Isn't it ironic? - Yum-Yum music performers

Reason, May, 1998 by Brian Doherty

By the time I got my copy of the March Harper's, I had already heard, via e-mail lists or phone calls, complaints about the story's dubious premise from about a dozen Yum-Yum-conscious Harper's readers. The executive editor of Spin magazine, Craig Marks, was peeved enough to write in The Village Voice that he found Frank's account "bafflingly misguided." Marks suggested the real story was probably that "Holmes, too embarrassed to admit to his hard-ass buddy that...he actually liked girly-pop...fed Frank a steaming plate of cred-saving bullshit. And Frank bought it.... Now that's ironic."

Peter Margasak, a rock critic with the alternative weekly The Chicago Reader who has covered Holmes's career, says he "was just stunned" by the article. "No one in Chicago would believe for a second" that the Yum-Yum record was not a sincere and seriously intended shot at rock stardom.

Darcy Vaughn, Yum-Yum's viola player, acknowledges that it's difficult to do some of the things pop stardom involves, such as getting dolled up and posing for promo shots, without an inner chuckle. Still, she insists that Holmes never behaved with anything less than utter sincerity about the music he was making. In the studio, Vaughn says, he would solemnly relate how Certain lyrics came to him in a dream after a breakup with a beloved. The album consisted of sweet, open-hearted, string-laden love songs, and Vaughn recalls that Holmes always professed a genuine affection for that kind of pop - "especially with prospective girlfriends."

In his Voice piece, Marks called Holmes one of "the schmooziest musician[s] I have ever encountered." Margasak, the Chicago Reader critic, knew him as someone who went around town bragging about what a huge rock star this Yum-Yum record would make him. The consensus of those who know Holmes is that he badly wanted to make it big and that the Yum-Yum record was a sincere attempt at doing so.

It appeared to most of these people that Holmes and/or Frank had in effect pulled something over on Harper's. Margasak says Frank discussed interviewing him for the story but never followed through. Vaughn remembers talking with Frank when he accompanied the band for three days of touring but says she had no idea that irony would be a central theme of the story.

I was fascinated by the notion of a publication like Harper's, one of America's leading intellectual magazines, running an almost entirely single-sourced story by a childhood pal of the subject that struck almost every knowledgeable reader as screwy, if not flat-out wrong. In response to the criticism, Harper's Senior Editor Ben Metcalf denies that the story said what I, Marks, and others thought it said. Frank's point, he says, was not that Holmes didn't like Yum-Yum's kind of music but that any intelligent person must have a relationship with popular culture that is multi-leveled: Someone who collects Elvis kitsch might not really like Elvis; but obviously, on some level, he feels an attraction. This oh-so-sophisticated take is what made an otherwise unremarkable story about a failed rock band worthy of Harper's.