Tuesday, March 31, 2015

A Bulletin from a Past Life!

If you'd like to read some of my work on country music from the Old Days, you now have a great opportunity!


THE COUNTRY MUSIC READER, assembled and annotated by Travis D. Stimeling, himself an author of note and Assistant Professor of Music History at West Virginia University, and published by the Oxford University Press features a long excerpt from my first book, THE OUTLAWS — REVOLUTION IN COUNTRY MUSIC, which has been out of print for, like, forever (and, ironically, still a 5-star Amazon book, based on reviews from the 2 people who read it! LOL!).

THE COUNTRY MUSIC READER is a great book for anyone interested in country music. Stimeling did a super job of sorting through TON of material...heck, it exhausted me just reading the footnotes! Two other essays I would strongly refer you to in THE READER are Aaron Latham's classic piece from Esquire, back when Esquire wasn't something one scrapes off one's cowboy boot, "The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America's Search for True Grit"...yes, it's better than the movie...of course, what isn't?...and Alanna Nash's long essay on Emmylou Harris, one of my favorite artist. Emmylou was NEVER easy to interview, and Alanna, who wrote for me when I ran Country Music Magazine, did a splendid job.

I have to say their is a certain weirdness when reading your old work. It's not that it has been so long none of it is even remotely familiar — which is true — rather, I can't summon up the mindset I had when I wrote the words. I do remember sitting in my bedroom "office" under my loft bed in my NYC Greenwich Village walk-up late at night, frantically sprinting toward the end of the 6-week deadline. I bought what I recall as a Remington knock-off of an IBM Selectric typewriter because I couldn't afford the Selectric. I got the Remington at some Canal Street dump where it had probably fallen off a truck. It was such a POS that I eventually threw it out of a second story window in the middle of the night. I remember carbon paper, swilling beer with Lester Bangs and and crazed trips to Nashville where I only had the money to stay in flophouse motels like the Loveless and spent all my quarters playing sweaty pinball all night long with what would prove to be a Who's Who of country music. BTW, that motel's legacy, the Loveless Dinner, still serves the best Southern food short of my long-departed grandmother. I eat there whenever I can.




8 comments:

Matthew said...

As one of four reader / reviewers of "All Night Radio" on Amazon, I'm still waiting for a sequel.

Who do you think you are Michael?

George RR Martin? ;)

I suppose I should feel lucky we got a Trailsafe update and great Downrange TV shows.

Anonymous said...

I like going up to MB at random times (he doesn't know me) and saying "I liked your book", at which point he is usually nice enough to say something polite and drive on.

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Moosejaw said...

FYI. You are on Fox News Channel this AM. a clip from SAFE HAVEN from the outdoors channel.

Michael Bane said...

Always nice to be on Fox! The SAFE HAVEN doc is very, very good, and I'm honored to have played a part in it. It was produced by my partner on GUN STORIES and THE BEST DEFENSE, Tim Cremin at Winnercomm.

Matthew…sigh!!! I wrote 153 pages of the sequel before I completely fell into Television World. I've gone back and read those pages a few times and I think they are some of my best work.The problem, I suppose, is two-fold…television is as close to a total immersion thing as I've ever seen…and so is writing a novel.

I loved writing fiction, but you have to put your head in that world to a point that the characters are alive, are real people. Heck,I've been interrupted 4 times in writing this response!!!

And Anon, glad you liked liked the book!

mb

Matthew said...

Obviously the solution is to put more tax dollars toward cloning technology. =)

Since your output is uniformly good, I'll take what I can get and truly enjoy it.

Have a great Easter weekend!

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