Drunken Owls and Other Delights

First off, I have to share this absolutely brilliant quote about from Bob Mould in his autobiography which talks about his tour with Husker Du in the early 80s, which I believe brilliantly captures what I'm aiming for in this book:

"We were quickly discovering that the East Coast had a unique mentality that might be summed up best in two words: college rock. A lot of it came down to the clustering of high-quality schools in the Northeast, particularly in the Boston area, where the tour took us next. There were many more college radio stations in the Northeast than in the Midwest, and they gave rise to the likes of the Bongos, Violent Femmes, and the dBs, bands who had a more accessible, more melodic sound than hardcore."

Seriously, I need this as the preface quote.


The research for Walk in Silence continues apace, with much reading and note taking. I probably should be doing some more pencil-marking in the books I'm reading, but I'm one of those book geeks who cringes at doing that. (Which is funny, considering how my Dad's been doing that for years with his own hometown history research.) Still, I'm finding a lot of interesting information that I can play with, and I've ordered a few books from Amazon that should be coming my way soon that could help.

It's kind of interesting, looking for the history of college radio. Not college rock, per se--one just needs to look for biographies of the genres, bands and scenes, and there are many--but when it comes to college radio in particular, it's kind of a desert when it comes to books, or even online resources for that matter. There's a few books out there on the technical and historical sides of college radio stations, and there's a ridiculously huge number of band/scene biographies...and crazy as it sounds, I'd like to marry the two in this project.

Why, you might ask, would I want to do something like that? Would anyone really care about why some backwater college played The Smiths instead of Kylie Minogue, or The Cure instead of Van Halen back then? But that's part of why I want to write it: because if that backwater college hadn't played the Smiths or the Cure, they may not have been as huge and influential here in the States. Sure, some of this music filtered through in other ways--hardcore and punk pretty much survived on DIY and word of mouth--but a lot of these bands that I'm focusing on weren't DIY punks from LA or DC or wherever. I'm not focusing on the hardcore punk scene anyway--there's quite a glut of those books out there already. I'm focusing on British post-punk bands and local American bands that were rarely carried in chain stores because they weren't fast, big sellers. They were bands that caught the ears of the collegiate crowd in the early 80s and were played on their stations, and maybe by some fluke (or some brilliant producer or director) showed up on a tv or movie soundtrack. In my opinion, it wasn't so much the hardcore punk as it was this particular post-punk genre that became the basis of today's indie rock, and I think that story needs to be told. We've already celebrated "The Year Punk Broke" in 1991/92, but again--that's just a subgenre of a much larger musical movement. I'm not looking to tell the story of its grand entrance into the mainstream; I'm looking to tell of the story of how it eventually got there, something that's very much glossed over. My idea is to explain why this music came to be important in the mid-to-late 80s, show its origins, and how it eventually became the norm.

So! For your entertainment/perusal, here's a list of some of the books I've been using as reference so far, or at least have in my to-be-read pile:

Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991

Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor, Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day

Joshua Clover, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About

Travis Elborough, The Vinyl Countdown: The Album from LP to iPod and Back Again

Josh Frank and Caryn Ganz, Fool the World: the oral history of a band called Pixies

John Harris, Britpop! Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock

Greg Kot, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music

CP Lee, Shake Rattle and Roll: Popular Music Making in Manchester, 1955-1995

Greil Marcus, Ranters & Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92

Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution (**currently reading)

Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

Brett Milano, The Sound of Our Town: a History of Boston Rock & Roll

Barry Miles, London Calling: A Countercultural History of London Since 1945

Bob Mould, See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody

Richard Neer, FM: the Rise and Fall of Rock Radio (**a big influence/inspiration for this project)

Michael Plumides Jr. and Virginia Saunders, Kill the Music: The chronicle of a college radio idealist's rock and roll rebellion in an era of intrusive morality and censorship

Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past

Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (**this one's a HUGE help, and highly suggested**)

Simon Reynolds, Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews

Samuel Sauls, The Culture of American College Radio

Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond

John Sellers, Perfect from Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life

Christopher Sterling and Michael Keith, Sounds of Change: A History of FM Broadcasting in America

Neil Taylor, Document and Eyewitness: An Intimate History of Rough Trade

Jesse Walker, Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America

I know there are a hell of a lot more books out there I could be referencing (and if you have any suggestions, by all means let me know by commenting here or emailing me (joncwriter at yahoo dot com)...if I'm gonna do my homework on this, I'm gonna do it right!


On the music side of things...

I've been acquiring a lot of mp3s of music from the 1983-1989 era, thanks to eMusic and elsewhere, just to refamiliarize myself with the sound. It's really interesting to hear this stuff within the context of its time. I'm doing this in a few ways--listening to other albums/songs that were released around the same date (thank you, MediaMonkey, for having an awesome tagging feature!), reading histories of what was going on at the time (thank you, Wikipedia time lines, for making it easier to reference!), and remembering what I was doing personally at the time (thank you, weird habit of dating my writing sessions!). I've gathered quite a few albums and tracks, but I know it's still far from complete.

Which of course, means that if you have any suggestions for bands/albums/sounds that I should know about, again--comment here or email me!

I'll most likely be posting more about this later this weekend, but thought I'd share what I've been working on so far. It's been a lot of fun researching this...I've never written a nonfiction book before, never had a reason to do so in the past, but for those who know me, this one's coming from the heart and it's been great so far.

[This is a sorta-crossposted shoutout I originally posted on Facebook. This is the longer LJ version that goes into further detail, which will also be x-posted to FB, so sorry to the FBers who are seeing this twice.]

I'm in the midst of research for a non-fic book called Walk In Silence about 80s college radio (rough timeline, 1982-1991...basically post-New Wave to pre-Grunge)--the genre/era that would become today's alt.rock that we all know and love. I posted notes and ideas about this project here awhile back, but the main objective here is that I wanted to write a non-fic book about the era of alternative rock that changed my life and became an obsession, and how it came about, and how it influenced others, and how it's changed over the years.

At this point I've got quite a few short snippets of memories and history on hand that I could build upon, but most of them are pretty much from my own point of view. What I'd like to do is get some other people's ideas, memories, and thoughts, and compare how this music genre affected others aside from myself. I would also like to get a decent grasp on the history of the genre as well as the mindset of the time. That will most likely be my heaviest bit of research to be done.

I want to avoid writing too much about the "scenes" (that is, place-specific music scenes like New York, Boston, Seattle, etc., as well as subgenre-specific, such as goth/hipster/indie/etc.)--there are quite a few books on them out there already. This is more along the lines of a Nick Hornby/Rob Sheffield/John Sellers type of book.

Would anyone be interested in being interviewed about it (their knowledge, love of it, memories of it, how it changed their lives, etc), or perhaps know of college radio djs of that era as well that could supply radio-centric history/info? If anything, I would be emailing you a short(-ish) questionnaire regarding on how you came upon this genre, favorite bands, fond memories of songs/albums/etc., things like that. I may follow up with other questions, but for now I'll keep the questions and things relatively short and easy.

If anyone's interested, or know of anyone who would be interested, please let me know by commenting here or dropping me an email at joncwriter (at) yahoo (dot) com.


Thanks!

So one of the writing projects I'm working on takes place in the wintertime, part of it in snowy New England, but part of it further south, probably around where you are. So my question is, what's the coldest it would get down there during the first half of winter?

Of course, I'm taking a few liberties as this takes place a good distance in the future, but I'd just like to make it somewhat believeable. Put it this way--if Massachusetts was in the mid to low 20s with a bit of snow, what would your neighborhood be like?

Thanks ahead of time! :)