And his big post-collegiate rock epiphany is seeing Grace Slick sing “Volunteers” with the Jefferson Starship - not even the Airplane! He works his way through the ’70s as an apprentice on a stage crew, an amateurish taxi driver and a disco doorman in the age of KC and the Sunshine Band, reading Browning between checking IDs. After his discovery of the Rolling Stones on, the book hardly mentions anything beyond band names. He does hit notes of insight and conviction (recalling a baby sitter who cruised Route 25 singing along to “Rhiannon” or some housing-project kids who never made it out of oblivion), but keeps getting mired in the narrowest, soundtrack-to-my-life aspects of music.įor Edmundson, “rock” is just another word for openness to life-expanding possibilities. He’s as slavish about songs that yank his heartstrings as the “Devout Elvis People” whom Almond visits Graceland to sneer at. The “D.F.” revels in music as anger outlet, big-screen sexual projection, social network, emotional narcotic and all-around field of frustrated dreams. A wrought-up, jocular treatise on music as gut-level soulcraft, it’s long on sarcasm and exaggerated attitude - a first-person survey of 30-odd years in the life of a self-described “Drooling Fanatic.” That heavy-handed term yokes together a loose confederacy of vinyl fetishists and zealous souls who love rock in the same abject way the hero of the film “Big Fan” loved his Giants.
Steve Almond’s “Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life” is less fun to hang out with, though it strains harder to entertain. Edmundson may lean more toward Woody Allen than Warren Zevon, but in his wide-eyed receptivity to whatever fortune comes his way, his youthful self might have stepped out of a dozen early Jackson Browne tunes. Mark Edmundson’s book “The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll” has alert, rueful-earnest prose to go with its overblown title, a nice retrospective feel for youthful appetites (more metaphysical than sensual), though rock is primarily a signpost in his coming-of-age-in-the-1970s story. Since she isn’t talking yet, we’ll have to settle for a couple of other redemption-rock chronicles here. That hip-shaking tyke would be about 45 now and could write her own memoir of what salvation turned out to be like. The walls around her tiny uptight world tumbled: “You know her life was saved by rock ’n’ roll.” One bored day, she turned on a New York radio station, and “she couldn’t believe what she heard at all.” Emancipation called: “She started dancin’ to that fine, fine music” (Lou Reed approximating a soul falsetto for that “fine, fine” part). Their second- or third-most-famous anthem was about a jaded 5-year-old named Ginny (or Jenny, depending on the listener). The Velvet Underground sang of dope and beauty, good times and damnation, the lust for experience and the deliverance of grace.