David Menconi
Off The Record
Writer's Club Press

by William Michael Smith

The premise of David Menconi's first novel seems simple enough: struggling local rock band hits the fast track, then tragically explodes, all under the hand of a savvy, unscrupulous, manipulative, music industry shark. But while Menconi has chosen a seemingly predictable plot line, there is nothing mundane about Menconi's writing or his story. If the devil truly is in the details, Menconi is devilishly full of them.

No doubt based in part on fact, gossip, and innuendo gathered in his day-to-day rounds, what sets Menconi's book apart is its wealth of interesting and colorful specifics and his wonderfully adept characterizations. Whether it is the eccentric and incendiary central character, Tommy Aguilar, the vicious, corrupt music mogul Gus DeGrande, the honorable but one-step-ahead-of-the-bill-collectors club owner Bob Porter, the jaded and ethically suspect local music critic Ken Morrison, the artistic and morally upright bassist Michelle, or the I-just-wanna-rock drummer Ray, Menconi's characters easily come alive and are entirely believable. The reader will have no difficult seeing "the film" of this fast-paced read on the brain's thought screen.

Menconi, who has written for Spin, Oxford American , Billboard, Request, No Depression, and Mother Jones, exposes the bloated, seamy underbelly of an industry that is seamier than most, and all in a very readable, understandable and enjoyable fashion. Beneath the plot line, Menconi uses the novel as a vehicle to lay bare the processes of the music industry: how bands come together, how they are "discovered," promoted, packaged, sold -- and stolen from.

The book is chock full of accurate detail about the nitty-gritty of booking, touring, record contracts, recording, marketing, the all-important financial fine print, and Menconi succeeds in making it all interesting rather than pedestrian or numbing. He probes the suspect and tainted symbiotic relationship between the press and the industry as only someone intimately involved in the whole scene could. A potboiler on the surface, Menconi's novel is actually a social and journalistic critique delving the quandaries and conflicts of interest that face reporters and artists in every town with a newspaper and a music scene.

The University of Texas educated Menconi possesses the skill and talent to write quite seriously while judiciously sprinkling his work with humorous tidbits, absurd soundbites, and side-splittingly funny scenes. He spares no one, in particular the music journalist Ken Morrison, of whose job at the fictional Daily News Menconi writes, "The music beat ranked just south of high school soccer in terms of importance." A local musician earnestly explains to Morrison, "No offense, but I'd rather have a great picture and a shitty review than a great review and a shitty picture. Let's face it, nobody remembers the words ­ just the pictures. Except for "All you need is love," and him saying the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, does anybody remember anything John Lennon ever said? Uh uh. But they sure do remember him naked on the cover with Yoko."

Menconi has also turned his years of experience into humorous wordplay with his choice of names for local bands, album titles, and song lyrics. For bands, he offers us the Rampagans, Pasture Bedtime, Frag the Lieutenant, Plurabellum, Dangermouse, the Potshots (whose guitar player dies of an overdose), the Guidance Counselors, and Driveby Drowning. When his plot requires a famous band filled with over-the-hill, Spandex-and-leopard-skin-clad, excess-prone sleazy wastrels still making the rounds of stadiums and groupies and drugs, he gives us Arrowhead. For rock fans, the ironies will be all too delicious.

The author has also brilliantly stuffed his spotlight character, the completely bizarre but musically brilliant Tommy Aguilar, with all the eccentricities and bad traits of an entire pantheon of rock glitterati. Aguilar has TEMPT ME tattooed on his knuckles. In one breath he is telling his manager he doesn't want to sell out, doesn't want fame; in the next he's asking where the money is, where the big record deal is, why his band isn't playing in bigger venues, headlining in stadiums. He tells the local critic, "Songs are all over the place, and writing them is just like fishing." The critic points to a broken Martin guitar in the corner and asks what happened. Aguilar tells him "It was catching too many I didn't like." When he has a song idea, Aguilar calls people and sings the song into their answering machines to get it down. "I got me demo studios all over town," he explains. The first album is titled Chorus Verses Chorus.

Another of Menconi's favorite devices is to quote from journalist Morrison's previously published columns. In one such column, Morrison opines that a band's quality can be determined by the dayjobs its members hold down: "Members of good bands work in record stores, while members of great ones work in restaurants. But members of bad bands invariably work in instrument stores." After the column appears, Morrison discovers a brick with a guitar tuner taped to it thrown the window of his car. The attached note, "Tell those shitty bands you DO like that they need to TUNE their FUCKING INSTRUMENTS," is scrawled on a drum manufacturer's brochure.

David Menconi, music critic at the Raleigh News & Observer, has packed 15 years of front-line rock journalism experience into Off The Record. His exquisite humor and his wonderful facility with detail and dialogue make the novel sing as the plot boils along. Show me a newspaper reporter who doesn't think he has a novel lurking in his recesses and I'll show you a reporter who has given up the ghost. David Menconi certainly had one in him. Off The Record is a well written and smartly conceived page-turner. Noted dean of rock music critics Griel Marcus recently included the book in his Salon.com weekly "Real-Life Top-10" column. As good as this one is, we can only hope Menconi has another one lurking in his recesses.


Contact William Michael Smith at: wms-at-rockzilla.net

 
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