Tom Perrotta is the author of eleven works of fiction, including Election and Little Children, both of which were made into Oscar-nominated films, and The Leftovers and Mrs. Fletcher, which were adapted into acclaimed HBO series. His new novel is Ghost Town.

Touré is an author who has published six books, including I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon and Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now, a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book. He was a TV host at MSNBC, MTV, and BET, and a correspondent at CNN. He hosts the podcast Touré Show. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Nation, Vogue, and many other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children. Follow his Instagram @Toure.

Matthew Miele created and developed the idea for Lit Riffs Original ed. Edition in order to reinvent the musical experience through literature. While a literary agent with John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., he handpicked the hippest and most celebrated storytellers of our time to imaginatively compose stories inspired by songs.
Prior to his publishing career, Miele wrote and directed the feature film Everything’s Jake — due for release in fall 2004, starring Ernie Hudson, Graeme Malcolm, Debbie Allen, Robin Givens, and Lou Rawls — and was a sound designer/music composer for film and television.
Miele recently founded and is current host of the Manhattan Concert Club (MCC), a subscription-based, ten-concert series presenting intimate, acoustic performances by the world’s most renowned recording artists in a wide variety of Manhattan’s most unique and treasured settings. Miele hopes that every MCC Concert will reflect to true music enthusiasts what the inception of the “Lit Riff” and this groundbreaking collection ultimately will reflect as well — a renewed celebration of and appreciation for great music.

Neil Strauss is an award-winning Rolling Stone editor, New York Times columnist, and writer/cowriter of eight New York Times bestselling books including The Game and The Truth.

Lit Riffs Original ed. Edition

By Jonathan Lethem

MTV

Copyright ©2004 Jonathan Lethem
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0743470265

INTRODUCTION

neil strauss

There is a beautiful album from the ’60s called Odessey and Oracle. Recorded by the Zombies, it is one of the most meticulously arranged and stunningly executed albums of the rock era. It unfolds like a paper rose, each song twisted together by themes of memory, loss, love, and the changing of the seasons.

For years, I wondered what wondrous tale held all the songs together, what feat of conceptual derring-do lay behind the music. And then, one day, my chance to unravel the mysteries of the album came: I would be interviewing the Zombies for The New York Times. And so I asked the question: “What ties all these songs together?” The band’s answer: nothing. They are just songs, the members said, unrelated in any way.

I was stunned. I grappled with their answer for days afterward, until I came to a conclusion: They were wrong. Sure, they may have written and recorded the songs. But I had listened to them. I had the pictures in my head. They were mine now. And so, as I continued to listen to the songs, I wove them together into a fifty-page musical, a tale of murder and intrigue, heartbreak and betrayal. Zombies be damned.

There are some songwriters who don’t like to discuss the meanings of their lyrics or the intention behind them. They don’t want to interfere with the interpretations their fans have imposed on the music, they say. When I heard this answer in interviews, I used to think that it was a cop-out. But the beauty of music is that it is, as Marshall McLuhan would say, a hot medium. It occupies only the ears, leaving the imagination free to wander (unlike films or the Internet). The closest equivalent is literature, which occupies only the eyes. The intent may belong to the artist, but the significance is the property of the beholder.

Lit Riffs Original ed. Edition then are the synesthetic experience that occurs when the senses cross, when sound becomes text. The converse experience is far from a rarity: books have led to countless classic songs and albums. Some of the best work of David Bowie and Pink Floyd was inspired by George Orwell; Bruce Springsteen based a song on Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me; U2 brought Salman Rushdie to musical life with “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”; the Cure made Albert Camus a goth icon with “Killing a Stranger”; Metallica brought “One” into focus with Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. Cribbing from everything from the Bible to Yeats is a time-honored tradition among songwriters, as much a staple of the art as coffee and cigarettes.

Though there are exceptions (from Haruki Murakami to James Joyce), far fewer writers look to music as the jumping-off point for a story or novel. Yet the simple act of listening to most songs, even nonnarrative ones, triggers a narrative or imaginary video in the mind. For example, many can’t help but imagine a fist connecting with Britney Spears when she sings “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” even though that’s not even what the song’s about. It’s simply their personal interpretation (or perhaps, for some, it’s wish fulfillment).

Thus, twenty-four writers — from leading novelists to top music critics — were asked to riff on a piece of music. The authors included here were instructed only to choose a song, write a story inspired by it, and provide an explanation of their choice. They were free to choose whatever music they wanted — even if, as in the case of Darin Strauss’s Black Crowes-derived be-careful-what-you-wish-for tale, it wasn’t a song they necessarily loved. And they were free to interpret in any way they saw fit, even if, as in the case of Victor Lavalle’s story, a droning, lyric-less song by the White Stripes reminded him of Iceland, which made him think of ice cubes, leading to a haunting fable of death and decomposition that is far from simple White Stripes homage.

Some stories here, like the Lester Bangs piece that begins (and in fact inspired) this collection, and Neal Pollack’s dissection of alt-country posers, are music criticism disguised as narrative. Others, like Toure’s Biblical Bob Marley parable, take the lyrics literally and tell the story of a song in prose form. Many, like Elissa Shappell’s John Cale tale, riff on the metaphor, mood, and message of a song. Tom Perrotta mixes both the Tom Petty original and the Johnny Cash cover of “I Won’t Back Down” into a vignette capturing the strange, mixed-up feelings that arise in grade school when social and parental pressures collide.

In her wonderful tale of Vietnam vets and the misfit obsessed with them, Lisa Tucker takes not just a song — “Why Go” by Pearl Jam — but also the album, the genre, and the period of the music, and rolls it all into one memorable story. In the process, her tale manages to capture the reason why a sad song can actually be uplifting to listen to — because it lets listeners know that they are not alone in their feelings, that there is someone else in this world who understands them.

Elsewhere, Anthony DeCurtis places the music of the Beatles squarely in his story, as a backdrop to the narrative. Julianna Baggott flips the script on Bruce Springsteen, exploring the point of view of one of the female characters, Crazy Janie, who tramps through his songs. Jennifer Belle writes a prequel to Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” Tanker Dane finds his “Hallelujah” not just in the version by Jeff Buckley, but in his tragic death. And Ernesto Quiñonez finds his inspiration the furthest afield, basing his elegy to the heyday of tagging on the aura of the video for “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

While rock fans tend to be obsessed with lyrics, basing their stories on words, Hannah Tinti looked to the music — the modal interplay, the harmonic innovation, the high-flying solos — of a Miles Davis composition in order to structure a poignant moment intertwining a man falling with a man ascending.

Taken together, all these stories, interpretations, and points of view make up the greatest compilation album you can’t listen to. Of course, all of the above story analysis is my own, and has nothing to do with the actual intent of the author (just as their interpretations have nothing to do with the intent of the actual songwriter or performer). Perhaps I would have been better off writing a song based on these lit riffs and completing the circle.

Of course, due to greedy music publishers, the lyrics to each song could not be printed in their entirety, which is an advantage in many ways because you should be experiencing the original inspiration as music (instead of text) anyway. In fact, just download the songs and, if so inspired, come up with your own lit riff. And if you ever happen to run into a former member of the Zombies, remember to tell him that he was wrong. Those songs do mean something.

Copyright © neil strauss

Continues…
Excerpted from Lit Riffs Original ed. Edition by Jonathan Lethem Copyright ©2004 by Jonathan Lethem. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.