In our new series, Writers and Music, authors either discuss the music that has been included in their most recent novel or the influence music has had on their work overall.
Richard Melo is the author of two politically out-there novels, Happy Talk (forthcoming from Red Lemonade) and Jokerman 8. He's a member of the National Book Critics Circle and lives in Portland, OR in a house with two kids and many stringed instruments. Writing is such an individualized activity that when I spent twelve years writing my first novel in virtual isolation from other writers, I thought it was unusual that I was on a high dosage of rock ‘n’ roll. I rarely drank, never took drugs and for that matter, didn’t even read much, so my inspiration came from the radio and my record collection. I’ve since discovered that not only do many of the writers I admire in my generation follow the muse of music, but in many cases, it’s the same music. On a whim, I decided to become a novelist one night in my college dorm room at San Francisco State University. It was 1987 and I was 19. The sources inspiring me were imagery from the rumored levitation of the Pentagon by war protesters in the 60s and a couple of Bob Dylan songs: ‘Visions of Johanna’ (which conjured the idea of characters, including one holding a handful of rain) and ‘She Belongs to Me’ (which gave me a line, ‘She wears an Egyptian ring that sparkles before she speaks,’ that served as the first line of the novel for years before falling victim to umpteen rounds of revision). The resulting effort became Jokerman 8, a novel less about 60s-era protesters than their sons and daughters who band together in the west coast forest radical movement (and hook up with an Egyptian studies major who supplies a ring with limited yet magical sparking ability activated by speech). Though I was still writing the book several years after leaving college, I placed scenes in my old San Francisco dormitory hall, including a paean to U2 whose music was ubiquitous on college campuses in the late 80s. U2 songs would seep from beneath closed dorm room doors like fog, even in the late hours when even the all-night crowd had gone to sleep. One of my favorite lines from the book is an image of the introduction of ‘With or Without You’ whistled by a ‘dowdy desert dog, a slow talker, dusty fur and face.’ That’s what I see when I hear the song to this day.
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