FRONTMAN

Review by Liz Phair writing in The New York Times, April 6, 2008

Freddie Mercury once said, “I want it all and I want it now.”

This appetite might aptly be called the rock ’n’ roll disease, and Dean Wareham seems to have caught it. Or is in recovery. Or is somewhere along the road. Part confessional, part unsentimental career diary, Wareham’s “Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance” reads like good courtroom testimony: to the point, but peppered with juicy and unsolicited asides. Dominick Dunne would make sure his seat was saved before excusing himself to use the restroom.

BLACK POSTCARDS
A Rock & Roll Romance.
By Dean Wareham.
Illustrated. 324 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95.

Wareham is a respected cultural figure who cut a wide swath through the ’90s independent music scene both in America and in Europe, fronting such beloved bands as Luna and Galaxie 500 (though, in the case of Galaxie 500, this frontman status was deeply contested by his bandmates, accelerating the group’s eventual demise, which is captured hilariously in an anecdote at the beginning of the book).

He portrays himself as a surprisingly unsympathetic character. He visits a prostitute. He makes people angry. He follows girls home after the show. He snorts coke. No apologies are made because this is, after all, a rock ’n’ roll autobiography. Late nights, a lot of drugs, a little infidelity (well, maybe not just a little, but I won’t give away the ending) — that’s par for the course, right? His honesty is challenging and humbling. Yet, for an egghead (Wareham is a graduate of both the Dalton School, the progressive and prestigious Upper East Side preparatory academy, and Harvard) with an elective reading list to rival Art Garfunkel’s (Thomas Mann, Mark Twain, André Malraux, Nietzsche, to name a few), he seems perfectly happy to partake in whatever recreational opportunities come his way, with enviable disregard for the consequences. Guilty? Not guilty? What are we as a jury to think?

The facts, at least, are straightforward enough. Thanks to what must have been meticulously kept tour diaries, a rich harvest of the who, what, where and when of Wareham’s past makes up the bulk of his story. The heyday of alternative music was a heady time, and Wareham was at the heart of it. After the big business of arena rock trampled through pop culture in the 1980s, with its smoke pots and high ticket prices, a fresh crop of homegrown bands espousing the D.I.Y. ethos, culled from the underground punk scene, suddenly came into vogue. A countercultural wave with roots in political and social activism swept the nation, culminating in the enormous success of bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. These self-proclaimed nerds conquered the world for a time, making up in originality and earnestness what they lacked in glitz and swagger. It is the arc of their ascendancy and, at the end of the decade, inevitable decline that is documented so vividly in Wareham’s prose, from the point of view of an authentic creative force within this world.

Born in New Zealand in 1963 into a middle-class family, the second of four children, Wareham recalls a passion for music at a very young age, when he formed definitive opinions about records before he was even old enough to date:
“My father ... brought home Nina Simone’s ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ wherein Nina covers George Harrison and Bob Dylan and the Bee Gees, and delivers what I consider to be the greatest recorded version of ‘My Way.’ Joe Cocker’s ‘Cocker Happy’ was also a favorite, with his stellar version of ‘With a Little Help From My Friends,’ which he did far better than the Beatles.”

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