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BLOOMSBURY CIRCUS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, wc1b 3dp, uk BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY CIRCUS and the Bloomsbury Circus logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd This edition published 2018 Copyright © John Niven, 2005, 2018 Introduction © John Niven, 2018 Foreword © Barney Hoskyns, 2018 John Niven has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work Music from Big Pink is a work of semi-fiction. While real people and events are described, certain conversations and scenarios have been imagined by the author. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organisation acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data has been applied for isbn: hb: 978-1-5266-0445-3; ebook: 978-1-5266-0446-0 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon cr0 4yy
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I ntroduction I received the email at 2.17pm on Friday 10 December 2004. I still keep a screenshot of it on the desktop of my computer today, nearly a decade-and-a-half later. Its first sentence reads: ‘Dear John, I’m very pleased to be able to tell you that your proposal for a book in the series, on Music from Big Pink, has been approved by the Board here.’ It was from David Barker, the original editor at 33 1/3, a series of short books that devoted themselves to close ana lysis of classic albums. All of the titles so far (just sixteen of them at that point, David had only launched 33 1/3 the year before) had taken a journalistic approach, deconstructing the historical context, composition and recording of their chosen records. With one exception – Joe Pernice’s Meat is Murder. Joe had written a coming-of-age novella, a piece of fiction soundtracked by the Smiths’ second studio album. I thought the book was great, and Joe and I had history. We’d met in the late 1990s, in my former life as an A&R manager, when I’d signed his band the Pernice Brothers for the UK. I’d left full-time employment in late 2001 to try and become a writer. I was thirty-five years old and I had the feeling I was leaving it all very late. Ever since I’d realised I was never going to be a rock star (somewhere around the age of twenty-two), I’d wanted to be a writer. I’d made several attempts at a novel throughout my twenties, but back then I just didn’t have xi
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anything like the self-discipline you needed to shut the door for months on end. Also, at that point, I didn’t have anything to write about. As is often the case with novelists, some life would have to happen to me first. To paraphrase Nabokov, before you can build your ivory tower to write in, you have to take the unavoidable trouble of killing a few elephants... After university, in 1991, I’d drifted into the music industry, eventually landing a job at London Records as an A&R manager (artiste and repertoire, the people who sign new talent), in 1995, at the height of what would later be called the Britpop boom. The first few years were great – a maelstrom of travel, expense accounts, parties, gigs, booze and drugs. But, as I moved into my thirties, I grew weary of the cynicism and the viciousness of major label politics. I became increasingly aware that this hadn’t ever been what I envisaged doing with my life. I started to picture being forty and floundering around in a job I was no good at. And the hangovers were getting worse. I figured I had enough money to survive for a year or two while I wrote the great novel I had in me. (Such was the astonishing level of hubris afoot.) Anyway, I left the business towards the end of 2001, soon after the 9/11 attacks (which, bizarrely, I watched unfold on TV in a room in the Columbia hotel in Bayswater with the Pernice Brothers, who had just flown in from NYC that morning for a UK tour) and started trying to write about my experiences in the music industry. Originally titled Unrecouped (like the lead character’s soul, I thought grandly), my novel centred on a decent young man who was gradually corrupted by his career in A&R. And it was awful. My God, I cannot tell you how much this book stank. By early 2004 I’d been struggling with the thing on xii
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and off for over two years. I’d been trying and failing to get an agent. I’d given myself forty as the absolute-last-gasp age at which I had to be a published author. It was fast approaching. I was out of money and living on the largesse of my then girlfriend and her mother (Helen, Sheila, God bless you both) when I decided to take a trip to Ireland to see some Pernice Brothers shows and catch up with Joe for the first time in a while. I confess, I had an ulterior motive. I’d read Joe’s Meat is Murder and I had an idea for a book in the same series. While I was working in A&R I’d noticed the level of entrée and prestige drug dealers often enjoyed.You were first in the dressing room after the show. You were on the tour bus, in the limo, on the private jet. It looked like a great life when you were twenty-five. But I didn’t notice it panning out too well for any of these guys when they got older. Very few of them seemed to retire happy and rich to their country pile. They were far more likely to become broken drug addicts with the best of times long behind them and a lot of leftover life to kill. I thought this was a sad and interesting character trajectory. The problem I kept coming up against was one common to novels set in music: when you invent a rock group it’s very easy to miss the mark and, rather than getting The Commitments, you end up with the kind of band Tucker Jenkins might put together in Grange Hill. I thought an interesting way around this might be to take my idea for a story about a minor drug dealer and wrap it around a real group, at a real moment in their history... I’d been fascinated by The Band since the late 1980s, when my friend Bill Prince first played me their music. I’m sure xiii
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if you’re reading this then you probably know their story, but, in case you’ve just liked a couple of my other books and don’t have a clue, here’s the CliffsNotes version: five Canadian (apart from the drummer) musicians spent years backing Canadian Bo Diddley impersonator Ronnie Hawkins before they became Dylan’s band when he went electric in 1965. They moved to Woodstock in upstate New York to work with Dylan in late 1966, after his motorbike accident, and wound up writing their own material and becoming a major critical and commercial success in their own right. The received wisdom about the move to Woodstock was that it was a period of quiet reflection, of woodshedding. Of getting it together in the country.Well, as anyone who knows anything about how rock and roll works could tell you, just transplanting a group of hardened touring musicians in their early-to-mid-twenties from the city to the country would never stop them doing what they were used to doing. As I dug into the research (Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic, Barney Hoskyns’ Across the Great Divide and Levon Helm’s autobiography This Wheel’s on Fire were never off my desk during this period), I learned about all the drinking and the drugs and the partying and the car crashes and the pregnancies that went on in and around Woodstock while The Band were writing the songs that would form the basis of their 1968 debut album. It just seemed perfect to insert my protagonist Greg Keltner (failed musician, minor drug dealer) into this milieu. I pitched the idea to Joe in a bar in Kilkenny. Joe put me in touch with David Barker and in October 2004 I sent him a one-page synopsis and the first three chapters. After an agonising wait, that email arrived. There was only a tiny advance involved, but I felt like I’d shot the moon. If xiv
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I could get it right, I reasoned, then I might have something here. Maybe we’d get some good reviews and, just maybe, the thing I’d been trying to secure for the last three years – an agent. I wrote the book over the winter of 2004 and the first part of the following year. I’d always known that the two members of the band Greg would become closest to would be Rick Danko and, particularly, Richard Manuel. The fact that both had died tragically young (the news of Manuel’s suicide in 1986 is the opening event in the novella, the moment that sends Greg – now living back in Toronto, semi-destitute and strung out on heroin in his forties – spinning back into his past) certainly had a freeing effect when it came to imagining scenes and dialogue that might have been more difficult with people who were still alive. But, more than this, it felt natural and right that Rick and Richard would be the members of the group Greg would have gravitated towards. They partied hard. They were closer to his age. (Levon Helm didn’t arrive back in The Band’s fold until later in their Woodstock period, Garth Hudson was older, more circumspect. Robbie Robertson was married by this point and lived with his wife Dominique, a little removed from the action enjoyed by the guys living together at the pink house in West Saugerties that would eventually give its name to the album.) Dylan and his manager Albert Grossman became quixotic, intimidating figures in the background, as I imagined they were in life for many of the minor players on that scene. As I wrote it did cross my mind, frequently, would anyone care? Also, how would people more intimately familiar with the time and place react to the finished thing? (After all I was writing about events that took place when I xv
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was a toddler.) What would Barney Hoskyns think? Or Greil Marcus? Christ, what would Robbie Robertson think? In the end I had to fall back on the novelist’s last line of defence beyond research – instinct.
When it came to revising the first draft, I had an incredible amount of help from my childhood friend Andrew O’Hagan. Andy was already the successful, celebrated writer (The Missing, Our Fathers, Personality) he remains today, but he spent an inordinate amount of time and patience with me and the manuscript, an effort that seems even more amazing to me today as I’ve grown to appreciate the pressures on your time as you become published and enjoy a degree of success. I owe him a frankly unpayable debt. I delivered Music from Big Pink in May 2005. It was published that December (just five months before that fortieth birthday deadline) and things did happen. A positive review in the New York Times led to me finally getting an agent, the incomparable Clare Conville, who still represents me today. The following year the film rights were optioned by the producer Steven Butterworth whose brother Jez (Jerusalem, Mojo) wrote a fantastic screenplay, that (mystifyingly to me) remains unproduced. Barney Hoskyns and Greil Marcus both had kind things to say. Then, in October 2007, out of the blue, I got an email from Alexandra Robertson, Robbie’s daughter, saying how much she’d liked the book. Almost as a postscript she’d added ‘my father happened to read it as well. He also thought it was fantastic.’ More than joy – although there definitely was that – I felt relief, the relief that I hadn’t fucked it up too badly. xvi
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But, beyond this, I got the injection of confidence and perspective I needed to return to the novel I’d abandoned. I made the decision to start again, rewriting it not as a third person narrative about an ingénue making his way in the music business, but in the first person, from the perspective of someone who is in the belly of the beast and who loves it there. Over the second half of 2005 and into the late summer of 2006, over a dozen or so drafts, this finally became Kill Your Friends. Clare went off to market. And returned with the cow clumping unhappily behind her. We were turned down by seventeen publishers (‘no one wants to read about the music business’ seemed to be the consensus) before Jason Arthur at William Heinemann stepped up to the plate and off we went. Why have I told you all this? Well, writing a first novel is a high-wire act without a net. You are constantly plagued by one question – why would anyone care about this? The only thing that drives you forward is you. It crossed my mind that the genesis of my first book might be interesting for anyone out there trying to become a writer, anyone struggling with that first novel, with that voice whispering no one will care. As James M. Cain said, screw that voice. As I write this I am a third of the way into my tenth novel. But it only really happened because of what went before it, with the book you are holding now. It turned out that with this little novella written for a tiny advance I really did have something after all – just the beginning of an entire career. I will be forever grateful to it. John Niven, Buckinghamshire, Spring 2018
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1
“Don’t you raise the sails anymore…”
Toronto, 1986 I don’t know why I was crying like that. I hadn’t seen the guy in years and he hadn’t crossed my mind in months. But here I was, standing right in front of the Mini Mart, reading the newspaper and bawling my fuckin’ eyes out. The stuff I’d just bought—canned soup, Wonder Bread, turkey roll, processed cheese slices—spilled from the dropped brown bag and rolled over the sidewalk. Sitting down heavily on the curb (I’m in my forties and weigh nearly 300 pounds: I do everything heavily these days) I stared at the photo in the Star of a gaunt, bearded Richard. I looked at the headline again, hoping the words might have changed in the last few seconds. That “dead” would somehow have become “alive.” Or “partying.” But it hadn’t. It still said: “band” singer found dead in hotel room. Suicide, it said. He’d killed himself. Richard had done that. I kept right on crying. I’d had a shitty week and hadn’t seen this coming. I’d just had an argument in the grocery 1
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store—the guy who runs the place accused me of passing him a bum bill. (I hadn’t, although I had twice before, getting away with it the first time and around it the second.) Anyway, we wound up getting into it. I was on an economy drive until the welfare check arrived at the end of the week and hadn’t shot up since breakfast. It was now late afternoon and I was jerking, man: my sweat just froze in the early March breeze. After a while an old girl stopped and—this being Canada— asked if I was OK. I looked up and caught my reflection in her Foster Grants: the rotted teeth, the star-bursts of broken blood vessels across my yellowing cheeks. Neither of us needed to be seeing this. Bravely, like a child, I sucked the sobs down and nodded. She handed me a dollar and walked on. I wiped my face with a ragged shirtsleeve, gathered up the cheap food, and hurried home. The place was a living shit-house. It had taken my parents thirty years to own it and me just three to run it into the ground. I would have drawn the shades but they were already drawn. I did the thing with the spoon and the lighter, the brown powder and cotton ball, the old hypodermic. (Glass and steel, pre-war, my father’s.) The heavily treated guitar came in like an ancient tramp wheezing his last, then the woody toms, deeper than a crack on the floor of the Atlantic. I took my shirt off, found a halfway decent vein, tied off, put the needle in, and pressed the plunger. I turned the old stereo (also my father’s) way up, lay down on the rug, and let the intro go through me as I started to glow; the tempo of the song good and slow, slow as memory, the beat of my heart. Finally, here was Richard’s voice, trembling in agony; “We carried you in our arms, on Independence Day.” 2
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He sang the words the way he’d sung everything: as though the information contained in the lyrics would end him. I stared into the black rippling pool of the speaker, feeling every tremor and pulse like breath on my face, wondering if over the years the fibers of the cone itself had somehow become stained, impregnated with the thousands of songs, the millions of notes, that had shivered as they passed through and out into the air: electrical impulses becoming sound that became meaning and heartbreak. I turned away and looked up. It took me about a minute. There was a crack in the ceiling above me and, like magic, a tiny fleck of plaster broke loose and came floating down, like a sorry kind of snowflake, or maybe a leaf. Sixteen bars, a spoonful of Iranian heroin, and I was two decades back into myself, floating happily through another time, another place. A time when we were all making money, driving good cars through the mountains, getting high, getting laid. A time when we were all living, not just waiting. Life is all just waiting after a while.
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also by john niven Kill  Your Friends The Amateurs The Second Coming Cold Hands StraightWhite Male The Sunshine Cruise Company No Good Deed
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