”Is it clear I was a hero of rock’n’roll?” asks Bucky Wunderlick, the
narrator of Don DeLillo’s novel Great Jones Street. Since we have been in
Wunderlick’s company for only one paragraph, it’s probably a little early to
judge. But were he to ask the same question 264 pages later, when Great
Jones Street’s story of searching isolation, weird drug cults and spiritual
decay chugs to a close, the best answer you might be able to give him would
probably be: “Er, maybe.”
Wunderlick, a more austere cross between Steve Tyler and Bob Dylan, has
abandoned his band, midtour, and gone into hiding. He has a silly name, for
which we can just about forgive him – until we find out that the corporate
monolith that puts out his records is called Transparanoia. He does,
however, have some interesting thoughts on a crowd’s need for its performer
to die. But does he stand up as a defining fictional representation of the
rock dream? It’s doubtful.
First published in 1973, Great Jones Street starts as a story of a retreat
from the limelight, a quest to see what you “can learn in endland”
(actually, scratch that Tyler comparison – can you really imagine the man
who sang Love in an Elevator saying this kind of stuff?), and gets further
and further from its musical theme. The writing becomes so opaque that,
halfway through the story, when Wunderlick’s girlfriend dies, it feels as
significant as a small insect expiring in the corner of the room. If it
weren’t for the (appalling) fake lyrics that pad out the second half, it
would be easy to forget it was a book about rock’n’roll at all. Nonetheless,
in the three decades since it first emerged, DeLillo’s third work has gained
a reputation as the best of rock novels.
There are two possible reasons for this. It could be argued that a good piece
of literature about rock should be druggy and difficult and opaque, and not
really about music, and that Great Jones Street fits the bill; it’s a rock
book in the same way that Performance is a rock film. On the other – more
likely – hand, its status could be largely down to medium-fish,
small-fetid-lagoon syndrome.
Over the years, few literary subgenres have been more troublesome than the
rock novel. Great Jones Street doesn’t come close to the standards of
DeLillo’s later Underworld or Libra, but it’s easy to see the thinking
process of serious literature fans who crave mythical rock tales: “This? Or
Jackie Collins’s Rock Star?”
What novelist with a big record collection wouldn’t be excited at the prospect
of writing about rock’n’roll life: the internal politics, the heartbreak,
the potential for myth-making? Nonetheless, the rock-novel genre contains
some of history’s most misguided books. Bad fake music journalism disguised
as fiction for people who don’t read fiction? Literary slumming from writers
who really should know better? Overexcited fan-boy ramblings? It’s all here.
You might have thought that, given enough time to get his beachball-sized
brain around it, Salman Rushdie could write with dizzying eloquence about
any subject under the sun, but The Ground Beneath Her Feet, his
Orpheus-referencing story about a rock band operating in an alternate
dimension, feels as inherently wrong as a man playing air typewriter at
Wembley. As for Jeff Gomez’s tribute to the 1990s American indie scene, Our
Noise, might it not have been easier to write a list of all the lo-fi bands
operating out of Chapel Hill circa 1994 and be done with it?
Jonathan Coe’s Morrissey-obsessed indie-rock novel The Dwarves of Death – it’s
rarely a sign of a writer at ease with his subject matter when he begins his
book with the line “I find it hard to describe what happened” – is a
faltering anomaly in his back list. As anyone who has read the passages in
The Rotters’ Club about the prog rock-loving Philip Chase will know, Coe can
write with great wit and perception about musical obsession. So why, when he
takes music as his central subject, is the result about as interesting as a
Wedding Present sound check?
It seems that the best pop-themed novels are those that dance nimbly around
the edges of their subject, never quite getting to the microphone, or even
the moshpit: books such as The Rotters’ Club, or High Fidelity, or Tom
Perrotta’s The Wishbones. It is when a writer attempts to be more definitive
that problems occur. How do you encapsulate the ephemeral, train-spotterish
world of pop and rock without coming up with a book that is ephemeral and
train-spotterish?
In Cathi Unsworth’s new novel, The Singer, the legend of the pretend punk band
Blood Truth is told, and barely a page goes by without a reference to a
real-life safety-pin hero. As the pop references accumulate, so do the
pop-cultural ones: the guitarist and singer in Blood Truth are “like Lee
Marvin and Robert Mitchum”, then, a few lines later, “like The Wild Bunch”.
Unsworth has few shortcomings as a plotter, but novelistic responsibilities
such as 3-D characterisation seem to have been replaced by glorified
adolescent list-making. For a book aimed exclusively at music obsessives, it
might be passable; for a work aimed universally at lovers of fiction, it
feels elitist and exclusionist. This is probably the rock novel’s biggest
blight: blinded by musical love, an author will often think that the mere
mention of a cultural landmark that excites them will be enough to excite
their reader equally. But what if that reader doesn’t like the Sex Pistols?
Unsworth has another classic symptom of rock-novelist’s disease, too: she’s a
bit too desperate to be real. Blood Truth are working-class boys from Hull
and, as if to underline this, her third-person narrative slips into sloppy
vernacular, using “it weren’t” instead of “it wasn’t”: “It weren’t just a
question of technique.” This feels less like a deliberate stylistic device
and more like a slip of the keyboard from someone trying to remind us that
true rock stars are ill-educated.
A criticism that has often been levelled at the rock novel is that, because
the literati are largely upper-middle-class, they haven’t ever experienced
the struggle and graft that go with dreaming of a headline slot at
Glastonbury. This is almost certainly rubbish, partly because the middle
class has just as much historical right to comment on rock existence as the
working class, and partly because musicians are, on the whole, roughly 13½
times lazier than novelists.
Joe Strummer once ranted that Rushdie should not have been allowed to write
about rock’n’roll because of his middle-class intellectual background, but
would you really want to have read a novel by Strummer? I’m sure it would
have been several miles more lumpen than The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
It would probably also have been worse than Love Songs and Lies, a novel
published recently by Libby Purves, the presenter of Radio 4’s Midweek,
which details the relationship between a well-to-do, poetically inclined
Oxbridge graduate and the lead singer of a band called Bastard and Sons in
the mid1970s.
Hard as it is to believe that you’d get reserved seating to see a band with
the word “Bastard” in its name playing at a venue called “The Dive”, and
that they would be concerned about whether they were better than Freddie and
the Dreamers, or that any self-respecting rocker in the history of popular
music has ever uttered the phrase “Shall we go to Islington and write some
songs, round at Friggy’s?”, worse-qualified people than Purves have written
made-up prose about pop music.
Call her inauthentic, but what’s worse? This, and the trashy, make-believe
world of Collins’s Rock Star – a book that seems to have concocted 400-plus
pages of heaving breasts and burgeoning erections from one five-minute
conversation with Rod Stewart at a party – or “in-depth” stuff from someone
whose storytelling ambition is fighting a losing battle with their ambition
to tell you how erudite their record collection is? It’s a tough choice.
Besides the show-off issue, and the fact that musical excitement is an
ethereal thing that seems to defy logical description, there might be one
more reason why we have not yet had the much hankered-after, “authentic,
seminal” rock novel. Whisper it, but could such a thing be, by its very
nature, a bit boring?
“The song grew resolute, intractable, like some enormous watch spring that
gained force the more tightly it was wound,” wrote the normally excellent
Jonathan Lethem in his recent rock novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet. It’s a
nicely constructed sentence, but that’s about all you can say for it. It’s
not surprising that Lethem seems to get bored writing about the rehearsal
room and invents some surreal extra plot lines about a kangaroo and a
bumper-sticker designer.
There’s a great skill to being a musically knowledgeable fiction writer and
resisting the rock-novel demon. Lethem slipped here. Stephen King, Nick
Hornby, Carl Hiaasen? They’ve all done okay so far, but who knows?
Temptation might get the better of them. They’d be well advised to read a
passage – just one passage, mind – from Purves’s Love Songs and Lies: the
bit where Sally, the narrator, gets bashful about one of the lyrics she has
written for the lead singer of Bastard and Sons. She says: “It looks
terrible on the page. Pop lyrics usually do.” In those two sentences, she
may have unwittingly summed up exactly why rock novels don’t work, and
probably never will.
