Book review #6: 'Freak Scene Dream' trilogy
Five years ago, the final instalment of Michael Goldberg’s three-part novel cycle – a rock odyssey with a Beat rhythm – emerged. We re-visit this sparky and spiky rites of passage epic
A LEADING rock critic with a strong Beat sensibility, Michael Goldberg has been shaking up popular music writing for well over 40 years. A senior writer with Rolling Stone from 1983 and for close to a decade, he made innovative waves in the early 1990s when he launched Addicted to Noise, the very first online magazine with rock music at its core.
A long-time fan of Kerouac and his crew, he contributed the chapter on Bob Dylan to the book Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack in 2018. He also interviewed legendary music critic and Beat admirer Richard Meltzer in the same collection.
In the meantime, he had completed a series of coming-of-age novels, the ‘Freak Scene Dream’ trilogy, the story of a would-be rock journalist and his stuttering adolescent progress, a potent confessional related in the jagged and frenetic syntax of gonzo, and each strikingly wrapped in the disturbingly bleak expressionist illustrations of Goldberg’s own wife Leslie.
I reviewed each of these titles as they came out and, five years after the concluding section of the three-parter was issued, we pay a return visit to those earlier notices in these very pages.
For me, True Love Scars (2014), The Flowers Lied (2016) and Untitled (2017) had a powerful flavour of post-Beat new journalism: a semi-autobiographical rawness and candid soul-bearing coupled to an innovative prose voice in which disruptive punctuation conveys both the neurotic energy and emotional uncertainty of the narrator.
Of True Love Scars, Goldberg’s former employers Rolling Stone said that ‘if Lester Bangs had ever published a novel, it might have read something like this frothing debut.’ Beat historian Dennis McNally said his work was ‘Kerouac in the 21st-century’. Journalist Paul Krassner felt that the main protagonist brought to mind ‘Holden Caulfield meets Lord Buckley’.
As for music journalism, the California-based author recently published the biography Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey, a key collaborator of Chris Isaak’s, and he is about to release his own ‘Best of’ anthology.
Backbeat Books will, this November, publish Addicted to Noise: The Music Writings Of Michael Goldberg. It will feature a foreword by Greil Marcus himself and a stunning pulp fiction pastiche by the hip and talented graphic designer Todd Alcott as its cover, a tribute in itself to an early edition of William Burroughs’ debut publication Junkie.
The ‘Freak Scene Dream’ trilogy – a return to those reviews…
True Love Scars (Neumu Press, 2014)
Can rock crit thrills heal romantic wounds?
THE GREAT rock novel? The pursuit of that ultimate piece of fiction that distils the primal energy, the ecstatic power, the neurotic craziness, of popular music has been something of a holy grail in recent decades and, in True Love Scars – a deeply ironic nod to Buddy Holly’s ‘True Love Ways’ – one-time Rolling Stone journalist Michael Goldberg is the latest contender for this Lonsdale Belt of rock‘n’roll writing.
His protagonist Michael Stein is a Californian teenager in the later 1960s, tangled to distraction in the sound and image of his hero Bob Dylan, a paradoxical blend of cocksure kid and deluded hipster, bruising his fragile ego in the choppy shallows of high school romance, then sabotaging his increasingly complicated love tangles in a haze of drug indulgence and casual disloyalty, and all to a backbeat of Highway 61 Revisited, the Stones and the Doors.
It’s the story of a disaffected geek and self-imagined king of cool who turns out to be much more naïve nerd, as his promising upward trajectory hurtles into reverse. But True Love Scars, the first part of Goldberg’s ‘Freak Scene Dream’ trilogy, is as much about style – the way he tells the tale – as it is about content.
Penned in a staccato amphetamine grammar, its narrative is fractured and deranged, often unsettling but frequently compelling, an unsparing portrait of the teen condition: assured then despairing, would-be sex god then impotent has-been, from erection to dejection, an only child battling the wills of his domineering father and interfering mom in the anonymous, suburban fringes of Marin County.
Goldberg’s work recalls a number of those post-war stylists who have tried to capture the uncertainties of adolescence into adulthood, the lure of escape and the quest for forbidden fruit. It has elements of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, a flavour of Richard Fariña and his smart college satire Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up to Me, and more than a dash of that frenetic gonzo gabble that Hunter S. Thompson utilised to frame the madness of the modern world as the American dream unraveled, around the very time that Stein is doing his incompetent best to grow up.
The great rock novel? Perhaps we still await it but, for sure, this writer has made a creditworthy tilt at this literary crown, and produced a very good one.
SW
The Flowers Lied (Neumu Press, 2015)
Roses are dead, here come the blues
DELIVERED in a sparky, yet splintered, patois, falling somewhere between Beat spontaneity and punk insolence, Michael Goldberg's The Flowers Lied picks up where 2014’s True Love Scars left off, as the second part of the ‘Freak Scene Dream’ trilogy carries his narrator protagonist Michael Stein into further labyrinths of neurotic insecurity, a campus caper where boy might meet girl but where the roses of romance are snared with the jagged thorns of rejection and betrayal.
Not that this is any mere love story: it's the tale of the would-be rock 'n' roll writer who still believes that his new journalistic prose, and his passion for Dylan and Beefheart, can lead him towards some kind of elevated self-fulfilment. But will an enthusiasm for the Stones or the New York Dolls, a blind belief in the existential promises of the electric guitar, be enough to compensate for wretched affairs and failing friendships?
Achingly self-conscious, riddled with agonising self-doubt, Stein has the flavour of re-cast Holden Caulfield, as this raw-nerved rite of passage travels some way from Salinger’s immediate post-war world and places itself in the early 1970s at a moment when the hippie dream seems to have lost its enticing glow.
The very title of the novel is a comment on the fact the hopes and dreams of the Sixties have largely evaporated and Stein feels caught on the lip between the fading utopian buzz and a decade hurtling towards a state of nihilistic disillusion. ‘Writerman’, as he styles himself, is keen to reject the cynicism of the age but the pallor of personal crisis tends to cloud his day-to-day judgement.
Goldberg's skill in this dark comi-tragedy is to energetically convey his feelings – the gauge on the emotional candour button is set to 9 – and he does this through a variety of techniques: a version of the gonzo syntax, occasional stream of consciousness ramblings and a secondary internalised narrative providing commentary on his own inner curdlings.
For readers who recognise the names – the rock stars, of course, but also the great rock writers of the day, like Christgau and Willis, who also pepper the pages from time to time – this is an engaging affair, as hot music, the powerful influence of music criticism and the spice of emotional turbulence become entangled in a tornado of twisting moods: the brief elation of a Fender lick is quickly balanced by a carousel of catastrophe; the ups are fleeting, the downs last longer.
The Flowers Lied, like its predecessor, has an edgy, fractious manner, but once you get used to the frenetic style, the prose moves forward with impressive vigour and the story, quite self-indulgent in many ways, has a definite resonance for a certain generation. The fact that this second instalment ends somewhat in mid-air might be a criticism, but it certainly leaves you hungry for the concluding episode, due in early 2017.
SW
Untitled (Neumu Press, 2017)
Darker and doomier but still a compelling read
SO, THE trilogy plays out and, after devouring the first two instalments of Michael Goldberg’s ‘Freak Scene Dream’ series, I was looking forward to where this rites of passage story would roam next. Well, this is a darker and doomier chapter in the young adult life of Michael Stein, would-be rock'n'roll critic, would-be creator of the Great American Novel.
Except, Untitled doesn't quite engage with the worlds of music, journalism and literature in the way the opening salvos in this triptych did. No – the volume which signs off this saga of late adolescence gets tangled in the sexual politics of the mid-1970s.
There's more sex, there's more dysfunctional sex, more unsatisfactory sex and certainly more drugs, harder drugs, drugs that weird out our protagonist so deeply that you assume the bottom of life's tawdry barrel has been well and truly scraped.
But that is not to say that Untitled – and there is rather more to this naming than just a loss of creative imagination – is not charged with the same spiky, neurotic energy, the same frenetic self-loathing, a similar dark comedic drama, that made its two predecessors True Love Scars and The Flowers Lied such compelling reads.
And maybe, just maybe, in this largely furious tirade against life, love and everything, could there be a flicker of silver in the banks of black cloud that cast their shadow over the fragile psyche of our ever-yearning hero?
SW