Rock Bookshelf: Volume 13

Diving into the surprisingly shallow rock/love genre of books.

Hello and welcome to Rock Bookshelf, my weekly column about music books. This week I tried (and sort of failed) to come up with some appropriate book recommendations for Valentine’s Day. Then I tried to write my own (and sort of failed spectacularly at that too). So I decided to design Valentines to make up for it. (By “design Valentines” I mean “ponder the enormity of love while listening to screamo and making my dopey little goth art.”) I printed a stack of postcards for my paid subscribers which I should be getting back from the printer next week. I will send an email to my paid subscribers about those very soon. So sign up now. Here, I will even knock the price down because I love you. 50% off and you get free postcards and discounts whenever I add something new to my store. For like two bucks a month or something. What a deal.

EXPLORING THE ROCK ‘N’ ROLL/LOVE GENRE OF BOOKS

I basically only read two genres of books: books about rock music and books about love. (There is a secret third category where all the books have titles like How to Pull Your Head Out of Your Ass and Be a Productive Artist, You Procrastinating Piece of Shit.) So I figured when I sat down to write this post, in which I attempt to recommend some books about rock-love stories for the upcoming Valentine’s Day, I’d have a long list to pull from. But surprisingly no! The crossover of these two genres is pretty sparse. 

Sure, there are a few rock memoirs that center around relationships, the obvious being Patti Smith’s Just Kids. I’m also a big Ronnie Spector fan, and her memoir Be My Baby (which I’ve written about previously) is sort of an accidental masterclass in writing about a toxic relationship that both points out a partner’s many (many) heinous flaws while also eliciting some sense of sympathy for them. My friend Laura, who reads every rock ‘n’ roll memoir that comes out, recommended Wonderful Tonight, Pattie Boyd’s memoir about marrying both George Harrison and Eric Clapton. And Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley, which I’ve neither read nor seen the recent movie on which it’s based!

But after those, the well sort of ran dry. I couldn’t come up with much in the rock/love fiction realm. A love story with music as a backdrop. Or vice versa. That’s what I’m looking for. Hm, is this fertile ground I should be stomping around in? Have I found an open literary lane that will make me rich beyond my wildest dreams ($55k a year plus health insurance)? Does the world need Dan Ozzi’s punk rock love novel? OK let me think up a pitch right here on the spot… Alright so uhhh it’s a coming of age story, right? And it centers around a meet-cute between two crustpunks hopping the same freight train. Imagine Before Sunrise but with scabies. Call it Amebix Amour. No, 50 Shades of Black. Oh my god wait I think I love this. Someone get me Random House on the phone. I just need a cover. AI robot! Design me a cover!

No, AI! You fucking idiot! This looks like a children’s book. It’s gotta be SEXIER! (Though good call on the dogs.) Try again.

Too teen drama! Make it sexy dammit!!! SEXYYY!!!! EL James meets Discharge.

What is this, some sort of Etsy shop zine fest for undersexed librarians? Get this cutesy shit outta here! Do better!

Oh for fuck’s sake. This is the technology we’re worrying about replacing us? It doesn’t even know the difference between crustpunk and cyberpunk. Yawn.

Anyway, I will save this million-dollar idea in my pocket and return to it at a later date. For now, I’m still trying to come up with rock-love novel recommendations. I suppose there is High Fidelity, though I think the Rob Gordon character is aging poorly. (There is a new book out about it which seems to argue otherwise.) I’ve had Love Is a Mixtape recommended to me as “lovely but sad” a few times, though I’ve never read it. My friend Emma Garland over at Gabrielle recommended Hit Parade by Izumi Suzuki, which she describes as “a collection of short sci-fi stories mainly about relationships against a very distinct backdrop of Japanese pop music and 70s jazz. A lot of them are very explicitly about affairs with musicians.”

After I finished bugging my poor friends for recommendations, I hopped over to see what ol’ Goodreads had to say but all it showed me was trashy rockstar romance novels, which apparently is an entire genre, and an extremely popular one at that. The books all have titles like Loud and Hot Lick. This is the description for one called Midnight Blue:

It should have been easy.
I needed the money. He needed a babysitter to keep him from snorting himself to death.
I was cherry-picked especially for him. Responsible. Optimistic. Warm. Innocent.
The worst part is that I should have known better.
Alex Winslow. British rock star. Serial heartbreaker. Casanova with whiskey eyes.
“Don’t get near the devil in a leather jacket. He’ll chew you up and spit you out.”
Guess what? I didn’t listen.
I signed the contract.
World tour. Three months. Four Continents. One hundred shows.
My name is Indigo Bellamy, and I sold my soul to a tattooed god.
Problem was, my soul wasn’t enough for Alex Winslow. He ended up taking my body, too.
Then he took my heart.
Then he took my all.

Good god there are so, so many of these and they’re all so fucking horny…

Aw man these books all have like ten times more reviews than mine. This is honestly painful to see. I am clearly in the wrong racket. Welp that does it for ol’ Dan. I vow to never write another researched history of punk bands. Interviewing musicians and digging up old fanzines? No thank you. Why would I do that when I can write some housewife jackoff material about a music publicist who begins a steamy backstage journey with her hot shot client, the lead singer of a band called Heavy Riffs.

Sorry. I don’t mean to sound like a jealous snob. I am clearly just having an existential crisis where I realize I’ve gone down the wrong road in my career and wondering how long it will take me to backtrack. Good for these authors. They appear to be self-publishing and selling millions of copies. Yay books…?

Anyway, anyone else got music-romance writings to recommend in the comments? Books, zines, short stories. I’ll take it all.

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