Summoning the music of their younger selves

October 05, 2009|Steve Morse

Uh oh, the premise of this book is to get “serious’’ authors - not entertainment critics - to write about the one album that made the deepest impact on them. That could open the door to all manner of snobbery. But fortunately that’s not the case in these highly readable, confessional pieces that focus on blockbuster acts from the Beatles, the Who, and the Jackson 5 to cultish figures Kate Bush, the Smiths, Fugazi, and Rickie Lee Jones.

The novelists, essayists, and magazine editors assembled for “Heavy Rotation’’ may end up revealing more than they intended (including a lot of debate about sexual confusion during their youth), but the mission of fusing music and literature, which is editor Peter Terzian’s theme, is accomplished quite well. A record album “becomes a portal into another world,’’ he writes, and most of the authors make their worlds come alive.

The choices are wildly varied, which makes “Heavy Rotation’’ all the more appealing. Novelist Alice Elliott Dark (like most of the contributors, she lives in the New York area), even succeeds in making an obsession with “shy Beatle’’ George Harrison palatable again. “You want to be with George without your father knowing,’’ she writes slyly. And the Who’s concept album of Mod culture, “Quadrophenia,’’ is engagingly described by James Wood, the literary critic and New Yorker magazine writer. His appraisal of the drumming of Keith Moon as “a form of dedicated vandalism’’ is right on. So is Martha Southgate’s view of the Jackson 5’s “Greatest Hits.’’ She’s an African-African Cleveland native who notes “how much like us they seemed at the time’’ - before Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery, of course.

The cult acts inspire even more passion. Stacey D’Erasmo, a novelist and assistant professor of writing at Columbia University, chooses Bush’s “The Sensual World,’’ aptly noting how her music has “a chilly wind blowing through the beauty.’’ And Benjamin Kunkel’s view of the Smiths’ “The Queen Is Dead’’ is a classic. “It’s music that you listen to alone while you lay in awe on your bedroom floor,’’ he writes.

You soon realize how many of the writers like to listen to their favorite albums alone. Kate Christensen, whose book “The Great Man’’ received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction last year, rhapsodizes about “The Flying Cowboy’’ by Rickie Lee Jones: “I never listened to it with another person. It has always been and remains a solitary album for me, not a social one.’’