I just finished reading Ian Christe’s book Everybody Wants Some, a history of Van Halen. I heard about this on the Talking Metal podcast, which is abuzz with news of this original-lineup reunion, minus Michael Anthony on bass, replaced by Eddie’s 16-year-old kid. Weird. Anyway, Christie wrote one of the 700 “history of metal” books that came out a few years back. When he was writing, he got in touch and wanted to stop over and photocopy all of my old zines, but we never hooked up, and actually I never read the book. So I picked up this one, touted to be the first definitive biography of the band, and got to work.

I’m going to start by saying the book is not that great, but it’s up in the air how much this was the author’s fault, and how much of the blame goes on the subject. The history of Van Halen starts with this whole interesting SoCal garage band culture, and these two Dutch kids teaming up with an outspoken Jewish son of an opthamologist, and then hits this mid-point where they are on top of the world and the whole thing implodes. But then the second half of the book is all of these years of dicking around with Sammy Hagar, and toward the end, it’s Eddie locked in a home studio, with a third of his tongue cut out from cancer, his parents dead, his wife gone, about 800 attempts at rehab, three fired/quit singers, a hip transplant, and a brother with fucked-up, inoperable neck trauma.

So at the end of the book, I’m thinking “where the fuck is the high note here?” I mean, it talked about all of the times the VH brothers broke off and tried to reconcile with Roth, with both sides saying the others were poisoning the well. And yeah, they’re back together now. But there’s a chance they will be broken apart by the time the ink dries in the book, and meanwhile, only about 12 people even care. Meanwhile, Michael Anthony the human alcohol filter is set up as the fallen silent hero or some shit, with his bass tracks mixed down, some studio tracks played by EVH, his bass solo snipped from the live set, and finally being told he had to relinquish all rights to all songs and trademarks and take a huge pay cut if he wanted to tour. And next time around, he’s fired. All of the old metalheads identify with Anthony’s party lifestyle, and who gives a fuck if Eddie can eke out Eruption while he’s sitting on stage in a wheelchair looking like the fucking cryptkeeper.

The book had one fundamental flaw which was also a benefit: it appeared that Christie did not have access to any of the members of the band. Most of the quotes were lifted from interviews with magazines or on tape, and there was no buy-in from any of the major players. (I might be wrong on this, but it sure read that way.) So that means there wasn’t any new dirt I didn’t already know. But it also meant that someone didn’t come in with an agenda and bumrush the book. Anyone in the band’s history (with the exception of Gary Cherone, who isn’t big-headed about it, probably because he was in the band for like three weeks) would completely dominate something like this, and if you only know one side of this story, you don’t know any of the story. Case in point: go pick up a copy of David Lee Roth’s Crazy From The Heat book. Now, I love this book, because it’s Roth the showman and storyteller, laying it down and getting into some really crazy shit about the road, his family, and everything else. But when I read his side of the VH split story, I wondered, “how much of this shit is true?” It wasn’t that his story was unbelievable, but I knew there were two sides, and his was going to be giant and overdramatized. And so by not doing an official Van Halen family biography, he sidesteps that problem, but also misses a lot of juice that would have justified the reading time.

Aside from the subject matter, Christie’s writing tries a little too hard in places, and didn’t hold me. It was competent, but it wasn’t a thickly textured tapestry of incredible stories and details. And why treat a band with such fucked up and incredible history just like you would if you were writing a Jewel biography? There wasn’t enough depth to blow me away, and when you’re writing about a band that (at least back in the day) was supposed to blow you away, it just didn’t mesh.

That said, there was a lot of information about Hagar-era Van Halen, and it made me think back to the years I listened to the band, back in high school. 1984 was my introduction as a junior high kid, when it was all over MTV and pop radio. And then I got into 5150 and OU812, even though everyone else wrote off Van Hagar and went on to other, heavier things. While I was reading this book, I put OU812 on the iPod during my drive to work, and was surprised at how that set of tunes totally set the stage for the summer of 1988 for me. I loved my Metallica and VoiVod and Grim Reaper, but I also had that tape in the player quite a bit, and it still takes me back. Those songs are seared into my brain, and it’s always comforting to give them another listen.

Anyway. Just started reading a Houdini biography, and I’m trying to get off the bio kick to get back to some good fiction…

I just finished reading Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America yesterday. When I saw a ton of hipster types reading it on the subways a few years ago, I assumed it was some kind of anti-Bush screed. (And by some of the reviews on Amazon, a lot of people who read it did the same.) But it’s not, and it’s a nice little alternate history novel that involves a big twist or two going into WW2.

I’m a big fan of these sorts of alternate history plots, especially when it’s World War 2. I just re-read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle a few weeks ago, and after a dozen or two google searches, found Roth’s book and decided I should check it out. Other similarly themed books would include Fatherland by Robert Harris, and maybe Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil, both of which I enjoyed. And there’s the PS3 game Resistance: Fall of Man, which takes the jagged alt-future and mixes it with a healthy dose of zombie-like beasts set out to infect and destroy the earth. Each of these books makes what we know as historic timeline turn into a different history by the change of a small event in the past, like someone not winning an election, or a war’s winner and loser flip-flopping. It’s always interesting to play the “what if” and read a story that starts with a stock set of characters and then switch it all up until you’ve got Josef Mengele running the research division of Procter and Gamble in the 1950s.

TPAA takes a softer touch with the changes, compared to other books anyway. The US doesn’t get involved in WW2, and a land that is becoming more isolationist and worried about fixing domestic issues before international voting in Charles Lindberg as the next American President, defeating FDR in 1940. He then signs peace accords with Hitler, and on the surface, shrugging off the thought of going to war. But many social programs are started that seem to target Jews, relocating them to remote rural areas to break up the strongly Jewish enclaves in large cities, and (voluntarily) sending off young Jewish kids to live in the countryside with farmers for the summer, and maybe teaching them to stray from their family beliefs. This quickly escalates into massive anti-Semitism riots and general chaos, with families fleeing to Canada, young men enlisting in the British army via Montreal to fight in France, and crews of Jewish vigilante police groups erupting in violence with the national guard and other non-Jewish vigilante groups.

Roth chose to write the book from the viewpoint of a young Jewish boy (also named Philip Roth) living in New Jersey, and he details the conflict in terms of this boy’s family, neighborhood, and apartment building. It’s interesting, because the cheap way to go would be to have these two-dimensional stormtroopers come in and lay waste to the high and mighty Jewish people that did nothing wrong and were entirely noble. But he spends time blurring the lines a bit, showing people within the family as not being entirely perfect. His dad is completely enamored by every word put across the airwaves by blowhard gossiper Walter Winchel (sort of the Jewish Perez Hilton of the 1940s.) The dad goes on these huge tirades and believes every word of Winchel’s reports; just saying the word “Lindberg” around him makes him blow a gasket. Philip’s brother Sandy enters the program to work on a farm in Kentucky, while his cousin Alvin joins the Canadian army, gets his leg blown off in France, and later ends up a low-level mafia henchman. His aunt marries a Rabbi that is a confidant of the Lindberg political machine; the downstairs neighbors get sent off to the deep south in the relocation program.

It was a real page-turner, although I thought he didn’t dive too deep in the alt history, and the ending slapped together far too quickly. Pretty much every loose thread is pulled back together at the end of WW2 to the actual history, with few explanations as to how that would happen. Much more of the book had to do with domestic policies and the slight changes among the population. For example, the war in Europe is mentioned, but hardly detailed. The Japanese conflict is only mentioned once or twice. If you’re looking for detailed specifications of what kind of jet bombers the Luftwaffe built with no allied bombers mucking up their factories, that kind of thing isn’t there. There are also strange “factual” errors, like that if Hitler and pals went unchecked for an extra few years and the US had no great military buildup, it’s unlikely the Third Reich would have still fallen in 1945. This book’s much more focused on how the already existing anti-semitism in the 1940s could have exploded if the political situation went south, and it does do a good job of twisting together existing political figures into the fabric of the story. That said, I found Roth’s writing itself to be somewhat clunky and tangled in places. There were more than a few times where I read something and had to say “wait, they’re in Kentucky now?” and had to backtrack and read forward and search to find the tiny reference he made to some huge plot device.

What’s weird to me is that if you research Lindberg or the anti-war far right movement (which has been forgotten by history), you see that a lot of the reasons they had for staying out of WW2 were the same reasons people now state for staying/getting out of Iraq. Read this speech he gave in 1941, and it’s just odd to think that he’s on the completely opposite side of the political spectrum from people giving the same speech today. And with that in mind, back up to the thing I said about people who reviewed the book saying “OMG BUSH PWNED!” - did they even read the book?

Anyway, worth checking out, but go with the PKD for a better-written book, or Fatherland for a more technical one.

BOOK REVIEW High Fidelity - Nick Hornby

I read this book about a year ago and thought “oh fuck! this guy has taken about every theme from my first piece-of-shit book Summer Rain and incorporated them into a novel that’s actually interesting, funny, and touching.” My first read made me both jealous and overjoyed. I kept the book around with a group of other novels that reminded me of what I needed to do during the eventual rewrite of Summer Rain. (other said books include John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, Rupert Thomson’s The Five Gates of Hell, some key points in On the Road, Shampoo Planet minus all of the generation X crap, and an ever-changing list of Bukowski fiction).

I’m rewriting Summer Rain now, for a lot of different personal reasons. Hornby’s book fell into my hands again, because I was too cheap to buy new reading material, but mostly because I wanted to keep thinking about Summer Rain, instead of buying some book about futuristic bug aliens that read minds and colonized the planet Mars or something. Reading his book kept me on track, and made me think much more about the new edits to my book. But, his story made me think of some other themes, and this is one that haunted me:

You can look back, or you can look forward.

Here’s the deal: this book is about a guy named Rob who is in his mid thirties and lives in the UK. He runs a beat-up record store out of the way in some dark alley, and works with two other characters who are total music bigots. I mean they have 40,000 records in their house, they listen to walkmen constantly, they are making top 5 or top 10 lists all the time (top 5 blind performers, top 5 side one, track one openers, worst 5 bands, etc). Anyway, the book starts with Rob talking about his top 5 breakups. Why? He just got dumped. And now he’s 35, pissing away at some tiny shop, wondering what’s next.

Hornby’s got all bases covered here. He’s hitting you with the hilarious and screwed up antics of this small record store, sort of like a UK version of the movie Clerks or something, and you’re also getting the quite real and touching story of this guy trying to figure out what it all means. He messes around with an American folk singer woman, and tries to look up all of the women he’s dated in some self-masochistic ritual of trying to find out what went wrong.

Like I said, this all reminds me of what went on in Summer Rain - the main character got dumped, and he spent the better part of a summer trying to find out what path to follow in life. But what hit me more was how Hornby had detailed a lot of the strange emotional conditions that had led to my writing of Summer Rain. I became a writer because I got dumped by somebody, and needed to find something to do besides sending her emails about every 20 seconds and asking what was so wrong with me or what did I do or would therapy help or is this something that happened to me as a child. And Summer Rain became a vehicle for me - instead of looking up my old girlfriends and asking them what was wrong with me, I could animate them, and watch them interact with the other characters in my book, and find out what went wrong during the course of the novel. I don’t know if it exorcised any demons, but it kept me writing.

Anyway, it is a good book, and worth reading. End of book report.

I went to see the band Dream Theater on Saturday night. It was a totally last-second plan; I heard about it on the radio that afternoon, and it was only $20, and right down the hill from me, so what the hell. The club is called the Fenix, and it’s massively small for this kind of deal. As a dance club, it’s pretty huge, but get a couple of big-dick drum sets and about 28 tons of amps in there, and it gets small fast. They sold out of tickets (lucky I got down there around lunch to buy one before then), so it was wall-to-wall leather jacket in there. I went by myself, and didn’t really talk to anyone, but I got there just as the opening back started, so I missed any awkwardness there.

The opening band pretty much sucked - some amalgam of the most annoying and marketable parts of U2, Pearl Jam, and Blind Melon, or something. They weren’t horrible, but I didn’t find them too noteworthy, and if you listened to 5 seconds of both bands, you could tell that this was the doing of some record exec. I was standing by some fratboys that were really into this band, which sort of proves my point. Anyway, it wasn’t as bad as seeing the Cult open for Metallica, but it wasn’t like seeing Primus open for Rush, either.

[Editor’s note: the band I mentioned above was actually Creed.]

I’m really into Dream Theater’s first two albums and their EP. I got an advance copy of their first album long before it was out, and played the damn thing thin. I wasn’t into their second-to-newest album, Awake, and I didn’t know they had a new one. So there’s my problem - they played a lot of new stuff, and I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. Granted, it all sounded cool, but it was unfamiliar to me. After a LONG time, they did some stuff from the EP, then the first two albums, and I was into that.

The band’s pretty tight and all of the musicians are more than talented. It was weird to see them on such a small stage, but reassuring that so many people showed up. They did a lot of weird improv-melody type stuff. Long drum solo. Chapman stick. Lots of guitar. A keyboard player. Instrumental stuff. High-end operatic vocals. It was all there.

If you’re wondering why I don’t paint a broader picture, it’s because I am weird about concerts. It’s so anti-climactic in a sense, and although I recognize music perfectly, I can never remember the damn names to songs, let alone lyrics. So I’m not the kind of person that can memorize a set list and post it up here and talk about all of the exact technical stuff that went on. Either it was good, or it sucked. This concert was good. Not as good as the G3 tour, but pretty good.

I’ve decided I need to buy more CDs. And I need to get a new stereo someday. Hornby’s book reminded me that I was obsessed with the Beatles 5 years ago. Now, I don’t have any of their stuff on disc (I do have Revolver on tape). The White Album is this haunting return to this time when I lived in my tiny Mitchell Street apartment, hit on every woman that moved, and tried to program in C with every chance I could get. But, like Hornby taught me, you can look back or you can look forward…