2009 Reading: Petal Pusher: A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story

[snurri]

Books 1-10.
11. Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares.
12. Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins by Roy Wilkins and Tom Mathews.
13. Women, Culture & Politics by Angela Y. Davis.
14. Everyone in Silico by Jim Munroe.
15. Daughters of the North (AKA The Carhullan Army) by Sarah Hall.

16. Petal Pusher: A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story by Laurie Lindeen. So I am the ideal audience for this book: a Midwesterner who has spent the bulk of his life in Madison and the Twin Cities, and spent a significant percentage of the '90s in dirty bars watching underappreciated bands play until my ears rang. Laurie Lindeen grew up in Madison and launched her music career right here in Minneapolis. Zuzu's Petals was a female rock trio that put out two albums but never broke big, partly because it was the Age of Grunge and they weren't grunge--their stuff was by turns jazzy, poppy, even harmonic. Lindeen chronicles other challenges the band had, from casual (at times malicious) sexism to slimy promoters to a label that pushed the band to follow up their first album before the band was really ready. Oh, and there's the matter of Lindeen's multiple sclerosis, diagnosed in her early twenties and always lurking. As a chronicle of bands on the road, it's a sort of expansion of the snapshot song "Range Life" by Pavement, only more reflective. Lindeen is brutally funny and brutally honest, and she's particularly tough on herself. And as a story of an artist who ends up wondering whether it's all actually worth it, I found it thoughtful and sobering.

Comments

[janradder.livejournal.com]

God, I hated this book, thoroughly. She's got the whole MS thing that you don't find out about until, what -- a hundred pages into it -- even though it's supposedly what's fueling her passion to form a band? And then she just kind of drops it only to bring it out and mention it in passing from time to time, but she never describes how the MS affects her life except to say that it does. Then there's the structure of the book, how it keeps jumping back into her past for no apparent reason (I mean, really, why does she keep going back to her childhood at those odd moments when the memory she's describing has nothing to do with what comes before or after -- they're just odd non-sequiturs). Some of the writing was fairly hackneyed, too -- that part with her "marrying" the stage made me want to crawl under a table out of embarrassment for her. I also got pretty sick of listening to her complain about how her band never got any breaks -- they were a mediocre band that had a couple of okay songs and, by her own admission, they seemed pretty ready and willing to cancel shows and tours because they were tired or bored -- not really the sort of thing a band struggling to make it should do.


I felt like there was a good book in there if she'd just stuck with the band on the road and cut out all the whining and "we-coulda-been-contendas" crap. But that's what the book was -- whining and complaining that they never caught a break. And I think the only reason it got published and pushed as much as it did was because she's Mrs. Paul Westerberg.

Sorry for the rant -- I was just really ticked off by that book.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

First off, not sure if you've seen Laurie's response to you, below.

I agree that there were some odd jumps that didn't always flow for me, and it did get fairly negative towards the end, but I felt like that reflected her state of mind at the time she was writing about. As for the rest I'm OK to agree to disagree--except that I think it's unwarranted to suggest that she got a book contract because of who she's married to.

[(Anonymous)]

No book ever gets published for just one reason, surely you know that. I didn't begin with "the MS thing" because I didn't want it to be a disease book; I wanted the reader to be in the life I was living first. And, of course, it's not for everyone. It's tough to have an artistic identity when living with an artistic genius, but I'll keep slogging along! Cheers!

[janradder.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if you'll be checking back for responses but I had to say that I'm sorry for the "Mrs. Paul Westerberg" comment. It was obnoxious and, as you pointed out, not true.