Going through a stack of CDs and DVDs, I found John Darnielle’s Master of Reality, which I’d meant to write about long ago. The Mountain Goats’ singer/songwriter contributes his take on the Black Sabbath to Continuum Books’ 33 1/3 series in the form of a novella. That made me nervous, and I was moreso when I discovered it was written in the voice of a 15-year-old boy in a psychiatric hospital and his twentysomething self years later. That sounds like a recipe for cheap drama, but just as Mountain Goats albums work better than a description would make you think, Master of Reality is gripping storytelling and smart criticism.

Perhaps its not surprising that the older voice is more credible, but the younger voice rings true enough, and both address the roles music plays in our lives, which is a question I often consider these days. I  listen to the music I like most least because pop and punk, if it’s any good, distract me from writing. Much of my listening is function-based, and when we think about much of the music of Louisiana, thinking about its function is important to getting closer to how we should appreciate it. At the Ogden a month or so ago, David Greely, Joel Savoy and I debated whether Cajun music is at its core music made to be experienced as the soundtrack to a Saturday night, Greely making a good argument against that notion.

Black Sabbath might be a world away from Varise Conner, but the role of each’s music is well worth considering. In the case of heavy metal, more insightful thinking about it has long been necessary, and Darnielle’s suggestion that it’s a defusing element is a sensible alternative to a few decades’ worth of stupid, knee-jerk notions.  

               

I hoped Philip Shaw’s Horses (Continuum) would help me get closer to Patti Smith’s debut album. Only “Gloria” and “Land” delivered the wild and dangerous art that her early 1970s press promised. When Shaw writes about her development of a poetry-based rock ‘n’ roll, it still sounds exciting, marrying garage band, pre-punk and soul to Rimbaud-influenced poetry. Most of the album just sounded like artsy songs, though, and Radio Ethiopia came much closer to realizing the promised music I heard in my head.

Not surprisingly, Shaw focuses on Smith’s lyrics/poems, but because of that, once he writes about the songs, the book becomes pretty standard literary criticism – interesting, and oddly credulous where Smith’s accounts of dreams she remembers from childhood are concerned – but he misses the performed dimension, the words as they were sung while interacting with musical instruments. The flipside of the “Gloria” single was a live cover of “My Generation” recorded at CBGB’s with producer John Cale on bass, and it was the raw, daring thing I wanted. It was also that band that appeared on Saturday Night Live (guest host: Ron Nessen, Gerald Ford’s press secretary). I remember her sawing the strings of her guitar as if she was trying to pull them off (sadly, it’s not on YouTube for me to check). It was further evidence that the sense of drama, the frantic energy and compulsive risk-taking (acting like a rock ‘n’ roll cavegirl on national TV) that I had read about wasn’t a media fabrication, but I didn’t hear her or that on Horses except in moments. And I still don’t.

A more compelling entry in Continuum Books’ 33 1/3 series is Masters of Reality by the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle. He takes the series back to its more experimental first books and writes a novella written from the perspective of a teenager in a mental hospital. The premise seemed cheaply dramatic to me at first, and I’m not sure if I buy the voice of the teenager (not surprisingly, the protagonist 10 years later rings truer), but putting his thoughts on the Black Sabbath classic in the mouth of an unreliable narrator is provocative. It’s also hard not to see the book as a sly wisecrack toward critics, comparing them to unstable teenagers.