Richard Rodriguez on Religion, Atheism and Politics

SOMETIMES I wonder why the words -- especially the personal essays -- of Richard Rodriguez hit me so directly. He is a gay Latino born in the '40s, a devout if conflicted Catholic, and on many issues a political or social conservative. My origins and allegiances are very different and coincide with none of those categories (I have long thought of myself, for instance, as a Protestant agnostic on religious matters.)

Part of my connection to Rodriguez's work, I think, is that he writes so well about California, a major concern for The Misread City. But mainly, our mismatched alliance comes simply from the power of great writing, and deep thinking. I'm always curious what he has to say, even when we (frequently) disagree.

His elegant new book Darling is on religion after 9/11, and it's his first in a decade. It's my favorite work of his going back even longer.

Here is my Salon interview with Richard Rodriguez.

Cheering George Packer's "The Unwinding"

LORD know this book does not need any more praise, but I want to wave the tattered American flag for George Packer's The Unwinding, which just won the National Book Award. The book is not perfect -- more on that in a minute -- but it is lyrical, powerfully reported, passionately written, and lives  up to its subtitle: "An Inner History of the New America."

As research for my own Creative Destruction, I've spent the last year or two reading numerous books of social criticism, going back to the mid-century American generation of Vance Packard, and up through Barbara Ehrenreich and others, and this book makes an excellent extension of that tradition. (It is also self-consciously in the oft-overlooked tradition of Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy.)

Dwight Garner, in the New York Times, wrote about the potentially unwieldy number of piece that make up The Unwinding, some of which originated in The New Yorker. Here's Garner:

It is Mr. Packer’s achievement in “The Unwinding” that these pieces, freshly shuffled and assembled, have speed and power to burn. This book hums — with sorrow, with outrage and with compassion for those who are caught in the gears of America’s increasingly complicated (and increasingly poorly calibrated) financial machinery.

The larger discussion of the book hinges not on its skillful portraits of Florida real-estate busts, political life in Washington, Silicon Valley libertarians, or sketches of Newt Gingrich and Oprah Winfrey (who turn out to the the same person), but on its big picture -- or lack thereof. Here's David Brooks:

When John Dos Passos wrote the “U.S.A.” trilogy, the left had Marxism. It had a rigorous intellectual structure that provided an undergirding theory of society — how social change happens, which forces matter and which don’t, how society works and who causes it not to work. Dos Passos’ literary approach could rely on that structure, fleshing it out with story and prose. The left no longer has Marxism or any other coherent intellectual structure. Packer’s work has no rigorous foundation to rely on, no ideology to give it organization and shape.

Brooks, with whom I sometimes disagree, is onto something here, and several of my friends on the left have expressed similar reservations. Why is it that a journalist more-or-less on the left is uncomfortable/unwilling to frame his work with an  overarching theory of society or history, the way similar scribes did in the 19th or 20th century? The reasons are long and complex, and I hope to get into this another time. (For what it's worth, Salon's Laura Miller, a critic I like a lot, praises the book because it "pointedly refrains from making sweeping polemical arguments about 'what’s gone wrong.'... In a culture in which everyone is perpetually shrieking their political opinions, it’s hard to convey just how refreshing this is.")

For now, let me acknowledge Brooks' criticism, but assert whole-heartedly that The Unwinding is an incredible piece of work, something that everyone who wants to understand the crisis in America today should pick up pronto.

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Postscript: As a reader, and an Angeleno, I am disappointed that Rachel Kushner's The Flame Throwers, a captivating novel about the New York art scene and '70s Italy, did not take the fiction prize. Both of Rachel's novels (The Other is Telex From Cuba) have been greeted with great acclaim (I am lucky enough to have written about both of them), she is as sharp a person as we know, and here at The Misread City we are confident that she will live to write and fight again.   

Digging the New Dean Wareham

DESPITE our well-documented bias for things West Coast, the Misread City gang has a deep and abiding love for the work of Dean Wareham going back to the Galaxie 500 and Luna eras. The day after seeing Luna on its first US tour (opening for the Sundays, if memory serves, and before the first LP), we walked to the local record store in Chapel Hill to pick up the band's Slide EP. (It was what we imagine kids in the '50s used to do.)

Dean -- whose roots are in Australia and New Zealand and whose early bands were based in Boston and New York -- has recently moved to Los Angeles. He's also just released his first solo record, an EP called Emancipated Hearts. (Check out the track called Air.) We spoke to Dean about his new work, the state of the music business, and his feelings for California.

Dean Wareham plays Thursday night at Largo at the Coronet, one of LA's best clubs. We'll be there. Here's our Q & A with him.

You’ve been in a number of semi-famous indie bands – Galaxie 500, Luna, Dean & Britta – and are now releasing what I take to be your first solo recording. How is it different from leading a band, and is it strange feeling to be on your own?

 To tell you the truth it still feels like a band effort, these are musicians I have been playing with for some years now: Britta Phillips on bass and Anthony LaMarca on drums, and augmented on this mini-LP by producer Jason Quever, who played keyboards and electric guitar. So anyway, technically yes it’s a “solo” release because it says so on the front of the record. I’m doing all the singing, and I write all the lyrics and melodies, but I depend on those around me to help figure out the arrangements.

That’s not so different from how I’ve been recording my whole career. Perhaps the difference was at the mixing stage, Jason Quever mixed it, and I was there too, but we didn’t have a whole band sitting behind him making comments. Last night the four of us had a rehearsal at Jason's studio in San Francisco and the band sounds really good, both on the new songs we recorded together but also on the Galaxie 500 and Luna songs we are doing.

You’re known for songwriting, but you’ve always had a great knack for covers – Wire’s Outdoor Miner, Jonathan Richman, Sweet Child of Mine, and so on. What makes a song right for you to play, besides, you know, liking it?

Picking covers is hit and miss. Just because I love a particular song does not mean I can pull it off vocally. I covered "Distractions" by Bobby Darin, a sly anti-war song from his folk period. But my rendition was not quite successful. Nor was Luna's rendition of "Dancing Days" by Led Zeppelin, though at least there is a bit of comedy in my singing that. Anyway I do look for songs that are under-appreciated, lost even. 

One of my favorite tracks on here is the digital-only number, Living Too Close to the Ground, an Every Bros song significantly less well-known that, say, Cathy’s Clown. How did you stumble upon this one and what made it seem right for you?

The Everly Brothers are amazing, first for their rhythm guitar playing (and this is more evident in the ‘50s songs), but there is also this ‘60s period where they recorded a number of great albums for Warner Brothers, albums that didn’t do well at radio (at least in the States, they were more popular in England). They were probably out of fashion, but they kept making records. “Living Too Close to the Ground” I think was written by their bassist (though I’m not positive about that, I’ve read a couple different things); anyway it is a great lyric and their recording is haunting and weird. I’m happy with how mine turned out too — there’s a delicious slide guitar solo in there — played by Jason.

You’ve written in your memoir Black Postcards one of the best assessments of the shift from the label era of the ‘80s and ‘90s to our current post-Napster musical universe. Lots of raging debate right now on Pandora, piracy, the joys of going it alone with Kickstarter, etc. Be brief if you like, but how are you enjoying our brave new world?

I didn’t quite realize as I was writing my book, that it was about something that was disappearing, a world of compact discs and tour support and even indie labels giving healthy advances to bands. The book ends in 2005, since then of course many more changes. Back then it was the early days of piracy (or filesharing), now people are just as concerned about streaming.

As you say, there have been some interesting discussions online lately, David Lowery arguing that the internet revolution has been terrible for musicians, and others writing about the dangers of Spotify — and on the other side Dave Allen, formerly of the Gang of Four, arguing that “the internet doesn’t care” and that we are simply in a transitional phase between technologies, with new markets being formed. Maybe that's true; certainly the old marketplaces are disappearing and we can see that with our eyes. Dave Allen also points to artists like Amanda Palmer and Trent Reznor and says they’ve got it figured out -- so what’s wrong with the rest of us? Which sounds like an updated bootstrap argument to me, something Dickens would make fun of. We hear similar thoughts from Thomas Friedman, that if we can continually reinvent ourselves and learn new technologies, we’ll be fine. 

At any rate there have always been challenges, being a recording artist or musician has never been a very reliable job. I know the 1990s were good times for the music business as a whole, it was a golden age where they convinced everyone to replace their vinyl collection with compact discs, how great was that? And if your band had a hit at radio, then maybe you did well. 

It is an interesting time to be in a band; there are certain advantages — it’s cheaper than ever to make recordings and distribute them all over the world, via the miracle of Internet and social media. It's easier than ever to reach your audience. The problem now is it’s more difficult to sell music. We hear a lot that music should be free. Sure, it should be free, and so should health care and education, and recording studios, and my rent should be controlled too. But unfortunately we don't live in that world.

You moved to Los Angeles earlier this year. What’s it like for a longtime New Yorker, originally from down under, to land in California? What do you like here and what do you miss about the East?

I lived in Sydney, Australia, from age 7 to 14. I only know Sydney from a child’s perspective, but Los Angeles reminds me of that city — the sprawl, the perfect weather, the Eucalpytus and Jacaranda trees. I have only been here six months but Los Angeles certainly has its charms, its rich history, good food, plenty of culture. But I miss some of the freedom of New York, where it is much easier to go out at night, easier to wander the streets or ride a bicycle. Life in Los Angeles, as John Cassavetes said, is life by appointment. But the truth is I spend most of my time at home, avoiding traffic, playing guitar, running my record label, making sure the social media is updated — pulling myself up by my bootstraps.

Rick Moody and the Wingdale Community Singers

HERE at The Misread City, we’re longtime fans of Rick Moody’s novels (The Ice Storm), short stories (Demonology) and music writing (collected in On Celestial Music and posted generally on The Rumpus.) His admirers include Lydia Millett, Michael Chabon and fellow Puritan Thomas Pynchon.

But we’ve only recently caught up with Moody’s folk/modernist band the Wingdale Community Singers, whose latest album, Night, Sleep, Death, splices their music with (among other things) the poetry of Walt Whitman. Moody sings and plays guitar in a band that also includes Hannah Marcus and David Grubbs of Gastr del Sol.

We spoke to Moody about Skip James, his Taylor guitar, Saint Augustine, Brooklyn, Bob Dylan, the sounds in his head, and what the band means to a writer like him.

Let’s start out with some sense of your favorite artists within this country/folk tradition you guys seem to be plying. Who are a few who shaped your approach?

I think it has been revealed over the years that the guy all three of us love in equal measure is Leonard Cohen. Once you get past him, we diverge slightly. Hannah Marcus is really in an Old Time/Irish music kind of way, these days, and can tell you everything about Alice Gerrard or whoever is the hot new fiddler. Dave Grubbs knows a lot about innovative and experimental music, but has lately been doing guitar transcriptions of Gesualdo. He also loves, as I do, Skip James, and often seems to have such a breadth of early recorded music under his belt that one is surprised by his learning. But then he is a very brilliant guy. I probably have more mundane taste by comparison, in that I also like some well-known music in these areas. The Harry Smith anthology. Johnny Cash. John Fahey. Martin Carthy. Fairport Convention. Even Simon and Garfunkel. That guy from Minnesota. And I am not averse to contemporary acoustic music, either, if it is played with the requisite level of dread. Sam Amidon, for me, really gets to the dread sometimes. Jolie Holland. The Be-Good Tanyas.

We assume that a novelist who is in a band is some kind of showoff, charlatan, dilettante, or opportunist – it’s like the way Letterman used to be able to say “actor-singer” and we’d all bust into derisive laughter. Where did this come from?

Do you mean why is it so funny? I dunno! I always played music, lifelong, took voice lessons as a kid and so on. So for me it’s not a footnote in my life, but very central to my life. I just happen not to be as good at it as I am good at novel-writing. I understand this rubs people the wrong way, and I kept my musical interests under wraps for a long while. But I think creativity is sort of a general condition, not a genre-specific condition, and after a while it seemed stupid to me to pretend that I hadn’t given a lot of my life to music. I recommend not dismissing this work out of hand because of my writing, but I also recommend against listening to these records as the work of Rick Moody the novelist. This is the work of a band, with a very group-centered approach, and it’s a band that has been together a long time now (ten years). We know who we are and how we work together, and the individual identities are not as important in the Wingdales as they are outside of the Wingdales.

 

You’ve written that being in a band – and especially, singing harmony -- has improved your novel writing. Has it done anything to your music writing?

I’m a lot better music writer these days because I actually have experience in the studio and onstage. So I can, in fact, write from songwriting experience, and recording experience. Before I only wrote from listening experience, which, however passionate, is different from trying to write and play the stuff.  I am not a sophisticated musician—I will never score parts on a staff—but I am not a total idiot either, and that, I expect, makes me a better music-writer.

Your band has found an oddly resonant space halfway between the Carter Family and Richard and Linda Thompson. How does fellow Brooklynite Walt Whitman fit into this?

Whitman is not the only guest lyricist on the new album. Andy Warhol is source material for Hannah’s song “So What?,” and Augustine of Hippo is cannibalized for “No Rest,” and one song is made entirely out of fortune cookie fortunes. The point was to disrupt the confessional lyric a little bit. We are trying not to be singer-songwriters in the usual way, we are trying to be songwriters in the more broad sense of the thing. Whitman is obviously a great touchstone of Brooklyn identity, and we are from Brooklyn, and we are all big readers, so Whitman is not a stretch. He’s someone we love, as we love Lightnin’ Hopkins or Karen Dalton. And why shouldn’t his songs be set to music? They happen to be very hard to set, because of scansion issues, but that’s part of why it was fun.

These days, nobody wants to be among those who booed Dylan at Newport. But is there something valuable and irreplaceable about acoustic instruments? (I’m aware that there is an organ or something on this new record and an electric guitar on some of the earlier stuff.)

Well, here, I’ll say an unpopular thing. I don’t think those Dylan gigs with The Band were so great. I understand it was a brilliant gesture, and I like the electric guitar as much as the next guy, but I think the acoustic Dylan is more masterful in some ways. On the 1966 authorized boot, I thought the “Visions of Johanna” recording was way better than the electric stuff.  For me, it’s about how much you can strip away. The more you strip away, the more emotionally resonant the material is. (See,Good As I Been To You, e.g.) This is true on a lot of punk recordings too. I think Suicide, for example, is an extremely emotionally resonant band, and there’s obviously nothing acoustic about that music. The fact is, the more musicians are on the stage, the harder it is to have everyone pulling toward the meaning of the song. When there’s only one personthere, then you definitely have a shot. The acoustic instruments are valid because they are really quiet, and they leave a lot of room for singer and song. This seems good to me. But those Billy Bragg albums where he plays solo electric are good. The late John Fahey recordings on electric are good. And very minimal. For me acoustic music is minimal music, and that’s what I like. 

What kind of guitar do you play and how important is it to you? Do you have any kind of models for your guitar playing?

I play a Taylor acoustic with onboard electronics, so I can plug it in. But I also have a Canadian acoustic that my brother-in-law got for me last year, a cut-rate affair with no particular legend attached, that should bebad, but which is extremely good, with excellent resonance in the lower strings. I really love it a lot. (Its name is Tex.) I am not a gear hound, at all, because I came from punk rock days, when people banged the shit out of their gear, or used really substandard gear. If I think it’s really about the song, then obviously I’m not going to give a shit about the guitar. I have a Mexican Telecaster, but it will not do what I want it to do, at all. I would like to get a Rickenbacker and will some day. My models for guitar playing would be people like Alex Chilton and Chris Stamey, who are rudimentary, but sort of ecstatic at the same time. I love Tom Verlaine too. Or Sonny Sharrock. But I will never be a player like that. For me it’s just about sketching out the chords and letting the band do what needs to be done around me.

You come from a tradition, at least in part, associated with hostility to music and the arts in general: The Puritans are famous for ripping the singers’ benches out of churches – leaving only “bare ruined choirs” – smashing the stained-glass windows, etc. How do you find yourself a musician 500 years later? Do you ever want to smash everybody’s instruments – Pete Townshend-style -- in rehearsal?

I think acoustic music in general, and especially in some of its idioms—gospel, blues, folk—are not immune to a church interior. I think God, if not the fire-and-brimstone God, then some other more sympathetic God, is not antithetical to acoustic music of the kind that we play. Melancholy is kind of numinous. But as for wanting to smash my guitar, SURE. I definitely identify with Pete Townshend’s feeling that there were sounds in his head that he couldn’t get down in song. I feel that way a lot.

Rachel Kushner and Laura Owens

RECENTLY I spoke to novelist Rachel Kushner, whose The Flamethrowers is far and away among the most celebrated novels of the year, and artist Laura Owens, whose recent show of recent paintings in her own Boyle Heights space reminds us why she became the youngest artist to have a career retrospective at the MOCA.

The two -- longtime friends and aesthetic allies -- talked about their own work, their respect for each other, and their hopes for the future. The story, HERE, is from Pasadena magazine, now helmed by my former LA Times editor, the mighty Maria Russo.

Fathers and Sons

ONE of the liveliest voices on the pages of the New York Times Magazine has just released a beautifully observed and heartbreaking book. Stephen Rodrick's The Magical Stranger: A Son's Journey Into His Father's Life justifies the overused word "poignant."

Rodrick is known to sharp-eyed readers for a wide range of stories in the Times magazine as well as Men's Journal; a recent story, on Lindsay Lohan, Bret Easton Ellis, Paul Schrader and the movie The Canyons, may be the smartest piece involving a celebrity I've read in years.

The Magical Stranger is both a look back and a look inward: It's a kind of reported memoir in which Rodrick chronicles his Navy-pilot father's early years and death in 1979, when he crashed in the Indian Ocean when Rodrick was just 13.

Full disclosure: Part of my interest in the book comes from the fact that his father and mine were classmates at the Naval Academy; apparently they didn't know each other. And while I've admired Rodrick's work for years before we met, we've become acquainted he moved to Los Angeles. Finally, I am unfairly biased in his direction because of his excellent taste in music, and he shares The Misread City's ardor for Lloyd Cole, the Go-Betweens and other exemplars of unpopular pop, a term it turns out to have coined.

Here is my Q&A with Stephen Rodrick, who appears at Vroman's bookstore in Pasadena tonight, June 3.

You’re a longtime magazine journalist – “I inhabit other people’s lives for a living,” you write – accustomed to looking outward at the world. Was it odd or difficult to look inward, and to report on and research your own life and family history?

It wasn't actually that difficult. I think waiting until I was in my 40s was a fortunate coincidence. The same powers of observation that you need to bring to profiling Judd Apatow or Serena Williams is a tool that serves you well when you look at your own life. As I do with my profiles, I tried to strip away the myth of my father as a fallen hero–which he was to some extent–and replace it with a portrait of him as a real man with foibles and tragic flaws.

I always say my greatest skill as a journalist is simply that I show up: Not just for a day or two, but for weeks in the hopes of getting a full understanding of the person that I'm writing about; the good days, the bad day, the days when nothing happens. And I tried to bring that to writing about my family and my father. There were trips I took cross-country and overseas that didn't make it into the book, but it helped give me an understanding of my dad and naval aviators that I think allowed me to write with a level of confidence about them. I tried to live with them, or my father's memory, as much as I could.

You’ve been living with the painful fact of your father’s death since you were 13. What triggered you to dig into that complicated story now?

Well, it was a bit of practicality that finally got me off my ass. I'd been talking about writing about my father and our family since I wrote a piece for Men's Journal on navy pilots back in 2002. But I kept putting it off, partially because it was a pretty painful experience to write about for six to eight weeks so the idea of spending two or three years on the project sounded pretty overwhelming. But I learned in 2009 that my dad's squadron, VAQ-135, was making their last deployment flying the EA-6B Prowler, my dad's old plane, in 2009-2010 before transitioning to a new jet. Half the book is memoir, half the book is reportage on following my dad's squadron so I knew it if I was going to make the experience as real as possible, it would have to be while they were still flying Prowlers. The guys actually got me up on a flight in a Prowler on a low-level training flight through the Cascades and despite booting a spectacular yellow fluid it was one of the great experiences of my life.

Give us a sense of what kind of research you did to try to understand the whole thing.

It was a little bit of everything: Filing a Freedom of Information request and combing through my Dad's accident report, talking to aviators who flew with him, going to his 50th high school reunion, discovering a diary he kept when he was twelve and thirteen; the same age as I was when he died.

For the modern part of the story; following VAQ-135 and, specifically, Commander James Hunter Ware the skipper of VAQ-135, I spent hundreds of days up around NAS Whidbey where they're stationed and then hit the road to meet them in the Pacific, Key West, Jacksonville, Pearl Harbor, and then traveling to Bahrain and Dubai to spend more time with Ware for his next job on the USS Lincoln where he was the air boss, supervising landing and taking off jets on the carrier. I probably logged about 50,000 travel miles and 250 to 300 days on the road. With some notable exceptions–confined to quarters in Dubai with bronchitis, the entire country of Bahrain–I pretty much loved every minute of it.

Did you have any kind of model for The Magical Stranger or for your writing in general?

I'm not sure I had a specific model but Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life for the memoir stuff, a semi-obscure American novelist Thomas Rogers' to remind me to shoot some comedy into the pathos and your dad, Robert Timberg's The Nightingale's Song for his look at what the Naval Academy was like in the 1950s and 1960s. All were well-thumbed along with some Evelyn Waugh book like A Handful of Dust which is my favorite novel. It really bore no specific relation to the book but reminded me how to write about people and tragedy in a tart, honest and sometimes funny way without either being mean or mawkish.

Your journalism is unpredictably wide-ranging from eccentric purveyor of “unpopular pop” Jon Brion to the making of the strange Paul Schrader/ Lindsay Lohan film The Canyons. Sometimes, of course, you jump because an editor calls, but when it’s up to you, what makes a Stephen Rodrick story?

I think like most writers, I look for people or subjects I can identify with. When I was writing the book, I spent a lot of time trying to parse what makes a book or any creative project work. Not conincidentally, it's a theme in my writing. favorite stories.  My favorite stories are watching artists try and make a project actually happen-whether it's Brion with Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine, Judd Apatow with Knocked Up; Schrader with The Canyons or Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian trying to write a movie.

In a way, Hunter Ware' attempt to build a cohesive squadron that took care of his men and women while also maintaining a high sortie completion rate for missions over Afghanistan is just a military version of that. But watching people try to solve their own riddles has taught me so much about leading and creating that I feel a little guilty that I get paid to basically attend a seminar on 'Here's How You Make Your Dream Come True or Here's How Your Dream Gets Crushed By The Forces of Evil.'

You’ve lived in L.A. for a year or two now – after all your years in New York, what’s that been like?

I love it. I work at home so I don't have to fight the traffic and I get to swim laps outdoors all year round at Occidental College. It is true; it's a more isolated experience; both good and bad compared to Brooklyn. My wife and I have taken to referring to our house as the compound because a) it's great and comforting and b) you have to jump in your car to go do anything so it's also a compound in a house arrest kind of way.

I loved the ten years I spent in Brooklyn, but it starts to lose a little of its allure when all your friends get married and settled down and you're not going out five nights a week. Then all the question arise: Why am I paying $2500 for a 1000 square feet and I have no outdoor space? But there are some similarities; just like there were Brooklyn snobs who would need Jesus to be playing at the Bowery to cross the bridge and go to the Bowery on the weekend; here I live in Eagle Rock and it would take Jesus AND Mary doing an acoustic set at Largo to get me west of La Brea on a Saturday night.

But the tacos here are so much better.

Sarah Polley, Director

SARAH Polley, the actress and director, has a new, very well reviewed film out. A few years ago, when her directorial debut, Away From Her, was released, I had lunch with her at the ArcLight. That film was based on an understated short story by the master Alice Munro, who I also spoke to.

HERE is that piece, which I wrote for the LA Times.

My main memory of that encounter was saying, somewhat clumsily, "Oh, you're Canadian, do you know the music of Ron Sexsmith? He's Canadian too." Instead of pouring her ice tea on my head, Ms. Polley -- who I found smart and engaging throughout -- beamed and raved about how much she loved Sexsmith's music.

I'm very eager to see her new Stories We Tell, a documentary about family secrets.

Speaking of new docs, I'm also curious to see the film Deceptive Practices, about the magician and storyteller Ricky Jay, who I absolutely adore. (That link takes you to the website, and the trailer, of the film.)

Prog Rock Tales

YOU would have to look long and hard to find someone who felt less warmly about the movement known as progressive rock as your humble blogger. (If the genre was bad in its original appearance, it seemed doubly awful in its ‘80s AOR rebirth.) I expect a lot of us who came of age in the years after punk feel the same way, and preferred the concision of college radio or “modern rock” acts like R.E.M. and Elvis Costello to endless prog symphonies. (Of course, I will make an exception here for the bizarre genius of Robert Fripp.)

 

Why, then, can’t I put down this new book, Yes is the Answer , a collection of writers on prog? I’m still not sure, but I love its combination of humor and critical seriousness. The book is edited by longtime LA writer Marc Weingarten – an old friend whose music journalism I read in the '90s -- and Tyson Cornell, who once booked authors at Book Soup and now runs Rare Bird Lit. 

The years between Sgt. Pepper’s and those first Clash and Pistols singles were a strange disorienting time for rock music. Glam found one way out of that puzzle, and prog took another road. Was all that heavy, high-pitched silliness worth it?

In any case, Yes is the Answer includes writer/producer Seth Greenland on The Nice, novelist Matthew Specktor on Yes, Wesley Stace (John Wesley Harding) on the prog scene of Canterbury, UK, Rick Moody on Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jim DeRogatis on Genesis, music writer Margaret Wappler on getting laid to King Crimson, New York Times food writer Jeff Gordinier on how failed sex is a lot like a Styx concert, writer/bassist Jim Greer on Guided by Voices' debt to prog, and many other sharp, counter-intuitive pieces. 

Overall, it's way more fun than it has any business being.

Keep your eyes peeled for events around town. For now, here is my conversation with Weingarten.

Why did this seem like the right time for a book on this once-mighty musical form? Is there a prog revival going on, like when Yes returned with “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” and Rush and Asia were rockin’ the suburbs? 

I think there are a lot of bands out there who secretly love prog but don't want to admit it - they have no cultural cover, so to speak, because this is the last rock subgenre that hasn't been reclaimed by hipsters.  So, we thought it was a good a time as any to point out that there's a lot of great music here, made at a time of pretty outrageous and often overreaching experimentation. Which is also part of the charm of prog - how crazily ambitious it was.  I love the idea of bands writing hour-long suites and traveling with orchestras - it speaks to a kind of silly grandeur that I think is lacking in indie rock  - you see it in contemporary metal, I suppose.  

Most of your contributors are -- like you and me -- Xers who came of age with post-punk or alt-rock. We’re a generation, then, for whom prog became a punch line or a bad memory. What undercut prog’s world domination back then? 

Because Prog was almost exclusively a British phenomenon, it was completely stomped by Punk Rock, because Punk in England was really a tsunami.  It was time for Prog to go, anyway - it had gotten really overblown and quite awful.  I don't think any of our contributors would argue that Relayer is better than London's Calling, but we all have a soft spot for Prog.  

How did you and your co-editor come up with your contributors? There are a few well-known rock critics like Jim DeRogatis, but mostly this is literary folk.

We didnt want this to be a wonky, "Robert Fripp created Frippertronics in 1979," facts-and-figures book. We didn't see the point of that, especially with a genre like Prog, which is so rooted in adolescence, and cherished memories of early drug experiences, arena shows and gatefold album analysis.  It seemed like a good idea to have non-music writers have a fresh go at it.  

I count two women among all the contributors, and suspect this is NOT the fault of the editors. Could it be that prog has traditionally been a guy thing, and as some of your essayists suggest, a pre-adolescent guy thing?

Totally young dude thing. One hundred percent! 

Do you have a favorite prog band or album? Anything involving Phil Collins?

Well, Phil Collins is an incredible drummer - and I do love all the Gabriel-era Genesis stuff. I guess King Crimson's Red is my favorite album - a noisy, dark and disturbing record. So unlike most Prog, in other words!