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I know
it's much cooler to talk about the band that changed everything
for you. Maybe it was Public Enemy, Nirvana, Eminem, or, god
forbid, Hoobastank. But sometimes it's a book that changes
everything forever. Oddly enough, I'm pretty sure I can trace
my hunger for weird experimental literature to a song I heard
when I was a kid—a song that used parts of a Kurt Vonnegut
book as its lyrics.
When
I was a tiny, tiny child, my mother listened to the local
AOR station (that's album oriented rock for those who have
forgotten what radio was). On our AOR station, the DJs had
quite a bit of latitude, so mom was regularly exposed to a
variety of new music. Alongside The Eagles Hotel California,
Fleetwood Mac's Rumours and other mom-ish staples was
a 12-inch single of Ian Dury's "Reasons to be Cheerful." She'd
often come home from work and say things like, "I heard this
great song on the radio by Squeeze—I think it was called
'School for Cats'?" I wish!
 Even
as a kid, I was her rock connection for anything out of the
mainstream, but when she came to me one day saying, "I like
that song about the Chinese dentist—can you get it for
me?" I knew I would have to do some research. Luckily for
me, we had a local independent record store that sold things
like British import singles, so I marched down, crossing the
big street and cutting through the Kmart parking lot. Of course,
the hairy guy with the one long fingernail at the counter
knew what I was talking about.
"Oh,
yeah," he said, smiling through his pot-addled haze. "That's
the song from the Kurt Vonnegut book. Cat's Cradle."
So after
picking up the single by Ambrosia,
I went to the library and checked out a copy of Cat's Cradle.
Despite the great, weird lyrics, I never really liked the
song so much—it was a little sugary, even for a kid—but
I really liked Cat's Cradle.
Many
years later, my roommate came home one day having spent his
last $10 on a new record—a project with Lydia Lunch and
Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth called Harry Crews. "I guess he's
some sort of author?" my roommate offered. He didn't care.
It was Lydia and Kim, two of his favorite noisy women. The
album, Naked in Garden Hills, was in heavy rotation
on our shared turntable.
Despite
my annoyance with Lydia (lawd, she was always whining about
something) and Kim (Sonic Youth? My ass! Those people were
older than I was!), I found the Crews record to be charming
in a way that I never really found Crews himself to be. Lydia
is in rare form on the record, which was recorded live during
the band's only tour, a two-week jaunt through Europe. Nasally
moaning, Lydia berates the audience for not having heard of
Crews, but forgives them also.
 "Harry
Crews, a man by the same name as the band. I know it's confusing
'cause you never heard of him. You might have heard me, you
might have heard of her [Kim Gordon]—you might have heard
of the wrestler on the drums," (actually, I hadn't heard of
their drummer, Sadie Mae, and for some reason I still think
it was Babes in Toyland drummer Lori Barbero), "but you never
heard of the man because in this country, what the fuck have
you heard of? But that's what I'm here for—educational
reasons..." Lydia truly is one of the world's great unrecognized
educators.
Every
Harry Crews song is exactly what one would expect—a lush,
noisy mess, most songs sounding almost exactly like Hole's
"Teenage Whore," but predating it by a few years. The majority
of songs are loosely based on Crews's books and share his
basic themes of gritty freakishness and decay. They are abrasive
in the same way Crews is, and like Crews, not for everyone.
I wasn't
surprised that Kim and Lydia were people of the book, but
I was happy to see them flying their geek flag proudly—so
much so that I went to the library and checked out a few Crews
books to see if maybe I liked him better then than I had the
first time I had read him. In a way, I always saw Lydia and
Kim as sort of dysfunctional mentors of mine, so if they liked
Crews, I should too. But no. I still didn't like him. But
that didn't color my opinion of Harry Crews the band. How
can you not like when someone calls her favorite author "[a]
man that looks like one of those kind of dogs that ain't got
no fur on their body that are full of wrinkles." That's a
Shar Pei, Lydia! That's what I'm here for—educational
reasons. We should get together; I think we can learn from
each other.
Now,
years later, I still don't really like "Nice Nice Very Nice,"
although I am grateful to Ambrosia for bringing Vonnegut into
my life so early. And I like Harry Crews the band, but the
author? Not so much. I go back to Crews every so often just
to make sure, but he just doesn't do it for me. That's not
important. Hopefully, some woman is sitting at a laptop somewhere,
churning out gruesome stories about trailer trash, her life
having been changed after hearing Lydia and Kim and Sadie
sing songs about Harry Crews.
(July,
2008)
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