The Guardian recently reported that Morrissey’s Autobiography, tadalafil released in October in the UK and just reported to have found a US publisher, price reached number one in the UK book charts in its first week of being on sale, becoming one of the fastest selling memoirs in official book sales record history. The last musician to have a super successful memoir was Keith Richards with his memoir Life, one of the best-selling rock memoirs to date, which Morrissey’s first week sales have also beat by more than 6,000 copies.
Morrissey and Keith Richards follow in a long line of musicians who’ve released memoirs and autobiographies, from Patti Smith’s award-winning Just Kids to Cherie Currie’s Neon Angel to I, Shithead by DOA’s Joey (Shithead) Keithley to Richard Hell’s I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp to Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs by Johnny (Rotten) Lydon to Alice Bags’s Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, A Chicana Punk Story to the also-very-recently-released Americana: The Kinks, the Riff, the Road: The Story by Ray Davies. Even Courtney Love will release a memoir in early 2014. The list runs on and on and on.
But… As fans of the music, why should we care? Why do we care? Will reading the life stories of these musicians add anything to our experience of their music? These are folks whose lyrics we might like, but when do they become writers of books? (Patti Smith aside, I suppose, who’s always been a damn fine poet.) Why are Morrissey’s books flying off the shelves in England? Why have I and some buddies of mine already pre-ordered the US release?
Why do I care?
Earlier this week, I asked Mark Phinney, writer and director of Fat The Film and self-described gigantic Morrissey fan, if he’d pre-ordered his copy of Autobiography, half-knowing his answer already. “I would totally still have tried and get the book from the UK [if not available in the US],” he said. “I would have tried to get it on Mars!”
I wanted to know why he wanted the book. As a fan, why? What are you looking for that you haven’t already found in the music? He told me he didn’t think the book would change his perspective about The Smiths or Morrissey, that that wasn’t what he was looking for from the memoir. “I am excited to see what one of my major artistic heroes has to offer me,” he said. “The man himself, who he is, why he does what he does… It’ll feel like an open conversation from him to the reader.”
Previous lead guitar player for Indianapolis-based Neon Love Life and really big Morrissey buff (as evidenced by a nice “Viva Hate” tattoo scripted between her shoulder blades) Ashley Plummer Gilchrist hoped for “insight” from Autobiography when I asked her about the book, too. As both a fan and a musician in her own right, she wanted to know “how he chooses to write and arrange lyrics… When someone is an amazing lyricist, such as Morrissey, I always want to get inside their head and be like, ‘How in the hell does this work so well?’”
The both of them have read other memoirs by other musicians, too. It seems as if the appeal in a memoir written by a rock star is to admire their work in a deeper way.
And for me, I’m in the same boat as Phinney and Gilchrist – maybe in paging through this physical piece of information from an “artistic hero” I can feel closer to what they meant when they penned those lyrics and wrote that song. I am a sucker for books, lose hours and days inside them, just like when I hear those songs that catch me in the chest. I finger through the pages, doggy-ear my favorite parts, have my A-Ha moments as I underline everything witty. There’s something tactile and immediate about the memoir, too, as if this is the inside scoop – the real life answers to your questions lie within its covers. This is the truth. This is how it happened.
In an interview with Salon, literary critic Daniel Mendelsohn described memoir’s appeal, saying, “People want real life to be amazing… The memoir’s traction is: Can you believe that someone’s actual experience is so much like a story?” Truthfully, we already know musicians and bands have good stories we’ll want to read.
Boring people don’t make good music. Interesting people do.
And when these stories are beautifully shaped, when a musician doubles as a writer of songs and a writer of words, when the story grabs the reader by the wrists like the music can, too, the duality can be altering. You can hear something important happening when you listen to Television – but in reading Richard Hell’s story, you feel him whispering in your ear.
That’s why I care about these books. I love the music without a doubt, but I relish the whispers more.