An Old Rock Memoir Finds Me

 

Since I started this damn MW program almost every book I read has been about wine.  I read a book for pleasure a couple weeks ago, "Petal Pusher", a re-print of a rock memoir from the early 1990s from a pretty obscure Minneapolis band.  Oh, don't worry, after finishing that book I started an act of penance by reading a translated Spanish book on geology and wine terroir just to keep the universe in harmony.  But... Back to "Petal Pusher"...

The book is a first person account from Laurie Lindeen on her band ZuZu's Petals.  They were about 3-4 years in front of The Cowslingers in their development, but I remember seeing them booked into some of the same venues that we played and I knew they had a record deal on Twin Tone (something to be jealous of in our van).  The book is a pretty good read about someone trying to make it in an all female band without the dogma hangups of the Riotgrrl thing that came along shortly afterwards.  There is an interesting dichotomy about the book however.  Lindeen is very self effacing about her own abilities and band's limits but at the same time seems totally blind to the fact that they were afforded all of the opportunities to be on the label and get high profile shows because they were in the same clique as the guys in Soul Asylum, Jayhawks and Replacements.  They worked together at the hipster diner, drank at the same bar, and all lived in the same social circle.  Zuzu's Petals had a record deal well before they knew how to play and got to skip the multi year phase of learning how it all worked.  I think she was also oblivious to the fact that any all female band that got on a stage immediately got a crowd that was theirs to lose due to the sheer uniqueness of it and the undeniable draw to the undersexed male 18-24 indie rock club goer.  We would have killed for those connections and advantages.

Something that struck me in the book was an emphasis on how much "the scene" appealed to Lindeen as apart from the desire to create songs.  It came off to me that they liked to party, wanted to become a bigger part of the scene and do what they had seen their friends doing.  I have always been singing hooks of songs that hit me out of the blue into recorders or writing turns of phrase that catch my ear to use later.  The songs are such an afterthought in this book.  Zuzu's Petals had ambition and drive to get on stage, but my takeaway was it was more about being a bigger part of the scene as opposed to making great records.  For example, they got the chance to do a ramshackle tour of England after putting out their first single.  Crazy opportunity.  Granted, it ended in disaster, which makes for a good read.  Yet, they all went home and cancelled dates before the "tour" finished because they were miserable.  If every punk rock band left the road when things got fucked up, no tour would have ever completed in 1988-94.  I have passed along a great number of sketchy ass stories from that time period in this blog, and never once did we say "we quit, we are going home".

Their band trajectory went like this:  They put out a record on Twin Town in 1992.  The book mentions a few tours they quit in the middle because they wanted to go home.  In 1995 they have to put out a follow up record because Twin Tone had been gobbled up by the large conglomerate Roadrunner and it was time.  The problem is that in the three years since that first record came out, they didn't write any songs.  I have no idea how that is possible.  They then wrote the next record in the studio (always an awful idea) and not surprisingly the record wasn't very good.  Lindeen seems to think they should have had more tour support, which seems odd as even she knew the record wasn't very good and wouldn't sell.  Why would the label put their limited resources there?  "Hey, we have a crappy record that comes three years after our last modest record, we quit every tour we go out on, and we cancelled our European dates because one of the band members wanted to go home.  Where's our tour support?".  Seriously, she had no idea of the breaks that they were given or the experiences they were gifted and pissed away.  Ultimately the book is about a band that thought being a touring band looked cool and never liked the reality of it.

There are a bunch of stories that go "We showed up at the club, and the people that worked there were kind of dicks, and then there were only 20 people at the show."  Well, yeah...  It's not like people are thinking "When am I going to get the chance to see some strange women I don't know play unfamiliar songs somewhat poorly for $10 at the club?".  It looks easy when you are hanging out at the packed club with your talented buddies in Soul Asylum and The Jayhawks that worked their ass off and wrote a bunch of songs to find 10 good ones for their latest LP.  You have to do the work, but more importantly, you have to WANT to do the work.  If you don't love the whole of it, life on the road as an indie rock musician is no place to be, especially in 1993 (even if in 1993 people would think "Hey, they're on Twin Tone so we should check it out").

I started to feet like I was being snotty when I read the book as club after club that we have played showed up in the text.  "What are you whining about?".  I did get a sense she was being a little too self effacing and took a lot of labor to distance herself from cashing in on the relationship with her boyfriend (later husband/ex-husband) Paul Westerberg of The Replacements in both the band and in the book.  It very easily could have turned into a "I Married Paul" tell-all book as a cash in, but to her credit she clearly wanted to avoid any sense of that.  I was curious to see if she played music now or if she just wrote (which is much easier but much less of an adrenalin shot than playing in a rock band).  I then felt REALLY badly when I saw she had died suddenly a number of years ago.  This then make me re-think the memoir and re-focus on her very real health struggles that now seem like foreshadowing and ask if the author might have been too hard on herself for the band's "failure".  There was a chapter late in the book where she touches on how she was speaking with another musician about the band after it was over, and the disappointment she felt.  It was pointed out to her that they had sold 30,000 records, toured the country, and had the opportunity to have the experience of the band lifestyle that had always been the goal in the first place.  It seemed to me like she was trying to convince herself even more than the reader that she had in fact done something noteworthy in those passages.  As I thought about it, it hit me that she really had been a success.  It had never been about writing a #1 song.  It had been about getting up there and doing it.  

As we have been playing these Cowslinger shows this month, we have had the inevitable walks down memory lane.  That book had found me at sort of a perfect time, allowing me to put perspective on what we had been doing in 1993, one of the various vans traveling the Midwest playing shitty rock clubs just because we liked it.  Unlike the members of Zuzu's Petals, I still like it, but I think that's because I like almost all of it.  It stopped being about "the scene" a long time ago and instead has been about the more elusive pursuit of writing and playing good songs that connect with our people.  As we climb back in the van, the same guys as 1993, it was illuminating to see what it was like in another one of those vans driving around on I-90 hoping some people would be at the gig.  We would have looked at them as super successful, which ultimately I guess they were.