books, books, books

jukeboxgraduate dot com is an at-least weekly newsletter about rock and roll, written by Caryn Rose. the newsletter is free, but paid subscriptions help me prioritize this work. if you can't afford to subscribe or put money in the tip jar, tell a friend about the newsletter & why you like reading it!

This week's newsletter is all about books! I CAN'T REMEMBER IF I CRIED, MISS MAY DOES NOT EXIST, MIA ZAPATA & THE GITS, UNDER A ROCK, HOW WOMEN MADE MUSIC, and more!

I've always admired Carrie Courogen's work. She's one of those people who when she's enthusiastic about something, it's contagious, and so when she got the book deal to write this biography of Elaine May I was overjoyed for her. It also meant I was going to eventually sign up to read a 400 page biography about Elaine May, but with the state of my TBR pile I had no idea how I was going to make that happen. But I pulled the trigger when I was flying overseas and needed something that could hold my attention for long periods of time but wasn't going to be something I was going to be writing an in-depth review on.

I want to say something like, "I can't believe how good this is" but of course I can absolutely believe it based on Courogen's work and her dedication to the subject. This is for you if you are interested in Elaine May, in the history of comedy, in the history of American movie making, in modern theater, in the 60s and 70s, in old New York, or if you want to observe a master class in how to take an incredibly complex and multi-layered subject and attack it with surgical precision, while keeping the reader engrossed and engaged.

Even when I thought, "I am not really that interested in this particular phase of Elaine May," Courogen made me interested. It's so important that we have definitive books on women who matter and it's so important that women get the chance to write those books. I hope Elaine May read it (or had someone read it for her) and said, "I should have talked to her." I know this isn't a music book but it's relevant for the reasons I just outlined above. [bookshop | amazon]

I knew this book was going to be great because Chris Stein is insanely smart and a great writer, but I literally had to put it down after half an hour because I was so engrossed that I knew I was going to stay up all night reading it and I was going to need to take notes while reading it so I can review it, so it's going to have to sit in the TBR pile a little bit longer. It is just SO GOOD I felt the need to mention it. [bookshop | amazon]

I literally screamed when I opened the package this was in (thank you, Feral House!) Finally, a book about Mia Zapata. Review to come (it's next in the TBR pile) but if I didn't know this was coming out, you probably didn't know either. [bookshop | amazon]

I Can't Remember if I Cried: Rock Widows on Life, Love, and Legacy came on my radar as something I wanted to read and then the author reached out to me to ask if I was willing to be her conversation partner at an upcoming appearance in the area. There’s nothing I like more than a deadline. “I’ll read it this weekend,” I told Tucker-Sullivan, “And let you know if I have any questions or concerns.”

Needless to say, I did not read it “over the weekend” because this is not an easy, breezy beach read. I had to read a chapter and then put it down for a little while. This is deep work, shadow work, emotional work. Tucker-Sullivan is also a widow, and it was the death of her husband that sent her back into her writing, and put her on the path to telling these stories. In the introduction she talks about listening to a program about John Lennon’s death, part of which was a discussion about what Yoko Ono had accomplished since his death. She thought, “There must be others like her.” She went looking for them. The result is this book. 

“The wider misogynistic framing of widowhood,” is a quote from Catherine Mayer, the widow of Andy Gill from the Gang of Four. I read that line and read it again and again, and then realized I’d never considered how even losing your husband/partner/best friend will get distorted through the frame of misogyny and yet of course it does, men will take every possible opportunity to exert their primacy in a situation to their advantage. Especially within the music business, which still remains a faithful branch of the He-Man Woman Haters Club (thank you, Governor Walz). You would think that after the death of a friend/compatriot/band member that everyone would rally around to help and uplift the family of those who were left behind. You would think. As humans we are hardwired to believe in the best of people.

Tucker-Sullivan shows us through these interviews how every terrible person came out of the woodwork and pushed their agenda forward whenever they could, leaving the survivors behind. Every time. It is a machine. (Speaking of the machine, In that same chapter, Mayer talks about how when Gill finally agreed to go to the hospital that he was afraid that if people found out, he’d lose work, promoters would be afraid to book the band, or it would decrease interest in upcoming projects. This shouldn’t be surprising given how people reacted/still react to COVID related gig cancellations, and yet.)

The title of the book of course comes from Don MacLean’s “American Pie,” about Buddy Holly’s wife, Maria Elena. We all know the story by now. But I didn’t learn until decades later that she heard her husband had died on the radio, and lost her pregnancy as a result of that trauma, which caused the FAA to create policy around not releasing names of air crash victims to the news until the next of kin has been notified. That’s similar to what happened to Judy Van Zant, the wife of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant, who learned about the plane crash that killed her husband (as well as other band members and airline crew) from someone else who heard it on the news. 

(I also learned that there are actually adult humans in the world who refer to Judy Van Zant as “the Yoko Ono of Lynyrd Skynyrd” because she was doing the work to maintain her husband’s legacy and protect her family. That was another moment I had to put the book down and go take a walk, but for different reasons than the other moments. Do these people even hear themselves talk?)

The persistent thought I had, early into this book was: “No one ever talks to these women.” Even though these were the people who helped and loved and assisted and co-wrote and managed and performed endless emotional labor, they were also the first people to get pushed out of the picture by family and management and record company representatives. Some of it absolutely is a situation about getting things in writing, but that is difficult to advocate for, especially when you are young and in love and feel like the road ahead of you stretches out forever. And it’s also difficult because the same vultures who show up when someone has been dead for five minutes are also there to circle and hover and plant seeds of doubt and “you don’t need to think about this now.” They can’t win. 

I am glad for the widows who have refashioned and reclaimed their lives, usually with no help or support or sustenance, being forced out of the place that they lived with zero notice, just pushed out the door so someone else could claim clothes and guitars and jewelry and whatever else. The fact that they just kept walking forward to get where they ended up is remarkable. 

But I came out of this book hating many of these men. Jim Croce blamed his wife for her rape; I don’t believe that Warren Zevon doesn’t remember beating his wife, Crystal, which is what she relates to Tucker-Sullivan: “He was too drunk to remember.” To be fair, they are survivors and I don’t blame them but I do blame the men. Crystal Zevon, for the reasons noted above; George Jones’ widow, Nancy, who has a lot of nerve dissing Tammy Wynette and underplays her own domestic abuse; Annette Walter-Lax, Keith Moon’s last girlfriend, who with tells Lori, “Keith wasn’t suicidal, he would just OD then vomit it up.”

I found the chapter with Jamie Weiland the hardest because it wasn’t like there weren’t signs that this was a very bad idea. She turns to Tucker-Sullivan and says, “When you found out your husband had cancer, did you think, well, that sucks for you?...No, you stayed.” The situations aren’t analogous and I’m mad on Tucker-Sullivan’s behalf that this happened to her but it was also her choice to put it into the book, which has meaning, whether it was deliberate or not.

The second reading of the book was easier for me; it was easier to believe in forgiveness and my rage was not quite as white-hot. Just something to keep in mind.

At the book event, we discussed how she saw her job as telling the stories of the widows as they told her, as they saw their lives, as they believed or remembered. There are plenty of books out there that outline the terrible things that these men did, and plenty of people who see it as their duty to do things like show up on Gloria Jones’s Facebook page to call her a murderer. Jones was Marc Bolan’s partner at the time he died and was driving the car at the time of the accident that killed him. Jones both lost the love of her life and was seriously injured to the point that her singing career was destroyed because of her injuries. But some Bolan fan is gonna show up on Facebook 47 years later to be what he surely thinks is some kind of brave hero.

I’ll admit that I was skeptical about some of the chapters before I even read them, because the patriarchy is real and information abhors a vacuum and in the absence of information to the contrary, you consume and internalize the narratives you are given. Even the staunchest feminist can be bamboozled. I’m also willing to have my mind changed but I’m still angry at most of these dudes. I think that's okay. I don't have to forgive them.

It’s important to remember that the reason for the book’s existence is that Sullivan-Tucker is also a widow, also had her life rearranged in support of her husband’s goals, also had to restructure and rebuild. The book is a quick read but it’s a heavy one, as you ride alongside her as she makes her own personal connections between the lessons these women have endured and her own sorrows. The first question I asked her when we met was, “How are you doing, after all of this? Are you okay?” She's okay. You should read this book; you'll definitely learn something you didn't know, and it will widen your perspective. It widened mine. [bookshop | amazon]

First of all, I have an essay in the upcoming book How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music, but that's not the reason you need to order this book. I love this book not because I have an essay in it but because it takes advantage of the entirety of NPR's incredibly rich archives throughout the years, and also because the way it's constructed. It is your smart best friend making the connections, both obvious and not-so-obvious, it is all the best writers writing about the best subjects (with the benefit of NPR editors, who still edit your work and are invested in it being the absolute best, and yes I am speaking from experience.) It is such an engaging read.

I wrote about Sister Rosetta Tharpe for TTT back in 2019, the year that grounded the foremothers, and they (rightly) used Alice Randall's Rosetta essay in the book. So for the book, the editors asked me to contribute an essay on the Detroit Cobras, and when you read it you will completely understand why (and it's not because I live in Detroit, I've been here five minutes). I'll write more about it later because I obviously can't write about it anywhere else and it's my newsletter, dammit.

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