THE REDNECK WAY OF KNOWLEDGE

.......Revisited and Revised

In 1978 I became a rock and roll critic by accident. I’d written a couple of books about rock stars under an alias. These were books for people who moved their lips when they read, basically picture books, with some 20k words of text, and, since I thought of myself as a serious artiste, I wrote under the name Vivian Claire. I wanted my name to be Crystal Claire, but the editor said that sounded made up. Well, it IS made up, I said, but he insisted, so Vivian I became. (I did once go to a minor book party introducing myself as Crystal, Vivian’s sister, explaining that Vivian was away on business.) 

One of these books was about David Bowie. It was called David Bowie. I had never heard of David Bowie when I wrote it. In 1978 I was still listening to music on my high school record player, that’s what we called them, and only one speaker worked. This will be easy, said the editor I won’t name. Just write 20 pages of biography and 20 pages about the music. It’ll be like doing a term paper. He paid me $2000 for each book, which was much better pay than writing indexes.

These were cut-and-paste research books because so much was being written about rock music. Interviews with music stars abounded, and rock critics sounded as serious as if they were writing about medieval literature. Meanwhile, there I was with my one speaker working.

I find it hard to write bad sentences, even under an alias, so the Bowie book, my third and last, was the smartest and most engaging. Bowie was, of course, a wonderful subject, and I did my 20 pages of biography quite easily. Then I discovered that music critics and interviewers did not actually talk much about Bowie’s music or his lyrics because they seemed to find his personality so fascinating, so there was nobody to steal thinking from, but I had a master’s degree in English literature, and I began to realize that David Bowie was, in fact, a brilliant lyricist.

From “The Young Americans”….

It took him minutes, took her nowhere, heaven knows she’d have taken anything…..

Mama’s got cramps, and look at your hands ache

(I heard the news today oh boy)

I got a suite and you got defeat

And, of course, there was Space Oddity, which over a number of years has kept growing in importance and popularity:

This is Ground Control to Major Tom
You've really made the grade
And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear
Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare

This is Major Tom to Ground Control
I'm stepping through the door
And I'm floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today

For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do

Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles
I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go…….

  Recently I listened to a 2022 novel in which Space Oddity was a major recurring motif. A family is driving around the country (I can’t remember why and did not love the book) and they are playing this song repeatedly.

Anyway, Vivian Claire was a pretty good writer, and the Bowie book began to appear on lists of important books about rock and roll. Someone introduced me to the music editor of the Village Voice, and soon I was writing about music while I kept explaining that I knew nothing about music and that my stereo only had one working speaker, but now other critics were wanting to meet me, and  I was calling myself ‘the people’s critic’ saying I listen to music on my broken stereo the way real people do and that I thought Fleetwood Mac was great, which was not a popular view with rock critics. One night I got very drunk and made a little speech about Kansas’ Dust in the Wind, claiming that its brilliance lay in its artificiality and banality, because there were no real musicians in the group, it was a studio creation, and the lyrics were such tightly woven cliches that they rose to a kind of transcendence, like the cliches that had been woven together into the Nausicaa episode in James Joyce’s  ULYSSES.

Soon I was writing for the Village Voice about a range of things. I had moved back to South Carolina where there was no music scene to mock, and my piece about stock car racing, “The Redneck Way of Knowledge”, appeared on the July 4 cover of the Voice with a woman’s hands popping open a beer. An editor at Alfred A. Knopf called me and offered me a book contract, and I got very drunk with the waitress from the diner on the corner, and we went and sat under a bridge in Moncks Corner, South Carolina surrounded by tin cans and broken bottles and lots of other trash while I tried to understand what was happening to my life.

Thirteen pieces I wrote for the Village Voice during those few years were collected in a 1982 volume, THE REDNECK WAY OF KNOWLEDGE. Six had run on the cover. The book was rereleased by Vintage Books in 1995 with a new Introduction by Dorothy Allison, and that is the tenuous bridge I am crossing to try to stop writing and thinking about Dorothy.

Starting on Monday, I will begin to offer abridged, rewritten, fiddled with versions of the essays in THE REDNECK WAY OF KNOWLEDGE. The book is available on Audible, where I read it myself, though I did not read my novels. The Audible versions were produced by the brilliant Susie Bright, who also bought Dorothy’s backlist and somehow even managed to record Alison Bechdel’s FUN HOME.

Susie Bright has her own substack, where she is producing a fountain of good writing, as is another writer, Laurie Stone, who, like me, got her first big break at the Village Voice. I recommend them both to you. They are smart, deep, original, and fun.

On Monday I’ll bring you “Aunt Thelma at the Rockettes,” the opening piece in REDNECK. Or, I dunno, I might change my mind and present a different one. Want to hear about the Pope giving mass in Yankee Stadium, riding around in a Bronco jeep and waving at the crowd like a homecoming queen? Want to hear about a shootout in North Carolina? Want to listen to a trick pool shot of lies that is a take-down of white aristocrats in Charleston? Or how about a boxing match? I’ll end all these pieces from REDNECK with the bravest pieces I’ve ever written: a surreal little riff called “South Carolina” and “Growing Up Racist,” where I tried to take on structural racism before we had that term for it.