Laura Levine

Maybe we here at Coral Press have synesthesia—the mental state that confuses senses, allowing you to hear colors, see music, etc.—because not only does Coral Press love music as music, we love music as fiction ... as story.
But we also love the music as art, and to that end we spent a fun afternoon last weekend in Phoenicia, N. Y. After downing the great pancakes at Sweet Sue’s on Main Street, we crossed the macadam and ended up at the Mystery Spot—truly one of upstate New York’s great finds.

The Mystery Spot is a gallimaufry of inherently luminous cast-offs owned and operated by Laura Levine, who does striking outsider art–like paintings of early rock figures and venerable country artists. These paintings have been published, along with informative words from Holly George-Warren, in two terrific books: Shake, Rattle & Roll and Honky-Tonk Heroes and Hillbilly Angels.

Both books are highly recommended—Laura’s paintings capture, in their forceful colors, deep-rooted innocence, and devil-may-care whimsy, much of the essential mystery that makes early rock and country music so powerful; and if you hie yourself to the Mystery Spot, Laura will autograph each book personally for you.

We recommend you check out Laura Levine's website and support not simply musical fiction but also musical art.

Bob Dylan's Modern Times

Sorry for not posting anything lately. We’ve been gearing up to put out a new Coral Press novel, Meet the Annas by Robert Dunn, the story of a ’60s girl group, as well as a novel about a mid-’70s cover band on the cusp of the Punk Era called Getting in Tune, by Roger Trott. (More info and publication dates on both books soon.)

We also haven’t come upon any new musical novels lately, though we did recently read and love Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and also Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.

But what I’d like to write about here is the new Dylan album, Modern Times. The central idea to Coral Press is that novels can be written about music, but also that enduring literature can take the form of great music, and perhaps no one exemplifies that better than Bob Dylan. (In our less restrained moments we’ve been known to call Dylan our own Shakespeare—or at least our own Lord Byron.)

And we’re crazy about Modern Times; think it’s the Bobster’s best record since Blood on the Tracks. After the triumph of Chronicles—far and away the best book any rock figure has written or ever will write as an autobiography—we’re inclined to trust Dylan on all matters, and so even when a line or conceit on Modern Times might appear slapdash, we’re happy to look for connection; and connections abound. The whole record seems, especially during a 4 a.m. insomnia-drenched headphone listening to the album, to connect in every possible way: not only from song to song, line to line, but also as far back in the past as possible, and yet to the daily newspapers or newsblogs that riddle our consciousnesses.

The line that we come back to is: “I wanna be with you in paradise /And it seems so unfair / I can't go to paradise no more / I killed a man back there” with its wit, surprise, hint of the Old Testament yet and touchstone to contemporary religious extremism. Oh, and the line about playing in a cowboy band always brings a chuckle. And ... if the whole album is no more than a shout-out to Alicia Keyes, and all that that implies -- well, that’s kinda great, too.

But the reason we’re talking about Modern Times here is that it’s a piece of music that does what great literature does: Makes your head explode. You come away from a listen to the record as you leave a good book, full of rich ideas you almost can make sense of, a feeling of world-shaking meaning almost grasped, a plethora of characters with their quirky charms, and overall, the vivid delights of being guided by the hand of a true visionary artist.

Oh, and not often commented on: The record is beautifully produced (bravo, Jack Frost, whoever you are); lusciously played; and masterfully sung. There’s as much meaning and richness in Dylan’s voice and phrasing as in Sinatra at his wisest and most experienced. Dylan hardly needs us to say that he's a genius; but of course he is, and we feel lucky to be alive when he is.

Leonard Cohen's vision meshes with CP

Just saw a screening of the new movie devoted to Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (opening on June 21). The flick is in the main a concert of Cohen songs done by (mostly) extended members of the McGarrigle/Wainwright family -- songs done very nicely, for the most part -- along with teasing rather than revealing interviews with Mr. Cohen and glimpses of old photos and home movies of him.

What’s great about the film is that it’s an hour and a half revel in the music of Leonard Cohen a true testament to his genius. (Personally, I’d count Suzanne and Hallelujah as the most transporting of his tunes played; I kind of missed Bird on a Wire, though -- thought that final line, “I have tried in my way to be free,” would have been the perfect ending.

What intrigues Coral Press about Cohen and his film is how he has tried in his own way some of what we’re here to do: To blend written literature with music and song to create a new literature. Of course, Cohen did it differently from us. He wrote a novel first (Beautiful Losers), then poetry, and then he set his poem/lyrics to song. I remember when I bought his first LP when it first came out that it seemed odd to have a serious poet trifle with pop music (we were still getting around the notion that a song such as Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone could appear in the top 10); now, of course, it seems that Cohen’s songs will endure and win fans far longer than many of his contemporary poets.

We’ve often said that the purpose of Coral Press is to hit a unique nexus of music and literature, and though we publish novels about music, we wouldn’t exist if writers such as Dylan, Cohen, Paul Simon, etc. hadn’t shown us that true literature could turn up in the structure of a Top 40 song. For me, it’s a kind of miracle that crappy rock ’n’ roll has enduring power; and it’s a joy that, as we hurtle into our new century, more and more writers are writing on the ways rock ’n’ roll, both mindless and bountifully mindful, can be great art. And so we here at Coral Press hope to make it all take another turn: To find stories in music that are timeless and great, and make literature out of them.

A line might run Serious Young Novelist writes novel (Cohen; Richard Farina); Serious Young Novelist explores similar or greater themes in song; songs turn out to bear greater brilliance, in turn inspiring rock songs that have the power of literature; and then, going full circle, inspiring novels that hope to capture great music and great stories in prose. Or something like that.

I’d love to read further thoughts on how song and literature have come/can come together. Please post here.

The Commitments and the art of musical fiction

One of the reasons our blog, Rave On!, is here is to talk about musical fiction—help define what it is and push other musical novels to readers who will appreciate them.

I was intrigued by the comment of John Niven (author of Music from Big Pink; see previous post): "Grab a pencil and draw up a list of novels featuring an invented rock group that have really worked. Done? You should have a piece of paper with Roddy Doyle's The Commitments written on it." See comments here.

Well, we here at Coral Press disagree; and clearly, we believe, Niven hasn't read any of our books (and we hope that'll change).

But what got me going was that I hadn't read The Commitments yet, though I'd seen and enjoyed the fine Alan Parker movie when it came out in 1991. So I finally picked up a copy of the novel, the first American edition from Vintage Contemporaries. (Interestingly, the first edition of The Commitments was self-published in Dublin in 1987—then as now, the book industry doesn't get musical fiction, at least until they have to. And a quick visit to ABE shows that those first, self-printed editions now go for well over a thousand dollars each.)

What an interesting novel. His style, somewhat telegraphic, reminds me of a great musical fiction short story, Eudora Welty's "Powerhouse," in which the rhythm of the prose captures much of the rhythm of the music; and of course The Commitments is great as it captures (helps invent?) Northern Soul—that fascination with soul music that's brought countless unremarked '60s soul 45s to the attention of ... well, at least obsessed collectors. (Missed the recent Northern Soul convention at a hotel in New Jersey, but I'm sure a fine time was had by all.)

So how does The Commitments stack up as musical fiction? And what does it tell us about the genre? One obvious thing of great interest was Doyle's type choices: the use of bold type spilling down the page to get the feel of the music across. I'm not sure it always worked; also not sure that, since he was dealing with known soul songs, that printing the lyrics more simply might not have let the songs themselves play in our heads.

But that's one of the dilemmas of musical fiction: getting the music, no more than words on a page, to play in the reader's own head. With our Coral Press books this is especially a problem, since we're dealing with invented songs that the reader has never before heard. But we believe that if the context of the song's playing or performance, as well as the way the song's received, are vivid enough, the music will come through.

The Commitments is certainly a simple enough story: a group of somewhat musicians comes together in Dublin, plays a few shows, then falls apart. Anything more narratively would probably be overkill. Another thing the book does so well is that we often only catch what's really going on through the flicker of our eyes; it's in a word choice, an aside, a beat of silence that the book reveals its true meanings and secrets. Admirable restraint on Doyle's part.

But then the scope of The Commitments remains somewhat restrained; and the book itself, though a brilliant little tale, never quite blows up into something larger. A neat trick, if you will, rather than a wide-open, blossoming novel.

Talking about this book also brings up a good occasion to mention the Bomp Bookshelf's compilation of musical novels. The list was personally kept up by Bomp Records founder Greg Shaw (a true friend of Coral Press), and unfortunately it's been frozen after his untimely death in 2005. Nonetheless, a reader searching for a good list of Rock 'n' Roll fiction should start there. Another list, this one using a larger definition of musical fiction, is kept by John R. Gibbs here.

We hope you'll let us know some of you favorite musical novels. Feel free to post comments here or email us at editor@coralpress.com.

First Blog Post

I’ve set up this Coral Press blog because as much as I love to listen to music, I also love to read about it. I plop down the $8.99 each month for the new Mojo magazine, grab new books on the blues or the Beatles when they’re released, take pride in knowing the stories behind the music I listen to.

I also love to write about music, and because I’ve always written fiction, I’ve found the writing I do about music is in made-up stories and novels.

Thus came Coral Press, not only to get musical novels into print but also to provide a forum for the whole idea of musical fiction -- and now we’re starting this blog to give our readers a place to move discussion, note new musical fictions, and further the whole notion that you can tell a story as good and powerful as real life in a novel.

What specifically made me set this blog up was reading Music from Big Pink, a musical novel by John Niven that’s part of the excellent Continuum Press 33 1/3 series of book on single LPs. As you probably know, the books in the 33 1/3 are examinations of one album, creatively written, for sure, but for the most part a long essay about how the record was made and the effects on everyone it has had.

But with Music from Big Pink, Niven wrote a fiction—a first person narration by a young drug dealer hanging around Woodstock as the Band was putting together its first, great LP. There can—and should—be debate as to how good a novel Music from Big Pink is (The New York Times Book Review quite liked it), but that it succeeds in colorfully and powerfully evoking the world around The Band circa 1967, the tensions in the group, and the both willful and haphazard creation of a masterwork can’t be denied. The Music from Big Pink story is well told through an invented character and his story.

More and more there are musical fictions out there, and more and more they’re getting attention and appropriate regard. We’ll talk more here about musical fictions as they appear; we’ll also feel comfortable discussing movies and TV that are also musical fictions (a flick such as Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous is a perfect example of how telling a good musical story in a made-up way can lead to powerful art; the somewhat lamented recent TV show Love Monkey shows another way storytelling can get into the music biz, if not the music itself).

One of our stated goals with starting Coral Press is to turn musical fiction into an accepted genre. As our joke goes, we’re after the reader who says, “Boy, I’ve read those mysteries and romance novels, and by now they’re all the same. What I really need is a good new Musical Novel!”

These readers are out there. All you need is a love of music and a love of reading about it and a love of hearing a good story with strong characters and powerful lots and ... well, all that makes any novel great.

And that’s what we here at Coral Press, especially here in our new blog, hope to push: Books that tell musical stories in a musical way, that let you capture all the joy and sadness—and more—of the music itself as you read.