Musicians as Authors: the Medium and the Message - Spook Magazine August 2015

When musicians spread their literary wings to explore other mediums of story telling, sometimes it’s a tangible version of their music, and sometimes it’s just the ramblings of a lunatic, says Alexandra English.

There are so many times when I can’t decide whether to read a book or listen to music, so I do both, effectively ruining each. Kind of like the time I ate pizza in the shower because I couldn’t decide which was more necessary.

Nick Cave’s novel And the Ass Saw the Angel solved my book-or-music quandary –  a novel written by a musician is like music to the eyes. Written in Berlin in 1989, it is the ultimate novel-music fusion, embodying a lot of the same themes as the Bad Seeds’ work at the time: murder, religion, filth and madness with a Southern Gothic twist. Cave even ended up creating a soundtrack to the novel just to enhance the experience for readers.

Cave is a versatile storyteller in an enviable number of ways. His story remains the same whether he has chosen to tell it through music or literature, yet you never find yourself swearing that you’ve heard it somewhere before. Through his writing, he creates dark mythological worlds, watched over by a vengeful God, and where the minds of small-town folk have been warped by Christian fanaticism.

Reading And the Ass Saw the Angel is like hopping into the front seat of Cave’s beat-up pick-up truck. He promised to take you somewhere electrifying, only to kick you out in the depths of a valley, leaving nothing but a trail of dust and laughter in his wake. You find yourself alone in the nightmarish town of Ukulore. All around you there are religious zealots spreading incest and ignorance. It’s here that Euchrid Eucrow lives: a lone twin, deranged, deformed and mute.

Cave has been bashing around with the same themes across a variety of mediums for decades. And the Ass Saw the Angel is like the junkie brother to the Bad Seed’s 1985 album, The Firstborn is Dead.

The album tells the story of Elvis Presley and his stillborn identical twin, Jesse (what a world). In the first song, ‘Tupelo’, Cave sings:  “A child is born on his brother’s heels, Come Sunday morn the first-born dead.” His novel tells a similar story, but one that is high on crack and hyperbole. The first chapter details the birth of twin brothers; one lays dead and unnoticed in a box while the other, Euchid, telepathically begs him to return.

Cave offers an effective, yet temporary, solution for those times when you can’t decide which medium of story telling to indulge in. The problem is that you can’t read a novel on repeat like you can listen to an album.

Like Cave, Patti Smith has embraced the transcendental nature of storytelling and carried similar messages across a variety of mediums. Smith crafts intimate tributes to departed loved ones and saints that are always metaphoric and dreamy regardless of her approach. Her most frequent muse is her lifelong friend and former lover Robert Mapplethorpe whose story she tells in her 1996 book The Coral Sea.

It is the story of an ill-fated man on a journey across the ocean to see the Southern Cross, and as he is travelling south, he is reflecting on his life and the illness that is consuming him. The Coral Sea is a collection of prose and poetry that serves as homage to Mapplethorpe. Set against his photography, the story is rich in detail, and illuminates Smith’s deep sadness at losing her friend, while also creating a compelling body of work about artistry and self-discovery, and in 2008, Smith teamed up with Kevin Shields to create an accompanying record. 

It’s no secret that Mapplethorpe’s journey was at the forefront of her mind in the ‘90s. The lyrics to her song ‘Beneath the Southern Cross’ are devastating: “Oh, to cry, not any cry, so mournful that the dove just laughs…Where gods get lost beneath the Southern Cross.”

In the live recording of ‘Memorial Song’ in 1993, she tells the audience that the song was written for “my friend, Robert.” She goes on to sing, a cappella and heartbreakingly, “Little emerald soul, must we say goodbye…as you light afar, It is true I heard, God is where you are.”

When you think about musicians and how their messages are presented across different mediums, you experience a kind of (unrequited) intimacy with them. You have in front of you a collection of their words; similar to the ethereal music that surrounds you, yet tangible.

This is the kind of intimacy I’ve always wanted to have with a young Leonard Cohen and I thought his 1966 novel Beautiful Losers would have offered it. Who knows whether it’s because Cohen was an author before he became a musician, or because without the finite structure of a song Cohen is wont to ramble like a lunatic, but this book is in complete contrast to his song writing.

This is the story of an unnamed folklorist who is trying to make sense of his shattered life after his wife’s suicide and his male lover’s descent into madness and eventual death. You experience his psycho-sexual hell as he does: you analyse his love triangle, you wonder what he could have done differently to save all three of them, and you find salvation in a long-dead 17th-century Mohawk saint called Catherine.

Cohen the Author is profane, delusional, hilarious and completely polarised from Cohen the Musician who is rhythmic, lyrical and majestic. Through literature, Cohen explores themes of history, sex, politics and religion, in turn creating an epic and intricate piece of fiction that will make you feel like you’ve never read a book before.

In saying that, Cohen’s storytelling, whether through literature or music, is something to be admired. Who would have thought that the person who wrote the lyrics, “I lean from my window sill in this old hotel I chose, yes one hand on my suicide, one hand on the rose,” was the same person who wrote, “I am an old man with one hand on a letter and one hand up a juicy cunt, and I understand nothing.”

For Cave and Smith, the medium is a chameleon that adapts to a message. For Cohen, the message is a chameleon that adapts to a medium, appearing different within each one and completely unrecognisable from the one that came before.

Beautiful Losers turned out to be Cohen’s last novel because the struggle was far too real. He had been relying on the editorial assistance of amphetamines and fasting while also suffering from sunstroke. He became hallucinatory and finally collapsed 10 days after the novel’s completion, weighing 116 pounds lighter than he had the Tuesday before. Later that same year Cohen was inspired by 23-year-old Bob Dylan and decided to give up writing novels for a career in music. Thank god for that.

It was at this time that Dylan had just finished writing his first book, Tarantula. The kaleidoscopic hodgepodge of nonsensical ramblings, short stories and letters left readers baffled and scratching their heads, and nearly 50 years later no one is any closer to understanding what the hell is going on there.

In 2003, Spin wrote an article called ‘Top Five Unintelligible Sentences from Books Written by Rock Stars.’ Dylan came in first place with this line from Tarantula: “Now’s not the time to get silly, so wear your big boots and jump on the garbage clowns.”

Tarantula shares similarities with Cohen’s novel, which is probably more representative of the age in which it was written than the influences the authors had on one another. Cohen and Dylan both write songs that are visionary and ambiguous, and they both write novels that, if taken seriously will warp your mind, but if taken lightly are hilarious.

History and modern culture have played significant roles in Dylan’s work, and these are the themes that shape both his songwriting and literature. On any given page in Tarantula’s you’ll see a reference to figures like Grace Kelly, Hitchcock, Teddy Kennedy, and Blue Beard the pirate. His protest songs like ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ show Dylan reacting to specific people and events from a turbulent period.

While the writing style seems to be in direct conflict with his song writing, it is actually in perfect harmony with his contradictory persona. Dylan is notorious for saying one thing in one interview and saying the seemingly opposite in another, like when he referred to the poetry of TS Eliot as “soft-boiled egg shit,” then later that same year changed his mind: “I liked T.S. Eliot. He was worth reading.”

The absolute nonsense is the best thing about this book, even though you’ll probably be left with little to remember from the experience of reading page after page. The rhythm, the tone and the juxtaposition of words prove that Dylan is an excellent wordsmith regardless of the medium, the message, or how much sense he’s making.

But does it matter anyway? I’m still going to try to read Ulysses with the new Tame Impala record on repeat and hope that something comes of it.

This story originally appeared in Spook Magazine in August, 2015.

Main image: Patti Smith in Paris, 1969, by Robert Mapplethorpe.