Days between stations: music writers are their own breed, a new novel takes you into the heart or their world

Interview, Sept, 2003 by Greil Marcus

"Music writing is an art of substitution," Jonathan Lethem wrote in his editor's introduction to Da Capo Best Music Writing 2002. "What we seek is the voice, and what's behind it. What we want is to be with ourselves, but not alone."

There's an undertow of melancholy in those lines, and it carries over into this month's The Fortress of Solitude (Doubleday), Lethem's first novel since Motherless Brooklyn, which won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. "Voices in memory you can't name, rich with unresolved yearning: a song you once leaned toward for an instant on the radio before finding it mawkish, embarrassing," says Dylan Ebdus, the primary focus and sometime narrator of The Fortress of Solitude--here, he's writing the liner notes for Bothered Blue Once More: The Barrett Rude Jr. and the Distinctions Story, a reissue collecting the work of a late '60s-early '70s soul group.

Dylan is in his thirties as he writes; there's no hint that when he was growing up on Dean Street in Brooklyn, his best friend was Barrett Rude Jr.'s only son, Mingus, or that Rude himself was the cocaine addict next door, the king of a vanished kingdom. Dylan was on Dean Street because it was his mother Rachel's dream to create a new nation on a single city block. She forced her son into a drama of racial harmony, placing him on the concrete as a white face in a black world. And it didn't work--not before Rachel abandoned her family, and not afterward. "I'd been pushed out like a blind finger, to probe a nonexistent space," Dylan says, "a white boy integrating public schools which were just then being abandoned, which were becoming only rehearsals for prison." Dylan escapes into college, writing, and a shriveling solitude; Mingus ends up a convict and a crack addict.

"Maybe the song knew something you didn't yet," Dylan's liner notes continue. There is no suggestion in the words from which a grown-up Dylan now makes his living that he is struggling to make sense of his own life or that he has ended up a music writer--practicing "an art of substitution," because songs make it possible for people "to be with ourselves, but not alone"--precisely because he has come to believe that life makes the kind of solitary community he wishes for impossible.

Dylan takes the part of a listener reaching for a song that the listener has already rejected. "By chance it goes unheard for fifteen years, until the day when your own heartbreak unexpectedly finds its due date. This happens the moment the song takes you by surprise, trickling from some car radio ... But the disc jockey flubs the call list, never names the singer ... So you forget the song again." No problem, he's saying. You forgot the song? You can get it back simply by plunking down $34.99 for this fine two-CD set of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Distinctions--or whatever it is he might be writing about next month. He's also saying you'll never get it back. "That's okay," he says--it doesn't matter, finally, "if you never follow the trail. In an uncertain world it's a reasonable certainty this forgotten song needs you even less than you need it."

"Liner Note," a section comprised of only 12 pages in the middle of this 469-page book, appears right after the shooting that will destroy Mingus' life and send Dylan fleeing from his--just after Mingus' desperate shout, "Go home, Dylan!" Those dozen pages are a gem: so lovingly detailed ("In May 1961 the Four Distinctions paid a fifty-dollar entrance fee for the privilege of winning a sing-off sponsored by Jerry Baltwood's notorious Tallhat label") and keenly argued ("What's remarkable isn't that '50s song structures were inadequate to those unfettered soul voices just then locating their force. What's remarkable is how '60s soul produced at blackrun companies like Motown, Vee-Jay, and Stax created an entire language based on the confinement of such voices in inadequate or mockinadequate vessels") that you can hardly believe that both Dylan and the group he's writing about are fiction.

That sense of a made-up story is even more powerfully swept away in the novel's last pages. Living out the story he sketched in his liner notes, Dylan drives away from the prison where he has visited Mingus, then from the place where he has followed his mother's trail as far as he will. He reaches for a cassette to play, but to learn what happens then--how everything the music writer reaches for in his liner notes collapses on him like a house one must read the book.

Greil Marcus is Interview's Music Writer at Large.