ROCK OF AGES
By Howard Hampton
Published: New York Times, July 15, 2010

George Rose/Getty Images
Mick Jagger, 1981.
 

ROCK AND ROLL WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE
A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us (With Bitchin’ Soundtrack)
By Steve Almond
By 222 pp. Random House. $23

THE FINE WISDOM AND PERFECT TEACHINGS OF THE KINGS OF ROCK AND ROLL
A Memoir
By Mark Edmundson
223 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.99

The Velvet Underground sang of dope and beauty, good times and damnation, the lust for experience and the deliverance of grace. Their ­second- or third-most-famous anthem was about a jaded 5-year-old named Ginny (or Jenny, depending on the listener). One bored day, she turned on a New York radio station, and “she couldn’t believe what she heard at all.” Emancipation called: “She started dancin’ to that fine, fine music” (Lou Reed approximating a soul falsetto for that “fine, fine” part). The walls around her tiny uptight world tumbled: “You know her life was saved by rock ’n’ roll.”

That hip-shaking tyke would be about 45 now and could write her own memoir of what salvation turned out to be like. Since she isn’t talking yet, we’ll have to settle for a couple of other redemption-rock chronicles here. Mark Edmundson’s book “The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll” has alert, rueful-earnest prose to go with its overblown title, a nice retrospective feel for youthful appetites (more metaphysical than sensual), though rock is primarily a signpost in his coming-of-age-in-the-1970s story. Edmundson may lean more toward Woody Allen than Warren Zevon, but in his wide-eyed receptivity to whatever fortune comes his way, his youthful self might have stepped out of a dozen early Jackson Browne tunes.

Steve Almond’s “Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life” is less fun to hang out with, though it strains harder to entertain. A wrought-up, jocular treatise on music as gut-level soulcraft, it’s long on sarcasm and exaggerated attitude — a first-person survey of 30-odd years in the life of a self-described “Drooling Fanatic.” That heavy-handed term yokes together a loose confederacy of vinyl fetishists and zealous souls who love rock in the same abject way the hero of the film “Big Fan” loved his Giants. The “D.F.” revels in music as anger outlet, big-screen sexual projection, social network, emotional narcotic and all-around field of frustrated dreams. He’s as slavish about songs that yank his heartstrings as the “Devout Elvis People” whom Almond visits Graceland to sneer at. He does hit notes of insight and conviction (recalling a baby sitter who cruised Route 25 singing along to “Rhiannon” or some housing-project kids who never made it out of oblivion), but keeps getting mired in the narrowest, soundtrack-to-my-life aspects of music.

For Edmundson, “rock” is just another word for openness to life-expanding possibilities. After his discovery of the Rolling Stones on Page 19, the book hardly mentions anything beyond band names. And his big post-collegiate rock epiphany is seeing Grace Slick sing “Volunteers” with the Jefferson Starship — not even the Airplane! He works his way through the ’70s as an apprentice on a stage crew, an amateurish taxi driver and a disco doorman in the age of KC and the Sunshine Band, reading Browning between checking IDs. Almost inevitably, he winds up an English teacher ministering to stoners at “maybe the last hippie school in America.” (Today he’s a professor at the University of Virginia.) Through his droll quest-romance peregrinations, set on his eager way by the Stones and “The Faerie Queene,” Edmundson has the alacrity and dumb pluck of a tenderfoot prospecting for gold.

Almond’s more insistent book is about the immortal quest, in the words of John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane,” to “hold on to 16 as long as you can.” He’ll get into a Don Rickles froth over the unforgettable dreadfulness of some mercifully forgotten old Toto hit, then turn around and make a sincerely snotty case for his boyhood heroes Styx. Almond believes those ­regressive-progressive rockers’ sort-of concept album “Paradise Thea­ter” “nailed the prevailing zeitgeist, the fraudulent nostalgia and grandiose self-regard of the Reagan era.” (For “nailed” I’d substitute “wallowed in,” but why quibble?) Dispensing fortune-cookie bromides (“There’s no arguing with joy”) and cutesy one-liners (on rockabilly: “the Fonzie of rock genres”), Almond positions himself as an accidental critic. Beginning as a cub sportswriter assigned to review Bob Dylan while barely knowing who Dylan was, he’s moved on from his days as a “bitter hack” to become a short-story writer. That may be some kind of progress, but this mock self-mocking book leaves a definite “going rogue” aftertaste — simultaneously winking and right­eous, historically incurious, throwing in a little anti-cultural elitism and underdog sentimentality to flavor the stew.


More at NYT.