A new rock and roll novel (in the tradition of In The Van on Comeback Road) will be coming this fall, exclusive to Ultimate-Guitar.com. More information as we get closer to the date. And usually more information at nolanwhyte.com (but not always).
Baby Boy Alex was born yesterday afternoon, and here I am at home having beers alone for the last time, for soon this will be a home for a young child, and it's just not cool blowing beer breath in the face of a young child. Let him hit the bottle at his own speed, and let his father not drive him to it, am I right?
Anyway (and this is the first time I've ever written a "this is what I did today" type of sharing-myself blog) today I had some time to fill at the hospital while Mina (my wife, dumbass) and the baby slept, so while I was mailing off the Live Birth forms to the government, I picked up a newspaper and Sam Kashner's memoir When I Was Cool, which is about studying with the Beats at Boulder, Colorado. Something to fill the time when the Alex is not in my arms.
Kashner talks about hanging with the Beats. He talks about hanging with Bill Burroughs, who is one of my biggest fixes, book-wise. Generally, I had two big book-heroes. The first was Jack London, who I read big-time in high school and in university. I wrote a paper on his work regarding Nietzsche and Marx at the Jack London Symposium in Santa Rosa, CA in 2000.
The second big book-hero I had was William S. Burroughs. I caught on to him through a Ministry single (he read the last few pages of his book Exterminator! on the b-side of Ministry's "Just One Fix" single). From there I read Junky, and from there I was on a whole new trip.
Let me say that I have nothing in common with Burroughs. He was a heroin-addicated homosexual gun-freak. That said, I don't think anyone has influenced my writing as much, including Jack London. As a writer, I can look at Jack London as my high school. Burroughs was my university.
Tonight, having beers alone in my apartment while my wife and son stay at the hospital, I was reading Kashner's book. He talks about Burroughs sitting in the dark, getting drunk and talking about wishing he led a life like Jack London's. It was a special moment, realizing that I share an idol with another one of my idols; one of my idols wished he lived a life like another one of my idols.
I wonder who my son will choose for his idols. I don't know. Like me, he'll come upon them on his own. Maybe I will give him hints and suggestions. London and Burroughs. Weird. One started fast and burned out young, the other started slow and peaked late. One a drunk, the other a junkie.
What place does this have on a guitar website? None, I guess. Too bad. You want talk about music? Okay, here: R.I.P. The Rolling Stones as a touring entity. The magazine MOJO just made a list of the 50 all-time best Stones tracks. My picks? In no particular order, I say Jig-Saw Puzzle, Stray Cat Blues, Can't You Hear Me Knocking, and Bitch. Yeah, four cuts off two albums. They are the best two. Everyone points to Let it Bleed and Exile on Main Street, but they are numbers 3 and 4 after Sticky Fingers and Beggar's Banquet, which are tied for number 1.
Oh my god, Alex is going to hear a lot of those four albums as he grows up.
My son. Yeah. Raise him on rock.
Here's something from that issue of MOJO, spoken by Mr. Richards:
I got into Sloan recently. If you don't know them, Sloan is a Canadian rock band out of Halifax who got big in the mid to late ninties, and still have a solid following. I never paid much attention to them in the ninties though, because in the video for the song "Everything You've Done Wrong," we all thought that they were just knocking off The Beatles. Maybe they were, but is it really fair to dislike a band for having a member who looks a bit like John Lennon? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Who cares?
Anyway, I was picking up a copy of The Stooges album Fun House a few weeks ago. It was on the two CDs for $10 rack, but I couldn't find another disc and I eventually just grabbed this Sloan disc Smeared. The Stooges disc was as awesome as I knew it should be, but I was really surprised by Smeared, especially the fantastic opening track "Underwhelmed." It's been on heavy rotation on the music box since.
A few weeks later I took a poke through my local record shop and found a Sloan double live album for like, $15. Yeah, okay, on the strength of "Underwhelmed," consider it sold.
Now that night I'm listening to it for the first time and I get to the track "Money City Maniacs," which I believe was their biggest hit. The live performance they give, heavy on audience participation in the small venue where the place was recorded, including urging the crowd to urge on the drummer to a huge drum solo, well, it just got to me: I was sitting at my desk with earphones in with this huge open-mouthed smile on my face just going, "Yeah, aw damn that's cool! Yeah!"
So the next day I'm going to work and I'm thinking, you know, I don't really have a rock and roll friend to tell about this. I've got work friends, but since I've come to this city, I haven't really made any rock and roll friends that I can bring over to my house and play a disc for and say, "Isn't this cool? Listen to this part," like I did in years gone by. I remember sitting at a house party once listening to The Misfits Evillive album, saying to a buddy, "Okay listen, Danzig is going to threaten to kill this guy in a second, it's fucking cool."
I miss stuff like that. Damn, no rock and roll friends. Alas. Only the blog, which is a weak substitute. No offence.
I see that the first part of Guitargasm is up and people are taking notice. That's good. Early responses are positive and encouraging. A few people seemed unimpressed with the choice of third person narration, but I chose that to avoid having this one sound too much like Comeback Road. Terry's narrative voice was very easy and comfortable to write, and I would worry about accidently slipping back into it. There will be other reasons, as you'll see in the future.
I was very curious to see one guy (and I presume it was a guy) comment that the first installment sounded like it was written by a female. Dude, I have no idea what that means. Thanks for reading, anyway.
So I'll have to get cracking on the second installment. There's been no time for it this week as I was working on an interview I did for UG with a little band from Texas called MINISTRY. That's right, my all-time favorite band. Unfortunately Al Jourgensen was unavailable, but I was able to talk with new guitarist Sin Quirin, and he was super-friendly. Definitely a special thing for me.
That interview will be up on UG sometime in the near future, not sure when. And chapter two of Guitargasm will be coming up, as well as chapter six of Our Man Evans on my own site.
And in between that stuff I'll have to find the time to work forty hours a week and help my wife with the new baby.
Fun times. I prefer this over boredom. Let chaos rule supreme!
So I dropped by the site tonight and saw that my interview with Ministry's guitarist Sin had been posted. I clicked, and heading the interview was the note that the interview was taken a few weeks before the untimely death of Ministry's bassist Paul Raven two days ago. HEAVY, man. TOO HEAVY.
I didn't know a whole lot about Raven until two months ago. U-G told me I would be interviewing either Sin or Raven (I was hoping for frontman Al, but I'll take what I can get). Not knowing much about them sent me off on a research binge and I read up on both dudes, making lists of questions for each. I saw quite a bit of our man Raven on the ol' YouTube, seeing vids of him performing live with Prong, Killing Joke, and on the last tour with Ministry.
I can say this: he played the rock and he was friends with all the right people. Speaking with Sin was great, but I wish I had the chance to talk with Raven as well.
I managed to get a bit of writing done over the weekend, as those of you who have dropped by my site will have noticed. Part Seven of Our Man Evans is up, and who knows, part eight might even appear before the next Guitargasm! chapter arrives on U-G.
Speaking of Guitargasm!, I think it's fair to say enough of the introductory material is out of the way now, and we can move on to some more actiony stuff. Part four will probably surface in the middle of next week, so if you're the impatient type, I suggest renting a lot of movies to keep yourself busy. Or maybe, I don't know, practice your guitar a little bit.
I think it's only fair to warn you people now that I am now thirty years old. This doesn't bother me, and I hope it doesn't bother you. It shouldn't, because despite my long grey beard and shiny new wheelchair, I am still really, really immature. How can you tell? Well, read anything that I write and that should be evidence enough. Or failing that, you can seek evidence that in my heart I am still ten years old in the fact that for my 30th, I bought myself a Transformers 2008 calender. To quote Richard Starky, "I hung it on me wall." And it's not that crap Michael Bay type of Transformers either, but the honest-truth '80s style Generation One. Go classic.
So to summarize, you should face the fact that you've wasted the last two minutes of your life reading this. Go play outside, or for goodness sake, practice your guitar.
It seems there is some anxiousness for me to crank out the new episode of Guitargasm (although probably not as much as I would like to imagine). I'll just give you a quick idea about timelines.
It takes about a week to write a chapter. I can do a new chapter three out of four weeks, meaning that every fourth chapter will have an extra delay. This makes it about three chapters per month. Not bad really.
So part four is actually done and in U-G's hands now. You'll probably see it in a day or two.
Although I am working on other writing projects simultaneously, these do not slow my work on 'gasm. I can only work on any one project for so many hours per week before needing a recharge. Brief breaks allow ideas to percolate. Do you want faster or better?
Anyway, thanks for not sending death threats like I got all the time when there were delays on Comeback Road. Who knows, maybe it's just too early for that. Maybe I haven't hooked you enough. I'll try harder, do better, I swear. Your death threats will soon be mine, this is my promise!
There have been some requests for me to release Comeback Road (formerly In The Van on Comeback Road) as a downloadable file. Well, you want it, you got it. The whole 292-page beast is available through NolanWhyte.com. Sadly I am charging for it (it was a bit of work to write, you know?), but as a tip of the hat to Radiohead, you can pick your price: $1, $2, or $5 Canadian. A word of warning: this is the final edited version, and differs slightly from the original series that was posted here on U-G.
Well, that's enough selling out for one day. I feel dirty.
Big thanks to everyone who's had kind words for Guitargasm! The story is being written for U-G, so there's no point in doing it if you people aren't enjoying it. That's why I'm happy to read both the compliments and the criticism (I can't fix it if I don't know what's broken). And while I am happy to listen to criticism, I can see there are some Comic Book Guys out there. Man, you should have seen the blog I wrote and then erased yesterday! It contained a couple references to my ass, I admit it.
I digress. New chapter next week. Turn off your computer and go practice your guitar.
I see U-G posted Guitargasm Part 4 again today instead of part 6. Probably just a typo on their part or something. Part 6 is ready to go. I won't tell you what happens. Just wait. Part 7? Yeah, it's coming too.
I occasionally get e-mails and private messages asking me questions about different aspects of rock and being a musician. It occured to me that the answers I was coming with were both pretty humorous and very time-consuming to write, so I've decided to share them in this blog.
If you any questions about rock or music or being a musician, or really about anything at all, private message them to me and I will answer them here. Put "Mail Bag" as your subject. Don't worry, I'll keep you anonymous.
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Nolan Whyte's blogs, last updated : July 17, 2008
