Chris Roberts
To me, the most interesting thing about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is the way you get a glimpse of rock gods as human beings. A picture Jimi colored for his dad or a postcard Patti wrote to her mom make you realize that once upon a time, these were folks who might have been in your algebra class or First Communion picture. Then something — what? — happened to catapult them elsewhere.
That’s why rock memoirs fascinate me. How did this person get from point A to point B when they started out just like we did? A slew of new memoirs collects the stories of female musicians who got to point B — and sometimes way, way beyond.
This fall gave us Debbie Harry’s Face It, Patti Smith’s Year of the Monkey, Tegan and Sara’s High School, Liz Phair’s Horror Stories and Amy Rigby’s Girl to City.
Two other big-ticket memoirs came out this fall, from Elton John and Prince, but it’s the female rock stars whose books intrigue me. For starters, it’s just a matter of math. The women’s books are a nice departure from the myriad rock memoirs set in the ’60s, when there were few female artists to even tell the tale. (Harry, 74, and Smith, 72, were around in the ’60s, but their music careers took off in the 1970s.)
Mostly, female rock stars offer something decidedly different from the typical boys’ club stories about getting drunk, stoned and laid (though there is some of that, too). Phair was asked for an autograph while giving birth. Rigby was a single mother. Smith navigates a life in which she has survived those she loved most. Harry was raped and stalked. Tegan and Sara recount high school angst that every former high school girl knows deep in her soul.
Harry’s Face It was the most anticipated of the bunch, in part because of her status as something of a New Wave Tom Hanks — everybody loves her. Face It does nothing to dissuade us from that affection, but it also doesn’t really inspire more with its cool, detached approach — not unlike Harry’s public persona.
Face It, culled from a series of interviews, is as much a recitation of Harry’s life as a reflection. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is a book; she doesn’t owe us her soul. There are laugh-out-loud lines when she’s blunt, which is often (“I could not live in L.A. in the sixties for fear of losing my soul. So instead I came back to NYC and became a Playboy bunny and a junkie. Go figure.”). You come away feeling that she navigated some dangerous territory and survived to tell quite a tale.
The biggest window into Harry isn’t what she’s written, but what she’s included in the book: fan-created portraits of her from all ages and abilities. She couldn’t throw them out, she writes, because people took the time to make them for her. Debbie, you old softie.
With Year of the Monkey, Smith dives back into M Train territory, sharing a year of wandering, drinking coffee and doing Patti things. Part of the charm of these books is that her wandering ways are so random, I half expect to walk in to a place like the Red Rooster Café in Mineral Point one day and see Smith sitting there sipping coffee.
Smith spends 2016 wandering and worrying, in part because two friends (including Sam Shepard) are near death. Beyond all the literary musings Smith sprinkles into her books, sometimes to the point of irritation, she also contemplates other truly vital issues, like in a chapter called “Why Belinda Carlisle Matters.”
In February of her year of wandering, Smith realizes it is her wedding anniversary and that it’s been 20 years since her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith died, “which prompts me to pull an oblong box from under the bed, opening the lid long enough to smooth the folds of a Victorian dress partially obscured by a fragile veil.”
Breathtaking moments like that are why Patti Smith matters.
Phair’s Horror Stories lives up to its title, tearing up the script and providing a nonlinear look at her life in music and beyond. She provides chapter after chapter of the worst things that ever happened to her, and how they shaped her. They seem, like her lyrics often do, designed to shock. Eventually the memoir settles down, and she pulls insightful and moving observations from her experiences — an apology from a guy who wrecked her college living space, her infidelity, her #MeToo experiences that she understands are just a famous person’s version of every other woman’s experiences.
Through a lot of discomfort, Horror Stories does what a good rock memoir should: It gets at the heart of what formed the musician whose work you like.
Tegan and Sara Quin approach High School nontraditionally, too. The Canadian indie pop twins with the sweet harmonies don’t tell the tale of their career, but they explore the path to getting there, stopping before fame arrives. They do so by alternating chapters, providing fodder for the adage that there are three sides to every story (your side, my side and the truth).
The two navigate growing up side by side, driving each other nuts, and sharing more than they could even imagine at the time. The twins, both gay but not confiding that in each other, explore their sexuality and work their way through various bad choices (the book is, after all, called High School).
One choice looms above all the others: music. They find their stepdad’s guitar stored away, learn to play it, and write songs together. When a battle of the bands victory lands them a record deal and a blip of fame, Sara’s ability to ditch her restaurant job reads like a triumph.
“In the vestibule between the restaurant and the exterior doors was a stack of Vox magazines with our faces on the cover,” Sara writes. “I grabbed one. I wasn’t a quitter, I just finally knew who I wanted to be.”
Now that is a happy ending.
In Girl to City, Amy Rigby tells her story of how she got to the happy ending of being able to forge a life in music, with all its indignities, frustrations and joys. Girl to City culminates with the 1996 release of her first solo record, the splendid Diary of a Mod Housewife, which came out when she was 37.
Though Rigby continues to record critically acclaimed albums and perform in small clubs, it’s a struggle, and the acerbic singer-songwriter has not turned into a superstar. That’s the beauty of her book, though. Her passion for her art flies off the pages while also providing a glimpse of what success can mean.
“I’ve been working on this book for 10 years,” she said at an October show at Kiki’s House of Righteous Music, a house concert venue here in Madison. “It made me realize what an interesting life I’ve had. Everyone should do this.”
These days it seems like everyone in the rock world does. If half of them do it as well as Rigby, those who love to read music memoirs will be lucky indeed.