BOOKS: NOVEMBER

BOOKS WE LOVE: In which we editors gush about the books—new or old—that have knocked our respective socks off.

KING OF THE QUEEN CITY: THE STORY OF KING RECORDS
by Jon Hartley Fox
(University of Illinois Press, 2009)

Picture a short, rotund Jew with close-cropped hair and lenses on his glasses chunky as small apples. He’s known for a raspy voice, an ever-present cigar, and a penchant for sweeping, apoplectic rages. This, more or less, is Syd Nathan, the founder of King Records of Cincinnati, “the most influential independent label of the 1940s and 1950s.” Also: one of the great record labels in American history and the first to experiment with true racial integration. Among the artistic giants released by King Records: James Brown, “Moon” Mullican, Roy Brown, the York Brothers, Hank Ballard, Brother Claude Ely, Wynonie Harris, Wayne Raney, Little Willie John, the Spirit of Memphis Quartet, Charlie Feathers, and on and on. Posits author Fox: “The road to social consciousness can start at many points, and music was a crucial first step for millions of young people. Although we are not yet ‘one nation under a groove’ (to quote George Clinton of Funkadelic), music has done much to move us closer to the ideal….” In 1946, Nathan himself hired Henry Glover, a “visionary” producer from Hot Springs, Arkansas, and a black man, to be, essentially, his trusted number-two man. Nathan wasn’t trying to impress anyone with his thinking, he just wanted to make hit records. In 1950, he said: “We give everybody an even break. This is because I’m a Jew and I know what obstacles are. A Jew may have it rough but a Negro has it a lot rougher. A good man is a good man; his religion or his race isn’t going to make any difference. At King we pay for ability and that’s what we get.” When he said, “We give everybody an even break,” he probably meant “an even break to make a hit.” Again: Color be damned, just give us hits. Capitalism rarely gets credit for this, but it, and even greed, can spark color-blindness. Because of its groundbreaking policies and its shocking roster of talent, King Records certainly deserves the coverage of an entire book. Fox is at times pedestrian in his writing (“old adage,” “his recording career was over before it even started,” “Nathan hastily beat it back to Cincinnati,” etc.), but not in his passion and research—although it must added that he never tells us for sure whether Nathan was a crook or not (plenty of King artists allege that he was). Readers shouldn’t be left hanging on this point. For argument’s sake, let’s say Nathan was a crook, meaning that he didn’t pay his artists what he promised to pay them (only some of what he promised). To that, all we can say is that crooks are often color-blind (and can even have acute musical taste). Beyond leaving us in limbo about Nathan’s ethics, the book’s other fault is that it doesn’t come with a CD. After reading about supposedly terrific (but obscure) artists like Lula Reed, Baby Shirley, Paul Howard, Jimmy Wyble, Meat Head Johnson, Junior McCants, Shirley Wahls, and so many others, we want to hear them! Still, Fox and the University of Illinois Press have given us an important book about a very important operation. Thank you.

Lines we liked: “With the possible exception of Sam Phillips at Sun, Nathan was more closely attuned to his artists and his customers than any other record company executive of the time.”

“I still can’t get this bop and I’ve really tried,” Nathan complained. “They go around talking about flatted fifths, and sometimes it seems it’s just people with inferiority complexes trying to bolster their egos.”

—MAS

HEAVY ROTATION: TWENTY WRITERS ON THE ALBUMS THAT CHANGED THEIR LIVES
edited and with an introduction by Peter Terzian
(Harper Perennial, 2009)

We almost didn’t survive the introduction. Writes editor Terzian there: “I came up with the idea for the book that you now hold in your hands for selfish reasons—I wanted to bring music and literature together.” O thank you Master Terzian! Silly us, we thought Peter Guralnick, Lester Bangs, Albert Murray, Stanley Booth, Stanley Crouch, Ellen Willis, Ralph Ellison, Bob Dylan, et al, had already twinned those forces eons ago. Next sentence: “The truth is that writers love music.” No way, dude!

Thankfully, Terzian is a better compiler (and, later in the book, essayist) than he is a presenter. This is a great mix tape of a book, replete with idiosyncrasy and fresh angles. Somehow Alice Elliott Dark manages to make The Beatles and adolescent love seem new: “It’s George because, just because, there’s really no reason you can say, you just know it’s him, he’s the one, with his skinny pipe cleaner legs and coconut-shell hair and the way he dips his head so you can’t see his eyes, only his eyebrow, he’s not like his friends who stare straight at the camera, the way your brother would….” Joshua Ferris does the same with Nirvana and the grunge ethos: “Suburban kids, unaware of cool things but suspecting they exist, are convinced of being the only living souls inhabiting a passed-over land whose zombie residents are reconciled, even satisfied, with their fate.” James Woods is uncanny in describing The Who: “[H]earing the Who is both a way of registering life and a way of shaking a fist at it…John Entwistle’s extraordinarily mobile, perpetually restless bass playing…Keith Moon’s wildly exciting drumming, both precise and slightly drunken, seems like a form of dedicated vandalism….but this is not the repetitive, mindless restlessness of heavy metal or punk….” Daniel Handler hits this note square: “When you’re seventeen you can drive around at midnight listening to anything and your life will change.” Not a dud in the collection—really. The writing itself is so entertaining, in fact, that you almost forget about the music you are being nudged toward.

—MAS

THE MOTEL OF THE STARS
by Karen Salyer McElmurray
(Sarabande Books, 2008)

Spiritual enlightenment is so confusing—nowadays, the options go well beyond ye olde palm and Tarot card readings to include such enticing prospects as rebirthing, vision quests, Mother Earth rituals, medicine-wheel ceremonies, interplanetary lives, and so on. And when a rare planetary alignment like The Harmonic Convergence (August 1987; not to be confused with the upcoming 2012 Phenomenon, when the Mayan Calendar flat-out ends) rolls around, even a skeptic like myself wonders, well, what if? Karen Salyer McElmurray’s novel explores such New Age terrain with wise restraint, focusing on two characters, a regional repo man and a girl struck by lightning, who are strung out with ten years of grief (over the same person). How long does it take to get over the loss of someone (a son, a lover, etc.) who means everything to you? It is challenging to tackle the subject of death and not sink to maudlin depths, but McElmurray succeeds. This is a melancholy book in which the sentences sing.

Lines we liked: “Could God keep anyone safe in such a fierce and mysterious world?”

—CAF

CONFECTIONS OF A CLOSET MASTER BAKER: ONE WOMAN'S SWEET JOURNEY FROM UNHAPPY HOLLYWOOD EXECUTIVE TO CONTENTED COUNTRY BAKER
by Gesine Bullock-Prado
(Broadway, 2009)
 
Paying homage to the holy trinity of butter, cream, and eggs, Gesine Bullock-Prado’s CONFECTIONS OF A CLOSET MASTER BAKER revels in the glory of gluttonous pleasures. Like other recent books, this one has a familiar format of memoir and recipe pairings, but the emphasis here is heavy on the pastry. Health-conscious chowhounds beware: Bullock-Prado dismisses health concerns, calling trans fat “transfabulous” and claiming that her “grandmother ate Lindt bittersweet chocolate religiously and lived to be ninety.” The sugar-happy writer describes her transition from California exec (yes, she is the sister of Sandra Bullock) to Vermont café owner with unapologetic grit. (Want to attempt wedding cake? Better brace for “Tiers of Frustration.”) Bullock-Prado has been praised for following her passion, and her Willy Wonka-esque backstory is enough to inspire delirious cravings for a filling career or simply a lavish, toothsome confection.
 
Lines we liked: “[The fifty-pound baby shower cake, complete with pregnant belly and breasts] was supposed to be for an eighty-ninth birthday celebration…. I spent a very frazzled ten minutes performing an emergency C-section and double mastectomy on poor Great Aunt Tula’s strawberry dream cake.”

—CMG

WHAT THE WORLD WILL LOOK LIKE WHEN ALL THE WATER LEAVES US
by Laura van den Berg
(Dzanc, 2009)
 
The recurring theme of water in Laura van den Berg’s debut collection is appropriate since while reading each story, you will likely find that you’re holding your breath. The world van den Berg creates is a brittle place. A misstep, an unintended glance is enough to send these loosely held lives tumbling in new directions. The characters are detached, connections are difficult—letters written from faraway places and strange dreams often take on more significance than the words spoken between people. There is an inescapable insufficiency that permeates every relationship, whether it is with a spouse, sibling, or parent. Ultimately, what allows each of the eight stories to breathe on their own is their ability to create those imperfect moments when submersion into the unknown is sometimes the only option left. 
 
 Lines we liked: “I concentrate on the scent, but it vanishes into the aroma of rain and tree bark, the way one life can collapse into another and different people can stir within the same body, like bats thrashing inside a secret hollow.”

—MB

PEACE
by Richard Bausch
(Vintage, 2008)
 
Richard Bausch’s eleventh novel, PEACE, is not funny, and there’s no immediate love story—it’s simply a tightly focused masterpiece that does one thing remarkably well: convey the misery of war. The action of the novel takes place in 1944 in the Italian Alps over a period of two insufferably cold days, soaked by rain and then frozen by snow. In the novel’s first scene, a small company of American troops has a fatal encounter with a lone Nazi soldier and then watches as the commanding sergeant shoots the Nazi’s civilian companion, presumably a whore. From there, a trio of the surviving American soldiers is sent on a reconnaissance mission, led by an elderly Italian peasant whose sympathies may or may not lie with the Nazis who are retreating over the mountain. These three factors—the weather, the soldiers’ moral ambivalence about the civilian murder, and the mystery surrounding the guide—shape the novel’s bleak outlook and provide the momentum for its relentless, tense pace. 
  
Lines we liked: “He saw again the look on Asch’s face as the bleeding went on, and he knew he should feel sorry for him. He had felt sorry for him, and for everyone in the world. But he did not feel it now.”

—SCA

DRAG THE DARKNESS DOWN
by Matt Baker
(No Record Press, 2009)

OA associate publisher Matt Baker’s first novel, DRAG THE DARKNESS DOWN, begins with an epigraph by the Arkansas author Donald (Skip) Hays: “They give you a little time in the sun and then they drag the darkness down.” It’s a fitting introduction to a brief but probing novel that begins as a darkly humorous road-trip story and ends up revealing the secrets of a family whose history is laced with violence and tragedy. Narrator Odom Shiloh, on the run from a hit-and-run accident with a cyclist in Memphis, enlists his PI-friend Blakey Flake to accompany him on a road trip through Louisiana, Arkansas, Kansas, and Missouri in search of his sister, the erratically brilliant Bridget “Birdshit” Shiloh. The story culminates in Odom’s hometown of Frothmouth, Arkansas, where he confronts the painful truth about the Shiloh clan and his place in it.

Click here for our interview with Matt.

Lines we liked: “It doesn’t feel half bad to get away from Frothmouth. I was never one for taking vacations. After all, you always got to go home. You wonder what sense there is in deluding yourself for a few days or a week when home is always back there, waiting to crash down on you.”

—SCA

Photographs by Southern Girl.