Rock Bottom

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greg.schutz, January 28, 2009 (view all comments by greg.schutz)
In rock and roll mythology, there are two linked stories that seem to be told over and over again: Pride, and The Fall. We admire a band’s success, marvel at its excess — and then, like motorists passing a grisly accident, we rubberneck at its self-immolation. VH1’s Behind the Music series has made an industry out of telling and retelling this story — adding, for the sake of narrative, a Part Three (call it Aftermath, or Redemption) and bending over backwards to force every band into their up-down-up, N-shaped rubric. The effect, of course, is facile, the glossy television product of elided facts and carefully edited interview snippets.

Rock Bottom, Michael Shilling’s debut novel, bears a paradoxical relationship to this old rock and roll story. In recounting the very bad last day of the Blood Orphans — a very bad band that could, once upon a time, have been very good — Rock Bottom is at once a raucous celebration of rock mythos and magic and a searing portrayal of what it might actually be like to be caught at the center of a VH1-worthy storm. What makes this novel noteworthy is Shilling’s ability to reconcile these objectives. Rock Bottom embraces the myths of rock even as it explodes them.

This feat is the product of an apparently egoless author. Like a good impresario once the band has taken the stage, Shilling makes himself invisible: the narration of the novel is given entirely over to its central characters, the four band members and their female manager. Jumping, in successive chapters, from one troubled head to the next, Shilling writes in an extremely close third-person that occasionally verges on stream-of-consciousness. The effect is remarkable: constructed completely from the actions, memories, and language of the characters themselves (none of that intrusive Behind the Music narrational presence), a complete picture of the Blood Orphans’ dissolution emerges. The language may be salty, but one of the pleasures of this novel is the way in which it speaks through its characters. To deny them their F-bombs would be to deny them a certain degree of reality on the page. Shilling, to his credit, never flinches.

It would be unfair to call these characters “unlikeable” and leave it at that — more often than not, these characters don’t like themselves. Each is responsible, in his or her own way, for the failure of a band that began with such promise; the power of the novel lies in its relentless plot, which forces each bandmember and their manager to face that fact. Think of that line from Nixon: “Mistakes were made.” With the passive voice, he camouflages his culpability. Scene by scene, Shilling strips the camouflage of passive denial from his characters until at last they see themselves — and we, as readers, likewise see them — clearly.

Because of this, though it brims with brio and black comedy, Rock Bottom is also a novel haunted by the specter of what could have been; a keenly rendered awareness of loss inflects many of its best passages. (Consider the deeply tragicomic moment, early in the novel, when Bobby the bassist stumbles upon a Blood Orphans display in a record store.) The path these characters follow is mythic, but by their humanity — Shilling has imagined each so intricately, in all his or her particularities — they rejuvenate it. Shilling’s is an exciting new voice: muscular, ballsy, and heartfelt.

At a key moment in the novel (I won’t reveal where, or in what context), a blue arc of electricity appears. Its purpose, I think, is to remind us: the Rock Gods are present here. Rock Bottom is a myth expertly repackaged. Through the humanity of its characters, it transcends its subject, finding art where VH1 finds only sensationalism. Rock Bottom takes an age-old rock and roll story and retells it in a funny, fresh, and surprisingly moving fashion.

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780316031929

Author:

Shilling, Michael

Publisher:

Back Bay Books

Subject:

Musicians

Subject:

General

Subject:

Mystery & Detective - Women Sleuths

Subject:

Mystery-A to Z

Copyright:

2009

Publication Date:

20090131

Binding:

TRADE PAPER

Language:

English

Pages:

373

Dimensions:

8.00x5.40x1.10 in. .75 lbs.