Been There, Read That, Bought The T-Shirt

Authors have, arguably, become the new rock stars of the age. But shopping for their merchandise could be a curious and somewhat dark experience, as Stephen Mccarty imagines

NOT CONTENT WITH merely making a song and dance about things, some rock stars like to print their words between book covers, as well as on CD-case inserts and, lately, full-sized record sleeves. This is hardly a new phenomenon: John Lennon’s first book In His Own Write was published back in 1964; he was even billed as “The Writing Beatle!” on the cover, as if musicians were unacquainted with paper and pen. Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature ostensibly for a career bursting with extraordinary lyrics, but volume one of his evocative memoirs, Chronicles, may well have contributed to his nomination.

The eloquent David Byrne, possibly popular music’s foremost intellectual, offers his thoughts on the future music business – candidly illustrated with reference to his personal business dealings – in How Music Works. Patti Smith, queen of the 1970s’ new wave, recently published Devotion, which has its origins in a lecture series called “Why I Write”, but wanders off into a short story framed by a travel journal. And Bruce Springsteen eclipsed countless biographies of The Boss by writing his own life story, Born to Run, which for a rock ’n’ roll autobiography turned out to be unusually honest and self-deprecating.

But this sub-genre of (mostly) non-fiction need not detain us further here, because in a curious, not-quite-parallel case of “anything you can do… ”there’s a startling evolution going on in the literary world. It seems that certain imaginative types, who, without having to bust a lung behind a mike or twang, bash or exhale into any sort of musical appliance, have arguably become the new rock stars of the age: authors.