 1994).

My belief is that part of the reason the New York scene is a black hole to Marcus is because he is from San Francisco, and did not get the opportunity to have the scene grow and evolve around him. It took a mediated television program after the nascent beginnings to bring the Pistols to his attention, and who knows if he would have been attracted to it at all if it had not crossed his path that way (fate? coincidence?). As he states above, I know there’s all kinds of stuff there I never really caught. I never really heard. How would his world be different if it had not come to him on the telly, or if the shop he mentioned didn’t bring in the “Anarchy” single? A modern kōan, if ever there was one.

Bonomo does an excellent job collecting (and occasionally transcribing) both the familiar and unfamiliar topics to the readers that have been covered in the books by Marcus. It’s fascinating to hear him take off his supposed (and I say that with a twinkle in my eye) objectivity, and place himself in the role of the subject.
While it’s true, as Bonomo states in the introduction, that Little of Marcus’s personal life is revealed in these wide-ranging discussions,(ix), there is a lot revealed about how he thinks, the processes he takes, and the effect of what he is doing (and to what he is listening) has an effect on his life. I’m going to posit that the reader is probably not really going to care what he was doing the day Kennedy was killed (pick one), but rather why he chooses what he does, and in that way he opens himself up. Sure, he can be a clinical writer, but Marcus is a fascinating scholar (though he might balk at the word), and whether or not you agree, he is a worthy read.

Book Review: “33-1/3: Highway to Hell,” by Joe Bonomo

Text © Robert Barry Francos
Images from the Internet

The 33-1/3: Highway to Hell
By Joe Bonomo
The Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc. (NY / London), 2010
131 pages
Continuumbooks.com

First, some essentials:

This is the third book I’ve had the pleasure to be reviewing by Northern Illinois University prof and music historian, Joe Bonomo. I’d like to digress and give a quick shout out to his previous two (non-fiction) books, SWEAT: The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, and Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found. Both are excellent reads, and worth seeking out.

This particular book is number 73 in a series of digest sized books that Continuum Books has issued that focuses on a particular groundbreaking album that had a dramatic effect on culture. A brilliant concept, as each book is decidedly different, with the author given freedom to write about the release from their own perspective, anywhere from a straight bio to an academic polemic, to a personal reflection.

Lastly, as a “truth in publishing” statement, one of my photos appears within its pages (p. 67), and myself and this very blog is quoted extensively at least twice. As there is no such thing as objectivity, and I have no plans in leaning that way, I decided to review the book.

Bonomo has a definite style in his writing that flows in an auteur manner (so far). He is a knowledgeable participant in the history of the groups he documents, and he mixes this considerable information with his own history related to the topic, such as where he was when he first heard the 1979 AC/DC LP that would be a major US breakthrough for the Aussie band, and the last for it’s doomed lead singer, Bon Scott. Bonomo describes how the licentious nature of the music touched his teenage (i.e., horny) psyche, as well as that of the generation.

The Bon Scott period is more remembered fondly as a past moment than it was in the time of its incarnation. With new singer Brian Johnson (who still fronts the band to this day), AC/DC hit their popular stride, and can fill auditoriums across the planet, but it’s the Bon Scott era to which everyone harkens back, and Bonomo places the reader in the time of that slow, upward popularity swing of the band.

What helps make this book special is that Bonomo does not put the band on a pedestal. He looks at the music frankly, and even states which songs on the album are the weakest (and, of course, why they are such). As for Bon himself, Bonomo writes:

I won’t romanticize Bon Scott. I can’t forgive that he was a self-destructive alcoholic who drank himself to death, but I can forgive that unhappy truth, and I listen to the songs that dramatize that hazardous dancer with more than a little sympathy, and with rue at the human mistakes he made, however fun they were.

The book is formally broken into chapters that literally and figuratively mark the three chords that AC/DC relied on so heavily. We are introduced to the rise of the band, the tour before Highway to Hell’s release, the making of the album, the tour after, the effect of the death of Bon on the band and its audience, the rise of their popularity based on this album and subsequent reworking with a new singer (yet keeping their style and mojo going), and the aftermath of a world that has had AC/DC as a paradigm for rocking hard for all these years.

As Bonomo discusses the final product of Highway to Hell, he analyzes each song as he posits what the particular piece denotes and projects, and what it has meant to him over the years, using himself as the representative of his generation. As he describes each cut, I played that particular song, one by one (thank you YouTube), as if he was a tour guide taking me through the highway of AC/DC.

A topic that crops up occasionally in this analysis is one I don’t hear very often, and that is AC/DC’s occasional descriptor as “punk.” This is funny to me, as my Brooklyn crowd always associated them with the likes of the heavy anthem rock of Slade, more than, say, other Aussie punk bands of the time, such as the Saints. Yes, AC/DC were essentially three chords and their songs reveled in the sordid, but even their insisting on keeping their particular brand of rock going (as did the Ramones) gives the application of “punk” as questionable. Heck, Tom Petty’s first album was labeled as “punk” in 1976.

AC/DC is a band whose whole emphasis is fun: drinking, women, and rocking out. Bonomo keeps the flow going from history to analysis to the band as personal touchstone throughout the book, from beginning to end. Whether one is familiar with the band or not (personally, I only own their first LP, High Voltage, which I bought after seeing them play at CBGB in 1977 for $1 in a bargain bin), the story of them is still intriguing as present by Bonomo, who seemingly effortlessly flows through AC/DC’s history, their importance, and their legacy. This was an especially fun read.

Book Review: “Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found”, by Joe Bonomo

Text © Robert Barry Francos/FFanzeen
Images from the Internet

Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found
By Joe Bonomo
Continuum (NY/London), 2009
208 pages
ISBN: 978-0-82642-966-7
www.continuumbooks.com

Joe Bonomo wrote the book on the Fleshtones, SWEAT: The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, and now he goes back a bit further, looking at one of the master’s of rock’n’roll’s riotous career.

I’m going to assume the reader of this blog has enough awareness to be cognizant of The Killer, Jerry Lee Lewis, and his amazing music. I’m not going to insult your intelligence, because neither does Bonomo.

The ultimate focus of the book is a rare 1964 recording Lewis made in Hamburg, Germany, called ”Live” At the Star-Club, where he was accompanied by the British band, the Nashville Teens. To many who have heard it, the recording is one of the highlights of not only Lewis’ career, but is considered one of the best live recordings in the history of the genre. Unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity, as this is still considered a hard album to find (anyone wants to send me a copy, I wouldn’t complain…).

Essentially, the book is broken up into four sections. The first covers what happened to the career of Lewis’ during and after his infamous downfall, when the news broke he married his barely teen second cousin (while still married to someone else, no less). The second section deals with what lead up to this Star-Club recording, the taping itself, and the aftermath. The next section deals with the rest of his career as it veered into country, and the final is his legacy.

Bonomo has stated (on Facebook, I believe) that biographies are also about the author. In this case, it’s absolutely true, and all kudos for the acknowledgement. As there really is no such thing as “objective,” it’s refreshing to see an author embrace that notion. He clearly places himself within the story, describing how the album effected and affected him, how he came to know the recording in the first place, and how it fits into his own world of music (including punk rock). One of the ways he does this is by discussing some other excellent live recordings, such James Brown’s Live at the Apollo and one by Charlie Pickett and the Eggs (and yes, it is an amazing LP; I saw them play CBGBs, as well).

It’s telling that Bonomo starts the book with the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word “ego,” as there should be a picture of Lewis right there (I have an OED, and there is not, FYI). Lewis does not always come off as a likeable guy in the story of his life, but Bonomo does not shy away from that, looking at both good and bad points of the artist as a talented, self-loving, self-loathing, drug and alcohol-fueled, misogynistic and abusive musical genius. As he states on page 102, in discussing a performance of “Mean Woman Blues,” “As always, the lyrics take a back seat to their filthy delivery, which takes a back seat to Jerry Lee’s piano playing, which takes a back seat to nothing and no one.”

As a side-bar, I remember when JLL was set to play the Ritz in New York City in the 1980s, someone was to interview him, but before he could, JLL insisted the writer down a tumbler amount of likker prior to him even being allowed to sit down at the same table (I would have walked out, frankly). I don’t remember who the writer was, where I read this, or what the outcome was, but it shows the personality of the man and his need to control. However, what he dominated the best was the piano keyboard. Lord, the man can play.

While extremely knowledgeable about his subject, Bonomo constantly feeds the reader many facts about Lewis, but with his excellent writing style, he never hits one over the head with it, nor does it resemble a history class, reeling off the facts. Rather, he weaves them into the story in a way where the reader is totally engaged in the moment, which is not an easy task. The author’s love of the topic comes through with excitement rather than gushing, without pretention of raising a flawed character, but rather places the reader there, sharing the experience rather than lecturing about it.

One of Bonomo’s strong directions is taking the events that are happening within the storyline, as it were, and placing them into a larger cultural context, such as telling what the Beatles and Stones were doing at the same time Lewis was at the Star-Club, or details about the Nashville Teens, what let up to their backing Lewis, and what happened to them after.

Bonomo talks to many of those who were involved with Lewis’ career, including the late, great musician Jim Dickinson and producer Jerry Kennedy, both from Memphis, as well as some who had been at the Star-Club that night, such as the person who did the recording, did the mixing the tape onto the album, and who ran the club at the time. All this gives authenticity to the author’s tales of the many rises and falls of Lewis.

Although short, I enjoyed the final part, where Bonomo takes the legacy of Lewis and shows it through his interpretation, and in the eyes of some current musicians of various genres, from the snubbing of Lewis by the Country Hall of Fame, to the punk of X and the Ramones, and the rockabilly revision of the Reverend Horton Heat and Dave Alvin of the Blasters (Alvin has a great quote near the end of the book [p. 188] where he states, “When you’re younger you have all these silly conversations: ‘What’s the best Fuck You record of all time?’ Was it Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music? I’d say, no, it was Self-Portrait by Bob Dylan. Well, so is ’Live’ At the Star-Club. The way I think about it is you’ve got a wolf that’s caught in a trap, and Jerry Lee at the Star-Club is the sound of a wolf biting his own leg off.”

As Jerry Lee Lewis declined to be interviewed for this book, I wonder what he thinks of it. But then again, by not talking to him, I believe that there is more freedom for Joe Bonomo in the book, giving him a bit of a clearer head perhaps, with less pressure to “perform” (Lewis is infamous for his demands), which makes for a grand ol’ time in itself.

Book Review: SWEAT: The Story of The Fleshtones

Concert photos (c) Robert Barry Francos

Taken at CBGB's, late 1977, Fleshtones on shared bill with the Zantees

During a visit to Buffalo, Bernie Kugel brought me to the local Borders, and pointed out this book, SWEAT: The Story of The Fleshtones, America's Garage Band (Continuum International Publishing, NY, 2007) by Joe Bonomo (pictured below). The main reason he did this is because I am listed in the bibliography due to an interview I did with the band in 1977, and published in my fanzine, FFanzeen), in 1978. A couple of months later, I bought a copy of the book at the Strand.

The Fleshtones certainly do deserve a tome to them, and Joe gives detail after detail about their background, lifestyle, formation, recording, and friends (including a rightful heavy nod to Miriam Linna, who was more involved with the New York scene than she is rarely given credit). Interviews with everyone involved, including record producers and label executives, are extensive and pretty through. And also often pretty amusing in hindsight, such as Paul Wexler's vexation with the Up-Front sessions (perhaps they should be referred to in the future as the Up-Tight sessions?).

But it's the Fleshtones contribution to blue-eyed R&B that is the main focus of SWEAT, and as well it should be. The true sweat is the audience as they jump around to some of the livliest music that came out of the '70s New York scene. The fact that the band is still around today shows that they are a well-honed music machine.

One of the central characters in the first half of the book is their house, in Whitestone, Queens. I remember being at one of their infamous parties, held Halloween, 1977. The first performance of the Zantees (who would eventually transform into the A-Bones) was held in their basement. It was a wild scene (though not as scary as a late-night forage to a local White Castle that same eve), with enjoyment watching the imbibing aplenty (I was pretty straight-edge already). The reason I bring this up is because as I'd met the Fleshtones in the -- er -- flesh, I can attest to how lively a crew they were. They also attracted a large number of interesting people into their circle, many whom I have associated, such as filmmaker M. Henry Jones and out-there fanzine editor Lisa Baumgartener (who was known to record every conversation she had, whether on the phone or in person).

There are some typos that run throughout the book, and some clear omissions, such as relating how the band shared a bill with Nervus Rex (spelled Nervous Rex in SWEAT) without mentioning that their drummer was Miriam (though Joe does mention her skins affiliation with the Cramps and Zantees). Despite this, the detail of the book is definitely a labor of love (labour of love, for you Canadians) and it clearly shows.

As the book often points out, the Fleshtones were on the forefront of the New York garage scene that would take off just a few short years after their formation, showing them to be ahead of their time. The Fleshtones contibuted much, and so does Bonomo with this book. I look forward to his next endeavor.

More info on Joe Bonomo or the book:
http://www.myspace.com/fleshtonessweat