Liz Phair reviews Dean Wareham’s memoir in the New York Times this weekend. Flash back to 1994 and tell me that the Exile in Guyville girl would be writing a review of the book by that guy from Galaxie 500 for no less than the Gray Lady of the NY Times, and I would have tried to take away your crack. And yet, the review is good — I mean a good read. And it seems that the book is, too.
Freddie Mercury once said, “I want it all and I want it now.” This appetite might aptly be called the rock ’n’ roll disease, and Dean Wareham seems to have caught it. Or is in recovery. Or is somewhere along the road. Part confessional, part unsentimental career diary, Wareham’s “Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance” reads like good courtroom testimony: to the point, but peppered with juicy and unsolicited asides….
He portrays himself as a surprisingly unsympathetic character. He visits a prostitute. He makes people angry. He follows girls home after the show. He snorts coke. No apologies are made because this is, after all, a rock ’n’ roll autobiography. Late nights, a lot of drugs, a little infidelity (well, maybe not just a little, but I won’t give away the ending) — that’s par for the course, right? His honesty is challenging and humbling. Yet, for an egghead (Wareham is a graduate of both the Dalton School, the progressive and prestigious Upper East Side preparatory academy, and Harvard) with an elective reading list to rival Art Garfunkel’s (Thomas Mann, Mark Twain, André Malraux, Nietzsche, to name a few), he seems perfectly happy to partake in whatever recreational opportunities come his way, with enviable disregard for the consequences. Guilty? Not guilty? What are we as a jury to think?
Wareham talked to a Canadian music website while working on the book:
It’s a self-serving memoir about what it’s like to be in a band. It’s coming along, it’s been very difficult for someone who usually writes lyrics. That is something you can hide behind, but when writing something like this, people want to know how you feel. It has to be more expansive. You can’t hide.
Since I’ve started writing a book, I’ve started reading again. Writing forces me to use a part of my brain that I thought was dead. I’m reading more, I’m reading a lot of history books — about the French Revolution, for example.
I guess I always secretly suspected the indie rockers were erudite. Although I hadn’t known, until I read it in the New Yorker, about Art Garfunkel.
It’s not often that the NYT can be credited with be truly imaginative in selecting a book reviewer, but they nailed it with Phair. (No entendre intended.) I’m even surprised they reviewed Wareham’s book in the first place. Even if I thought they’d actually review it at all, I never would have expected them to consider anyone other than Jonathan Lethem or some other rock-obsessed fiction writer. Nice work, Tanenhaus.