Paper Covers Rock

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

In The Hold Steady's "Charlemagne in Sweatpants," Craig Finn lays out the available options: "Do you want it like it's boy-meets-girl and the rest is history/ Or do you want it like a murder mystery?" Finn asks. "I'm gonna tell it like a comeback story."

Finn's not actually talking about rock 'n' roll bands here. But his lyric points to something important in both songwriting and narrative: No matter what the elements of the tale are, the really vital part is in the delivery.

This becomes especially true when you're dealing with rock 'n' roll on paper. Any long-form piece on music faces a difficult set of obstacles: steering clear of biographical dryness; avoiding rock snobs' coded clichés, even if there are good reasons for the clichés; conveying the excitement of music without any recourse to, well, music. These pitfalls might explain why there are so few great rock books and even fewer rock novels worth the time.

There are ways to avoid these traps, though. Michael Shilling's Rock Bottom (Back Bay, Jan. 9) struggles against them just a little, packaging the story of Blood Orphans, a big-hair, bigger-riff four-piece playing its last failed show, in a familiar Behind the Music-style account with equal time for each stereotype (oversexed bassist, messianic singer). Light and good-natured,Rock Bottomtends more to MOR pleasantness than Sunset Strip slash 'n' burn.

John Niven's Kill Your Friends (Harper Perennial, Dec. 30) fairly thrashes about with a much worse result: Unconcerned with music in his focus on the music business, former A&R guy Niven delivers a snapshot of early-Britpop A&R, which appears to revolve mainly around cocaine, rough sex, racial slurs and air travel. Niven clearly wants to angrily satirize the excesses of an industry he's left behind, but squanders whatever memoir material he may have had by clumsily sifting it through the filters ofMoney andAmerican Psycho, leaving only a bitter, distasteful residue.

Set against this field, the enthusiasm and cool ease of Cathi Unsworth's The Singer (Serpent's Tail, Feb. 1) becomes much more remarkable. Like Niven, she starts at a remove from the music, with struggling manchild music writerEddie Bracknell serving as emcee; like Shilling, she spends much of her book plumbing the dynamics of a standard four-piece (addict bassist, satanic singer). She's not writing comedy or bilious satire, though; the former Melody Maker journo projects the decline and fall of punk onto a noir-dark screen.

Unsworth's plot isn't really all that complicated; like all noir, it'stwo partsboy-meets-girl to one part murder mystery. Ambitionless freelancer Eddie finds a story in the long-forgotten disappearance of Vincent Smith, frontman for punk also-rans Blood Truth, just after the singer's wife's death; the doomed couple, the dissolving band and the Class of '77 backdrop combine to make up an irresistible, even marketable, book project. Unsworth unreels both stories in tandem, the band's and Eddie's, and manages both the origin story and the present-day investigation with a steady hand.

The Singer really excels in Unsworth's portrait of the London punk scene. Blood Truth come out of working-class Hull as an unlikely band of misfits galvanized by a Sex Pistols show and fronted by the Presley-fixated proto-Goth Smith. They quickly come into a London led by Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood and Dave Vanian, and Unsworth captures an atmosphere of rebellion, shifting fashion and creative destruction that goes further in describing the effect the Pistols' music had than any analysis of Steve Jones' guitar could.

It's this ability to set a scene, and to spin it with a sense of giddiness or remorse or menace, that Unsworth employs to move her novel beyond mere nostalgia and to breathe life into plot points drawn from the Sid and Nancy playbook. She pointedly conveys the desire that propels Smith to kiss Sid Vicious' bass, even though he gets only a broken face from the impulse. She just as assuredly presides over the band's dissolution, tainted by the violence that only a mixed-race punk act can provoke in a Birmingham, Ala., roadhouse. And most impressively, in Eddie's interviews, she captures the scene's aftermath, which has left her principals damaged or guarded or occasionally stronger, none as beautiful as they were, but no less fascinating.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)