Liz Phair Reviews Dean Wareham’s Memoir, Reaffirms “Blowjob Queen” Status
Dean Wareham’s Black Postcards is a very readable memoir that may ironically accrue a larger audience than his bands Galaxie 500 and Luna, whose careers the book chronicles. It’s both touching and amusing, but one thing I didn’t find it was melodramatic, possibly because I kept hearing the words spoken lackadaisically over Velvets-like guitar. Not so for Liz Phair, who hypes the rock’n’roll angle pretty strongly in her NYT book Freddie Mercury once said, “I want it all and I want it now.” This appetite might aptly be called the rock ‘n’ roll disease, and Dean Wareham seems to have caught it. Or is in recovery. Or is somewhere along the road…
He portrays himself as a surprisingly unsympathetic character. He visits a prostitute. He makes people angry. He follows girls home after the show. He snorts coke. No apologies are made because this is, after all, a rock ‘n’ roll autobiography. Late nights, a lot of drugs, a little infidelity (well, maybe not just a little, but I won’t give away the ending) — that’s par for the course, right?
…Even his writing style has a rhythm to it: passages move rapidly back and forth between incident and impression, creating a kind of (I’m not kidding) rock ‘n’ roll.
Phair fans know she’s always found Wareham pretty glamorous, though.
Frontman [NYT] Liz Phair – Stratford-on-Guy [Youtube] [Photo: WENN]
