Living in Portland, OR in the mid 1990s, I caught wind of two local acts that helped me come to move through a funk of responding to the novel’s key question: Why the fuck would someone risk jail time or even death to sink wailing boats, serve as a human shield between hunters and wolves, or camp out in the canopy of ancient trees? The novel’s poetry explains it much better than I can do here, but among the characters I created, it’s a nostalgia for an incomplete childhood that drives them.
In my 20s, I was living in a Real World-style rental across the street from a house where a band lived. I had no idea that the band was Everclear, even as I was in my room listening to their ‘Fire Maple Song’ and figuring out how to recreate its emotion in my novel and getting to the heart of that key question. (It’s about the death of a friend in childhood that made it impossible to smile as an adult.) Everclear moved out of that house and went on to worldwide fame and for what it’s worth, I still consider Art Alexakis the best lyricist, if not songwriter, of the grunge years and despite living as neighbors, I’ve never met him.
A Portland radio hit in the mid-90s gave me the rest of what I needed to fill in the novel. The song was ‘Fanfare,’ by Eric Matthews. His stuff at the time sounded like 60s-era baroque pop though with more trumpet than string quartet. He was influenced by the pre-disco Bee Gees, though when I heard him, my first thought was that he sounded like Colin Blunstone of the Zombies. Admittedly, I am bad at hearing lyrics and despite hearing it hundreds of times, though I am not sure what ‘Fanfare’ is about exactly. I filled an early chapter with images I perceived from the song -- family photos, old home movies, the parents’ record collection -- and decided that it was about finding something you didn’t know you were looking for, something that feels like the way you smiled in childhood.
In the novel’s poetic imagination and joined with Everclear’s ‘Fire Maple Song,’ it creates a sense of how the young radicals in my novel grew into themselves. I learned later that Eric Matthews and I not only grew up in the same Portland suburb but had attended the same elementary school and probably bumped into each other on the playground.
Laura Nyro’s ‘Save the Country’ (which had served as a template for the Sesame Street theme) and Vince Guaraldi’s ‘Cast Your Fate to the Wind’ (which sounds like a more meditative ‘Linus & Lucy’) also provided profound inspiration. These were songs that sounded like my childhood that I never knew as a child. They play in the novel’s unheard background.
I haven’t listened to Bob Dylan or U2 much since finishing Jokerman 8, and while I do listen to many of the other acts who fueled the novel, I don't listen to the songs that influenced the work. Ending a novel is like a break up. You can try to stay friends or make a clean break and I made a clean break. Writing the novel was beautiful while it lasted but was going to become unhealthy if I didn’t find a place to stop.
I have since written two more books. Happy Talk, is a novel that wants to believe it’s a musical comedy and includes lyrics I’ve written, including parodies of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and Cole Porter’s ‘You’re the Top.’ (The latter includes what I believe is the best single line I have ever written, mostly for the speed at which it delivers its two-headed pun: ‘Arabian knights dance sheikh to sheikh.’)
A new book I am still completing explores relationships across political dissenters, cult followers, and rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t have much to say about it yet, other than it features a cameo by Paul Revere (of Paul Revere & the Raiders) wandering around Caribbean islands playing night clubs and hoping to get session work on reggae albums.
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