A rock musician without a book is like a fish without a, well … a bicycle. Yet how many musicians, thinking there's more to life than power chords and rhyming “pills” with “ills,” succumb to the lure of the word processor each year? Coaxed into existence by a ghost writer/editor, the result usually is nothing for the ages – either self-serving puffery or cautionary rehab saga, Motley Crue front man Vince Neil's Tattoos & Tequila being a recent and all-too-characteristic example of the latter.
Sometimes, though, a memoir comes along with real auctorial presence, a tale of sound and fury, wit, verve and revelation that succeeds not only in enhancing an artist's reputation but renewing it. Life, by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, seems a case in point: No less than The New Republic recently mentioned it (favourably) in the same sentence as Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory.
Another compelling example is Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Volume One, which scored (deservedly) a nomination for best biography/autobiography from the National Book Critics Circle in 2004.
A highlight of that memoir was its chapter on the making, in 1989, of Oh Mercy, easily one of Dylan's strongest recordings and certainly one of his best produced. A key element in the chapter's 70 or so pages was Dylan's vivid recounting of working in New Orleans with Oh Mercy's Canadian producer, the multi-instrumentalist and sound sculptor extraordinaire Daniel Lanois.
While aural auteur and music legend often clashed, in the end the duo was pretty much a mutual admiration society, with Dylan penning this lyrical appraisal of his sonic sidekick: “[Lanois] didn't want to float on the surface. He didn't even want to swim. He wanted to jump in and go deep. He wanted to marry a mermaid.”
At 59, Lanois may still be carrying a torch for a mermaid. You'll never find out, however, by reading Soul Mining, an impressionistic first-person yarn co-written with Lanois's assistant, Keisha Kalfin, that, true to its subtitle, is heavy on the tweeters and magnetic-field interference and one-point sourcing as well as apostrophes to Lanois's famous artistic associates – U2, Willie Nelson, Brian Eno, Emmylou Harris, Dylan – but light on pretty much everything else.
It's more cautious tale than cautionary. Those hoping that Soul Mining would be one-half of a sort of literary pas de deux with Dylan's Chronicles are going to be disappointed. While it has Chronicles' discursive way with narrative and, at 21.5 by 14.6 centimetres, pretty much the same trim size, there's nothing to equal, for instance, Chronicles' potent introductory description of Lanois: “He was noir all the way – dark sombrero, black britches, high boots, slip-on gloves – all shadow and silhouette – dimmed out, a black prince …”
Occasionally, Lanois proffers a telling reminiscence (“The school principal bypassed the strap and hit me straight in the face with hands and fists”) or hints at dark forces in his life (“I have to admit that the drug culture of the time did swallow me up for a while”; “I would play my steel guitar for weeks at a time, every drop of sorrow in me dripping down to my fingers …”). But he rarely goes deep. We get a fair amount of stuff about his Hamilton childhood as one of four kids of a single mother on the lam from her abusive husband. There are road stories, the rattle and hum of studio banter, motorcycle lore plus flights of poetic and aphoristic fancy that on occasion seem destined for Pseuds Corner: “The power to dream has always been my friend”; “The long road may make you sweat, but the short road will make you bleed.”
In sum, Lanois comes across as sensitive and obsessive, soulful and restless, a perfectionist in his work but in domestic circumstances? Not so much. Dude's a genius, unquestionably. Wrecking Ball, by Emmylou Harris, Martha and the Muffins' This is the Ice Age, U2's The Joshua Tree, the Nevilles' Yellow Moon and his own Acadie attest to that. But it's a musical genius. At the end of Soul Mining, Lanois writes of his initial reluctance to write a book “because I'm not a book writer … I am a songwriter, and songs tell stories.” He should have stuck with that. Apropos Allen Ginsberg, there are times when the first thought really is the best thought.
James Adams is national arts correspondent with The Globe and Mail.
