Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale is a music memoir about Jennifer Trynin's mid-'90s brush with major label rock stardom. One of the reviews on the dust cover recommends, "To anyone with her own dreams of hitting it big in the scene: First read this book." But really, anyone with dreams of any kind, anyone who's seen This is Spinal Tap more than once, and anyone who enjoys a good read and more than a few good laughs should read this book.

A year after a magical, chance meeting with Joni Mitchell at age eight, Jen Tryinin loses her family as she has known it when her father leaves. When she takes up guitar at age eleven, she vows to become a "real singer, like Joni Mitchell--beautiful, fearless, sauntering through strange cities, tossing lovers over my shoulder like salt."

Eighteen years later, she's an Oberlin creative writing graduate with a gift for lyrics, living in Boston. Having continued to write songs, she enters the open mic circuit and soon finds herself trapped in the "Sunday-to-Wednesday night folk/acoustic-chick-band-wasteland," of Boston's famed coffeehouse scene, where,"Nobody even remotely cool ever shows up, and these gigs aren't leading to anything besides more crappy gigs at these same crappy clubs where the audiences drink tea and stare at their shoes."

She quickly vows to jettison herself from the folk scene by methodically studying the ingredients for rock cred. Her producer boyfriend, Guy, explains that her songs are too complicated and that they don't "move" like rock songs. He makes her a cassette entitled "Great Pop Rock Songs," and Jen sets about paring down her lyrics and tweaking her image.

As her transformation takes places, you can see the pages flying off the calendar while she figures out, bit by bit, how to get rock gigs. It's "a tricky business having to do with where you work and what you drink and where you rehearse and who you're sleeping with or used to sleep with or who you might be sleeping with really soon."

I stop cutting my hair with nail scissors and go to a salon for the first time since high school. I get my hair cut straight across at my shoulders, leaving long bangs covering the left half of my face. I chuck my black jeans, ankle cowboy boots, and brown suede jackets and go to the cool thrift stores, where I find myself an old blue corduroy jeans jacket, a pair of big black-laced shoes, and three ugly print polyester shirts.

The finishing touch is repackaging her work. She takes one song off her "earnestly wrought twelve-song cassette," entitled, "Don't Make Me Beg," and shortens the title to "Beg" (because "cool bands use one-word titles"). For the cover, she chooses a picture of a "weird cat" she saw in a newspaper "because cool bands usually have weird nonsensical artwork," and, in a stroke of marketing genius, has it manufactured as a 45 and sends it out to all of the cool local radio stations.

To her surprise, it takes off. She then makes a full-length CD called Cockamamie with the help of Guy and her friend Aimee Mann, who happens to be one of Guy's clients. The CD lands steady rotation at all the hip local radio stations, and Tryinin finds herself playing to packed houses around Boston.

She soon becomes the subject of music industry buzz, climaxing in a record label "sharkfest" that takes place in New York, when she and her band perform at a trendy rock club called Brownies.

The rest of the book is the story of how Trynin's star rapidly rises and then steadily fades back into the atmosphere. It's a gripping read, and a hilarious drawing room comedy of rock-and-roll "manners."

Trynan has a winning combination of self-deprecating honesty, impeccable comic timing, and perfect pitch for the nuances of music biz posturing. At the Brownie's gig she meets promoter Freddy, who doesn't recognize her as the singer-songwriter who's been trying to get him to return her calls for past three years. Freddy turns out to be a short guy with dirty fingers and long black hair, who's "clacking the lollipop around in his mouth a mile a minute." When he casually tosses the lollipop against the side of the band's van, Jen protests:"'Hey, man, that's our van,' I say, not giving in to my fear of people like Freddy."

Later that night she observes a pack of music-industry personnages who have come to check her out:

Against the opposite wall, a small group is gathered around a tall guy in a suit with a heavy black beard. He's pointing at his ear and talking fast. Then he makes like he's shooting himself in the head. Everyone laughs, shaking their heads or grabbing their noses like this is the funniest fucking story they've every heard. Hovering on the outskirts of the group is Mr. Skivvy, laughing along, until he turns away and his smile disappears. He rubs his temples with the tips of his fingers, then pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes it across his mouth. He looks up and catches me staring at him, then waves and smiles. He walks over and introduces himself.

Trynin thankfully chooses to "show, not tell" and with deft strokes paints pictures that speak a thousand unsaid words. As she waits for a label photo shoot to begin, "...a woman appears in red sweatpants, an oversized baseball shirt, and two long ponytails sprouting from her head like huge dog ears. She introduces herself as 'Patty, Makeup Momma.'"

Trynin also has the narrative gift of sprinkling 'plot forwards' - hints at what lies ahead - that keep the reader turning pages. If you are already reading the book, though, you probably know that it is the story of her career's demise. What draws you in is wanting to know how and why.

Some reviews have portrayed Trynin as the innocent victim of the big, bad, music industry. She is unsparing in her account of the ruthlessness, insincerity and absurdity in which the industry is knee-deep. By far the most difficult reading in the book is her description of the byzantine shell game through which major labels actually pay recording songwriters for their work. Some of the juiciest sections of the book involve her showdown with the odious Shalaah!, a pretentious, prissy, Nellie Oleson of a singer-songwriter, with whom Jen is forced to tour toward the end of her career. (Several bloggers have wondered who this person is, since there's no evidence of Shalaah! online. I'm going to throw my hat in the ring and guess that it's Tori Amos).

But Trynin is also quite frank about her own role in her downfall. It has been said that "there's a very fine line between clever and stupid," and Jen straddles that line as she exhibits a certain contrarian streak. She writes a hit song with an out-of-the-ballpark chorus that goes, "I'm feeling good," but against all advice titles the song "Better than Nothing" ("because it's not about feeling good.") When she finally signs on with a label after a pitched and protracted bidding war, she becomes indignant when she is flown "coach" on her first tour, after having rated first class status while being wooed. She makes a petulant phone call to her manager that raises the first red flag that she may be "difficult."

By far the most self-destructive choice she makes, though, is her complicated and sexually charged relationship with her bass player, Buck.

This is one of the most implausible aspects of the book. There is nothing to like about Buck. Buck makes jokes like, "How do you get a million dollars, tax free? First make a million dollars. When the IRS comes to get it, just say, 'I forgot.'" Ok, I had that Steve Martin album when I was twelve, too. I can't figure out what he has going for him other than the fact that he possesses street cred from having played in punk and alt country bands, and occasionally rests his fingers on the back of Trynin's neck. He's forever sulking, stalking up stairs two-at-a time with his hands shoved into his pocket, saying things like, "Just doing my job, boss," when he gets pissy.

The bigger the gigs the band gets, the more self-absorbed and insufferable Buck becomes. When the band films their video and the director asks if he might try a few takes without the baseball cap (!) Buck wears at every show, he flatly replies, "Gotta have the hat." ARGGHHHH!!!!! I kept silently begging Jen, "Please, for the love of God, FIRE his ass."

But the truth is, Jen can't fire him because what she desires more than stardom is a family, a band of brothers to ride with in a van across the countryside, taking on the world together. Laced throughout the book are poignant snapshots of her actual family, who clearly care about one another but who seem to constantly just miss each other. Particularly heart-rending is her longing for a bond with her idealized brother, Tim.

A paragraph near the beginning of the book, as the band starts heating up, hints at where Trynin's heart truly lies:

This is the way I always imagined it would be. Me and my band goofing around in the van, roaming the highways. I have the feeling I used to get driving down to the Jersey shore with my family when I was maybe six....I remember wanting never to get there, wanting to always stay just like we were in that car, together and forgiving, because there was nowhere else to go.

Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be shows that, no matter what her medium, Trynin is a true writer, whose prose takes wing like a soaring lead on her shiny black '70s Les Paul with the Big Muff distortion pedal.

I can't wait for the movie.
posted by Lisa Moscatiello  # 8:52 AM | Perma Link   
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