Overkill

To: aceofspades_kingofhearts_joker@therollingstones.com
From: agent@edvictor.co.uk
Subject: new email address
Date: 15 June 2007 22:51:50

Dear Keith,

Sorry I’ve been out of touch, but as you’d changed your email address again I was having quite a time getting hold of you. Thankfully I was finally able to get the new one from Mick, who’s been more than helpful throughout this process.

We’re on the home stretch now, and I plan to submit the proposal and excerpt to a select group of editors. I’ve looked over your proposed list, and while I appreciate the time you’ve taken to compile it, I’d as gently as possible like to suggest that you let me handle the publishing industry details. For instance, the late Jacqueline Onassis is no longer an editor, and Pirate Meridian Cherry Bomb Press does not exist as far as I know.

I’m thrilled with your willingness to solicit favorable comments – what we in the industry call “blurbs” – from your friends in the music business. I’m still worried that Robert Johnson and John Lennon being dead might complicate your plans, but you’ve assured me it’s of no consequence, and I’m happy to keep an open mind. I think a blurb from Jesus might be overkill, though.

Finally, while I appreciate the playful spirit in which you let loose a hundred gold-armored mongooses in our offices, I must confess that they made work a bit hard to get done. Svetlana, in particular, seemed to have a real problem, as her only recently-returned lucidity was dealt a blow due to traumatic memories of her time at the Richards Estate. Our filing has fallen seriously behind as a result.

All best,
Ed

Memory

To: robert_johnsons_bastard_son@therollingstones.com
From: agent@edvictor.co.uk
Subject: re: Outline Fuck Yeah
Date: 01 May 2007 09:00:26

Dear Keith,

I’ve read your proposed outline for the memoir, and I think it’s quite good, very vivid and detailed. I might ask that you really make an effort to cast your mind back and recall more stories from the short periods of your life of which you profess to have no memory at all. Specifically, are you sure you don't remember anything from 1956, 1957, 1959, 1961-1963, 1964, 1966, 1968-1972, spring 1973, 1975-1977, “the Eighties,” 1990-1993, New Year’s Eve 1996, 1999, 2000, or 2002 to the present? Even a quick anecdote of the smallest detail – a favorite shirt, some friendly words from a girlfriend, your entire Rolling Stones discography – could really help sell the book to editors. (We’ve done some research here and determined that you were born in 1943, so you shouldn’t worry about your lack of memories of the French Revolution; you weren’t even there!)

Best wishes,
Ed

PS Your gift arrived in the mail; it was far, far too generous, Keith. Also, the package was signed for by my assistant Sean, and the Royal Mail’s reported him to the police. Please do be careful in future about what you send to our offices.

Titles

To: robert_johnsons_bastard_son@therollingstones.com
From: agent@edvictor.co.uk
Subject: re: TITLE-IVE GOT IT MATE
Date: 18 April 2007 08:31:50

Keith,

Many thanks for your email. I’m not sure Snorting Me Dad is exactly right, but let’s keep working at it. I like the new email address, though.

-Ed

475 Supermodels

To: zombieflashlightning@therollingstones.com
From: agent@edvictor.co.uk
Subject: our tea
Date: 28 March 2007 16:14:14

Dear Keith,

It was a great pleasure to meet you, as well as your manager, your road crew, your well-managed staff of shamans, and Svetlana, who is quite stunning. I am invigorated by the thought of helping you put your amazing story to the page, and am certain that I’m the right agent for the job. And I am both surprised and thrilled that you’re interested in taking such an active role in the crafting of the memoir proper; surely you know that this is rare among celebrities of your stature, but will add to the book’s value -- as a work of literature, as an historical document, and in the marketplace as well.

I’m quite frankly in awe of your wonderful ideas to build editorial enthusiasm for the book. However, I may ask you to reconsider your plan to compose the entire manuscript of your memoir on the naked backs and buttocks of 475 gorgeous supermodels. Though your idea would certainly catch the attention of each and every editor to whom we submitted the book, I’m worried that shipping and duplication costs – always a concern during the submission process – might escalate more quickly than you’d be comfortable with.

I’ll be in touch soon. Incidentally, Svetlana is still here, and is conducting a loud and somewhat embarrassingly personal conversation with herself in our conference room. If you have a moment to send someone round to fetch her I’d be grateful.

All best,
Ed

Peacocks

To: zombieflashlightning@therollingstones.com
From: agent@edvictor.co.uk
Subject: memoir
Date: 6 March 2007 12:21:03

Dear Mr Richards,

I must admit that when I asked Sean to ascertain whether you were, in fact, the real Keith Richards, I never expected such an immediate or extravagant response. You may rest assured that the twenty trained peacocks outside our offices have put their point across and may now be returned to your estate. I would be honored and pleased to talk business with you. Could you join us for tea?

All best,
Ed Victor

Keith Richards' Memoir: The Emails

To: zombieflashlightning@therollingstones.com
From: victor.assistant@edvictor.co.uk
Subject: your submission
Date: 6 March 2007 09:45:22

Dear Mr Richards,

Thank you for your recent submission to our agency. Mr Victor has asked me to write to ask you to confirm that you are indeed Keith Richards of the rock band the Rolling Stones. If you could please send along some proof of identification, we’d be grateful. Of course we regret taking this embarrassing measure but we were quite surprised to find your letter in our slush pile.

All best,
Sean Wylde
Assistant to Ed Victor

The Sanjaya of His Era

Don Ho, who died of heart failure Saturday at 76, was inarguably a terrific entertainer. In many ways, he was his era's Sanjaya: a crooner, a showman, a lover boy. Like the ponyhawked American Idol contestant, he could connect directly with an audience, whether on TV or live; like Sanjaya, he also represented to mainstream America the harmless exotic, the "other" who was safe to admire from a distance. Ho's long and happy career should serve as warning to those who dismiss Sanjaya as a flash in the pan whose fifteen minutes are about to run out. (It's not hard to imagine a 76-year-old Sanjaya playing to packed houses in Vegas, as Ho did in Waikiki; all he needs to find is his signature song.)

For his whole career, Ho represented a certain image of Hawai'i: the islands as vacation mecca for haoles from the mainland, a kitschy paradise of co-eds, beach boys, and tiny bubbles. Despite his outdated act, and despite the fact that few locals attended his Thursday-night shows at the Waikiki Beachcomber, he's being canonized in Hawai'i today. The flood-the-zone coverage in his hometown paper reflects the state's love for any native son, no matter how little he has to do with everyday Hawaiians, and no matter how skilled he actually is. (I still remember the 2000 World Series, in which local boy Benny Agbayani was the lead story in the Honolulu papers, not the Mets or the Yankees or even the games themselves. AGBAYANI HITS DOUBLE, the headlines would scream, and then in tiny type underneath: "Mets Lose 6-5.")

Ho began and ended every concert with his signature tune, "Tiny Bubbles" -- a song he professed to hate but nevertheless played twice, once early for the audience members who had to go to bed, and once late for the audience members who wouldn't remember he sang it the first time. I prefer to remember him for his jaw-dropping 2002 cover of Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey." It's not that good, but he sure sounds like he's having a great time singing it. Me ke aloha pumehana, Don Ho.

Anti-Climate Change Concert: Exit 16W

So "Live Earth" US has been scheduled for Giants Stadium on July 7. It's a concert benefiting anti-climate change charities, and will feature a lot of acts I'd really like to see: the Police, Kanye West, Smashing Pumpkins, Ludacris, Rihanna, Kelly Clarkson. However, Giants Stadium is such a total nightmare to get to that it would take some kind of dream lineup to get me there. Like, the Beatles, Marvin Gaye, circa-1981 R.E.M. and Wolfgang Amadeus Fucking Mozart. The one time I ever went to Giants Stadium, for an exhibition match between Juventus and Manchester United, getting in and out of the stadium required wells of ingenuity of the depth usually reserved for solving the Middle East crisis.

We probably should've driven, but instead tried to take a bus from the Port Authority. After walking past the (literally) block-long lines for Meadowlands shuttle buses, we bought tickets for a regular NJ Transit bus and convinced the driver to just let us off at a gas station a half-mile from the stadium. We got into the stadium in time, but when the game began less than half of the seats in the sold-out house were filled and most of our friends didn't get there until halftime. After the game, it took us over three hours to get home.

So to recap: unless you are willing to drive the New Jersey Turnpike to this anti-climate change concert, you should probably leave right now to get there on time.

Facing Future

Much to my surprise, my book proposal for Continuum's 33 1/3 series has been accepted, and I'll be writing a book for them to be published sometime in late 2008. My book is about Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's 1993 album Facing Future.





The entire list of accepted submissions is pretty impressive. For instance, my own book isn't even close to being the one I'm most excited about reading. That book is, naturally, the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle writing about Black Fucking Sabbath.

Here's an excerpt from my book proposal:

When he died on June 26, 1997, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole weighed almost 800 pounds. He'd just won the Nā Hōkū Hawaiian music awards for Entertainer of the Year and Album of the Year, and had watched the ceremony from his Honolulu hospital room. After IZ's death, from respiratory failure, the flags on state government buildings flew at half-staff and 20,000 people a day came to view his body, lying in state in the state capitol building. (He was the first non-politician in Hawaiian history to be afforded this honor.)

He was without a doubt the most popular and beloved singer in Hawai'i. His popularity stemmed not only from his music but from his outspokenness on issues of native Hawaiian sovereignty. IZ's transformation from feckless, apolitical youth to politically engaged maturity is a familiar story, but his engaging personality -- plus his almost-literally larger-than-life stature -- made IZ a folk hero in a state struggling like no other with the weight and responsibility of its native heritage.

In that light, Facing Future represents, to most locals and especially to Native Hawaiians, the shining apex of a brilliant career and a crucial artifact of local culture. It's an everyday treasure, an album everyone owns and plays constantly, and two versions of "Hawai'i '78" -- a song first popularized by IZ's brother in the group they formed together, the Makaha Sons of Ni'ihau -- bookend the album. Over a lush wash of ukulele, synthesized strings and throbbing drums, IZ bemoans what the old kings and queens of Hawai'i would think if they saw what their great land has become in these modern times.

But to fans outside Hawai'i, "Hawai'i '78" isn't the album's standout track; for most, it's IZ's delicate cover medley of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "What a Wonderful World." His unique vocals, applied to a pair of deeply familiar songs, have made the track a licensing bonanza for IZ's label, Mountain Apple Records; the tune has appeared in ads (for eToys and Sony), films (50 First Dates, Finding Forrester and Snakes on a Plane) and TV shows (like Anthony Edwards' final episode of "ER"). That's how most Mainlanders first became acquainted with IZ, and it's that track that has made Facing Future the most commercially successful Hawaiian album ever.

I would guess that most Mainlanders who own Facing Future don't own many other "world music" albums, and I'd guess most listen to very little on the record other than "Over the Rainbow." "Hawai'i '78," to these listeners, is one of a series of nice but unfamiliar songs that exist mostly to be skipped over when they come up on an iPod's random play. To Mainlanders, the album is something of a curio, or kitsch -- a touch of the unthreatening unfamiliar in an otherwise staid record collection.

That disparity -- between a curio and a treasure -- is the starting point for my book for 33 1/3.

So the future that I'm facing is an awful lot of research, writing and editing, though it certainly doesn't hurt that some of that research will happen in Hawai'i. My book is something of an anomaly on the list of accepted proposals -- at the very least, it's certainly the one book among 21 whose title will make a lot of readers say, "Huh?" I'm very pleased and excited that the editors of the series have decided to take a chance on my idea.

33 1/3

I am a big fan of the 33 1/3 series of books, and I'm especially a fan of the extremely public submissions procedure the series has maintained. Run by Continuum Press in New York, the series consists of 50+ short, smart paperbacks, each on a single seminal album. The series has ranged from straightforward histories of an album's recording (Springsteen's Born in the USA, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea) to in-depth interviews with artists (DJ Shadow's Endtroducing...) to fanciful compendia of detail and data (The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs) to fiction inspired by an album (PJ Harvey's Rid of Me).

Over on their blog, the editors of the 33 1/3 series recently issued a call for submissions for the next two years' worth of titles. About 450 writers answered the call, swamping the editors with proposals on albums by 276 different artists, from AC/DC to the Osmonds to ZZ Top.

As the editors make their decisions, a bunch of writers have posted their proposals, and it's a fascinating look at what makes a person a fan of an album, and what makes them want to write on it. They're all very interesting, and they make me feel as if you could write a really good book on, seriously, any album at all. They also make me feel as though the editors at Continuum must have had a pretty fucking tough month.

Psychocandy by the Jesus & Mary Chain

I See a Darkness by Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

Live at the Star Club, Hamburg by Jerry Lee Lewis

Illinois by Sufjan Stevens

Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret by Soft Cell

Buffalo Springfield Again by Buffalo Springfield

Fevers and Mirrors by Bright Eyes

Shaft by Isaac Hayes

Chips From the Chocolate Fireball by the Dukes of Stratosphear