Bono Backs Out of Debate With Dave Marsh--The Full Story

BIG SCAR ON THE HORIZON…Dave Marsh writes: As RRC disclosed in September, last May U2’s Bono confronted Irish journalist Gavin Martin and myself in the lobby of Dublin’s Merion Hotel. He asked what I’d been working on. I said “the premise that celebrity politics has been a pretty much complete failure.” Bono replied that he wanted to debate the topic in public. He reiterated the challenge the next evening. The witnesses included U2’s manager Paul McGuinness and my wife, Barbara Carr, among others.

     I made sure that Sirius Satellite Radio, which was to broadcast the debate, knew about Bono’s invitation. By mid-June, U2’s New York office confirmed the plan, asking only that it be delayed until U2 finished recording its next album. I kept it public via RRC and my Sirius show, Kick Out the Jams.

     In November, U2 manager Paul McGuinness rang me. After some brief personal palaver—I like Paul even though I know he’s alluded to me as a “Trotskyist” behind my back—McGuinness sheepishly said “Bono has asked me to ask you if he can withdraw” from the debate.

     I said “Sure.” McGuinness expressed gratitude that I was taking it so well.

     “Of course,” I added, “this was a public challenge. Backing out’s not gonna be private.” I did not ask why Bono ducked the debate. Maybe he’d come to his senses, as his apologetics for world capitalism disintegrated with the stock, housing and employment markets. Maybe he was too busy preparing the banalities he’d blare on the new album.

     In the wake of the New Depression generated by Bono’s tutors in world finance, it’s hardly necessary to issue a point by point refutation of his statements about how the world works,. Based on Bono’s response to criticism of U2’s tax avoidance, he plans to carry to the grave the ardently stupid globalization orthodoxy of Forbes, the Wall Street cheerleading rag he co-owns. Can there be anyone else who’s ventured a deep thought in the last several months who still believes that the only path to change involves bending the knee to the powerful?

     As for the lyrics, don’t jump to the wrong conclusion. It can’t be denied that Larry Mullen, Adam Clayton and the Edge can still make fascinating music. Bono’s yelped vocals are another matter, his hollow lyrics--where every platitude yields to an obscurantist pretension and back again--yet another. Unfortunately, even if he’d come up with a lyric as great as “One,” Bono also carries into each project his off-stage political pronouncements, and his fawning affiliations with war criminals such as Tony Blair and George W. Bush.

     I don’t know why Bono spit the bit on debating these issues in a public forum with a well-informed antagonist. Maybe he decided that he’d fucked up and was about to lower himself by going head to head with a journalist. Maybe he doesn’t want to deal on the spot with descriptions of his repeated appearances at the conferences of the leading capitalist nations where he’s yet to ask his first hard question about anything but Africa; about his settling for promises from world leaders that patently weren’t going to be kept, and never doing more than mewing when they weren’t; about why it is that Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, by no means an anti-capitalist, observes that she met him “at a party to raise money for Africans, and there were no Africans in the room, except for me,” or why so many other Africans have complained that he claims to speak for them but has never so much as asked their permission. In regard to the last, I did receive more courtesy than Andrew Mwenda, the Ugandan journalist Bono cursed for raising such questions at an economics conference. (But then, I’m white and Celtic-American.)

     It certainly isn’t my fault that I have to say “maybe” about all of this. Bono never got back to me, or had any of his handlers get back to me, about the ground rules for our projected “debate”--his term, not mine. I’d have settled for an honest interview although “debate” would have been more fun, even though the result was inevitable. No matter how many people sided with my being able to see through the kind of thing William Burroughs once poetically dubbed “a thin tissue of horseshit” it wouldn’t be enough to outweigh Big Time Pop Star status.

     I don’t know. More to the point, you can’t know either.

     U2 could be in a fair amount of trouble. The band is old by rock standards, and on the cover of Rolling Stone Bono looked much older than the rest  because of a physical makeover that tries to deny it. No Line’s first single flopped on the radio. The band’s decision to have its song publishing company flee Ireland for a tax haven in the Netherlands has been subject to protests in the streets of Dublin and has no obvious justification, despite Bono’s fatuous counterclaim that it is his critics who are the hypocrites because free-market values were what created the “Celtic Tiger” of Dublin’s capitalist boom economy. The Tiger’s death throes look to be particularly messy, in part because of capital flight of just U2’s kind. The band’s attempt to alter the Dublin skyline with its Clarence Hotel expansion is another example of its ruinous distance from everyday Irish reality.

     Bono’s self-promotion fares much better on this side of the Atlantic than at home. For instance, he got away scot-free in the American press after declaring during the Inauguration Concert, “What a thrill for four Irish boys from the north side of Dublin to honor you sir, Barack Obama, to be the next president of the United States.” But Shane Hegarty wrote in The Irish Times that only one of the band now lives on Dublin’s working class north side while Bono has lived more of his life on the south side.

     “During the band's performance of ‘In The Name of Love,’” wrote Hegarty, “he described Martin Luther King's dream as ‘Not just an American dream--also an Irish dream, a European dream, an African dream, an Israeli dream . . .’ And then, following a long pause reminiscent of a man who'd just realized he'd left the gas on, he added, ‘. . . and also a Palestinian dream.’ This was his big shout out to the Palestinians… You can't help but marvel at this latest expression of Bono's Sesame Street view of the world. Hey Middle East, we just have to have a dream to get along.

     “Just ignore the sound of those loud explosions and concentrate on Bono's voice.”

     So listen, Bono, if you decide to suck it up and face me, I’m still available. I can’t win a debate, we both know that, and why you’d want to continue to look feeble and cowardly when you have virtually nothing to lose… well, that’s another question I suppose you’ll never be asked.

     It doesn’t mean that those questions are going to go away. Maybe for the tamed tigers of the American pop press, but not for me, or for those people in the streets of Dublin calling you a tax cheat, or for the Africans who feel insulted by your ignorance of their lives, or for that matter, the fans who wonder why you insist on siding continually, if slyly, with the powerful against the powerless.

Tags: bono, marsh, u2

A 25-Year Misunderstanding

Springsteen's "Born in the USA" Turns 25

By CHRISTIAN CHRISTENSEN

Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA turns 25 this year. The iconic song is perhaps one of the most misunderstood pieces of art in the history of global popular culture. Read it carefully, and it conveys a message that is at odds with the mythology and misplaced anti-Americanism that surrounds it. It is worth reflecting on both the history of the song and how the message it contains is as relevant in 2009 as it was in 1984. We may also reflect on how, in recent years, Springsteen has thrown his own legacy into question, as one-time voice of the working classes, by engaging in commercial activities that have disappointed loyal fans (and added a new layer of complexity to our understanding of the relationship between artist, art and fan).

Born in the USA is one of a small number of songs, films or television programmes (produced in large part in the United States) that can generate near-physical negative reactions with a mere mention of the title. (Films like Rambo and TV shows like The Jerry Springer Show fall into this category.) When the song was released, my own response to Springsteen’s creation, as a 15-year-old American boy living in the United Kingdom, was in line with those of many of my British friends: bemusement and indignation toward what appeared to be little more than a mindless anthem trumpeting the virtues of patriotism and American egomania. The song was brash, bragging and – to the irritation of people who despised the politics of Thatcher and Reagan – amazingly popular.

Conservative image

The apparent conservatism of Born in the USA was highlighted through the ways in which the Reagan right in the US embraced the song, as a celebration of the American Dream. While the lyrics were clearly anti-war and critical of the treatment of the working classes, the image of Springsteen (with his faded Levis, white t-shirt, American flag and thousands of adoring fans) fell into line with the ideology of the US conservative right: Bruce was a working-class boy who made it to the top through a combination of hard work and talent.

The conservative columnist George Will (editor of the ultra-conservative National Review during the mid-1970s) wrote the following in the Washington Post in September 1984 after attending a Springsteen concert: “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings songs about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the USA’!” (1).

Six days after Will’s article was published, Ronald Reagan himself made reference to dreams of the American people, and how those dreams could be found in the “message of hope” in Springsteen’s work. Such was the cultural impact of the song, and so strong was the impression that it was an upbeat melody on the virtue of being American that the Chrysler Corporation reportedly offered Springsteen $12m for the rights to use Born in the USA in their car advertisements.

In his study on the politics of Springsteen and his music during the 1980s, Jim Cullen reached the conclusion that regardless of the singer’s own ideology “Springsteen’s work functioned more effectively for the right rather than the left” (2).

Will and Reagan’s references to Born in the USA mirrored the general misunderstanding of the song (in the US and around the world) that endures to the present day. Springsteen, meanwhile, attempted to distance himself from these conservative, pro-US interpretations of his work.

Reagan’s reference to the song prompted an on-stage response from Springsteen during a concert in Pittsburgh in which he sarcastically wondered what Reagan’s favourite album might be, doubting it was his dour and depressing 1982 album Nebraska (which contained a number of songs addressing the suffering of the American working classes). Springsteen also turned down the multi-million dollar offer from Chrysler. Yet in the 1980s he was rarely overt in his political affiliations; for example, he did not openly endorse the 1984 Democratic presidential candidate, Walter Mondale, who was running against Ronald Reagan.

Since the mid-1980s – despite the critical lyrics of the song and Springsteen’s increasing visibility as a voice for the American left – Born in the USA has remained in a patriotic time capsule. In a 2004 interview in Rolling Stone magazine, Springsteen was philosophical about the relationship between himself and his fans, noting that audiences often engage in selective listening, suggesting that the meaning of popular music is as much the creation of the fan as it is of the band or the musician. Perhaps he was thinking of the various interpretations of Born in the USA when he said: “Pop musicians live in the world of symbology. You live and die by the symbol in many ways. You serve at the behest of your audience’s imagination. It’s a complicated relationship” (3).

Power, class and warfare

Yet despite Springsteen’s recognition of the power of the audience to interpret music to suit their own beliefs and desires, and despite the enduring tendency of seeing Born in the USA as nothing more than an anthem for American exceptionalism and a relic of the 1980s, the song continues to provide listeners with a reminder of the relationship between power, class and warfare.

Many of its themes present from the early 1980s – troubled young men sent to war, the horrors of conflict, depression upon return from battle, industrial decay, unemployment, a general sense of hopelessness – bear a striking resemblance to newspaper stories over the past few years. A 2007 report said that up to 25% of all US troops returning from active service in Iraq and Afghanistan had a mental health diagnosis and a third had a psychological diagnosis.

The unemployment rate in 2007 for US veterans of 20-24 was around 12% – that’s 50% higher than the national rate for adults in that age bracket. Of those who were working among the veterans, half made less than $25,000 a year (4). And a report in the New York Times in early 2008 showed that the number of homicides committed in the US by active-duty military personnel and new veterans was 89% higher in the six years following the invasion of Afghanistan than in the six years before it (5).

Distance between image and reality

However, as the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan continue and the global economic crisis deepens, the continued misunderstanding of Bruce Springsteen’s song has taken on a surreal quality. Springsteen’s support of the American left and his advocacy on behalf of the working classes are in sharp contrast to his great financial success. In addition to a recent seven-album deal with Columbia Records worth $110m, Springsteen & The E Street Band were the second-highest grossing live act in 2008, taking $204m (tickets for his 2009 tour cost $60-100). While Springsteen’s tour takings and record deals could be seen simply as reflections of his global popularity, the companies he has chosen to do business with, and the appearances he has made, indicate an increasing distance between (working-class, pro-union) image and reality.

Ticket sales for Springsteen’s concerts in the US are handled by Ticketmaster, a company notorious for “processing fees” that can increase already expensive prices by 20-50%. In January, Springsteen made an exclusive deal to release a “Greatest Hits” album with the rabidly anti-union Wal-Mart chain. Fans’ reaction to this apparent hypocrisy forced Springsteen to offer a public apology in an interview in the New York Times (6).

The final insult was Springsteen’s decision to play during the break at the 2009 US Super Bowl, a show that is seen as the ultimate in kitsch and commodification. What made this particularly upsetting for fans was that, as sports writer and critic Dave Zirin noted (7), it was sponsored by Bridgestone-Firestone, a multinational with a long history of maltreatment of rubber plantation workers in Liberia.

The Reagan years saw the revitalisation of American conservatives who had suffered during the “counter-culture” era of the 1960s; and the appropriation of Born in the USA came from one part of the American right reclaiming cultural power – whether Springsteen liked it or not. Ironically, as his most famous song turns a quarter-century, the singer has begun to shed the aura of authenticity that was his trademark, and was also what made songs such as Born in the USA so moving to fans who were willing to ignore the hype and listen to the lyrics.

Springsteen’s 2004 comment in Rolling Stone says as much about the 25-year misunderstanding of Born in the USA as it does about his increasing economic separation from his fan base. The singer noted that when an artist’s work meets reality, the results can be painful for fans. “The audience and the artist are valuable to one another as long as you can look out there and see yourself, and they look back and see themselves,” he said. “When that bond is broken, by your own individual beliefs, personal thoughts or personal actions, it can make people angry. As simple as that” (8).

Notes.

(1) George Will, “Bruce Springsteen’s USA,” Washington Post, 13 September, 1984.

(2) Jim Cullen, “Bruce Springsteen’s Ambiguous Musical Politics in the Reagan Era”, Popular Music and Society, summer 1992.

(3) “Bruce Springsteen: "We’ve Been Misled"”.

(4) “Young Veterans Face Financial Battles”, USA Today, 26 December 2008.

(5) Of the 349 homicides committed by ex-military personnel since October 2001, 75% were committed by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.

(6) New York Times, 01 January 2009.

(7) See Edge of Sports.

(8) “Bruce Springsteen: We’ve been misled”, see note (3).

Christian Christensen is associate professor of media and communication studies at Karlstad University in Sweden; his work focuses on political, economic and cultural aspects of global media.

Tags: born in the u.s.a., reagan, springsteen

TWO WHO ROCKED OUR WORLD

ICONS 2008: Remembering our pop-culture heroes

By MARK VOGER
Staff Writer

Welcome to ‘‘ICONS,’’ our end-of-year series remembering PAGE X interview subjects we lost in 2008.

BO DIDDLEY COULDN'T BE BEAT

As the creator of the famous ‘‘Bo Diddley’’ beat in the 1950s, singer/guitarist Bo Diddley was one of the forefathers of rock ’n’ roll. Mississippi native Diddley died June 2 at age 79. In never-before-published comments from a 2001 interview, Diddley spoke of designing his own guitars (such as his trademark ‘‘box’’ design) since 1958 – long before the ‘‘signature’’ trend in guitar manufacturing.

‘‘Well, that’s why I guess I’m different,’’ Diddley told PAGE X.

‘‘Because I wanted a difference here. I didn’t want somethin’ like somebody else had.

‘‘And it’s the same thing with songs and things. I don’t wanna copy nobody else. Unless I’m doing it as a comedy type thing – if I find a song that’s got some funny lyrics that I might make fun of in a comedy sort of thing. But other than that, I have to be a little bit different. That’s what makes me what I am.’’

Diddley felt some younger black artists didn’t have enough awareness of inroads made by the likes of himself, Chuck Berry and Little Richard – nor enough respect for certain entertainment traditions.

‘‘OK, so this is a new generation. I can accept that,’’ Diddley said.

‘‘But I think that musicians, they should learn, go some of the parts of the roads that we traveled. Because there were things like: You couldn’t come on the stage with holes all in your pants, funky, dirty and all that. We had to wear tuxedos. That’s show business. Either tuxedos or nice uniforms and stuff like that. Give the people somethin’ for their money. Don’t come up lookin’ like you just got off a garbage truck.

‘‘A lot of groups is makin’ millions of dollars, and they ain’t got but two or three pair of pants. That sucks. They don’t do nothin’. We had to work, man, and make an impression and show the people that, ‘I am an entertainer. I can entertain you if you just stand here.’’’

DANNY FEDERICI: TIES THAT BIND

As an original member of the E Street Band, keyboardist Danny Federici contributed to 10 of Bruce Springsteen’s studio albums, including ‘‘Born to Run,’’ ‘‘Born in the U.S.A.,’’ ‘‘The Rising’’ and last year’s ‘‘Magic.’’ Federici died April 17 at age 58 after a three-year battle with melanoma; the Danny Federici Melanoma Fund was founded in his memory.

During a 1998 interview with the Asbury Park Press, Federici spoke about the first time he saw Springsteen perform.

Said the musician: ‘‘When (drummer) Vini Lopez and I first saw Bruce play at The Upstage Club (in Asbury Park) – because we were pretty much playing at the same time – we basically said, ‘We’ve gotta have this guy in our band.’ So we decided to start a band.

‘‘So he (Springsteen) quit Earth to put a band together wih me and Vini. And we found a bass player, Vinnie Roslin. And that band was called Child. And that’s how the whole switcheroo thing – getting him out of Freehold – began.’’

Federici also reminisced about jobs he worked around the Shore area before joining Springsteen.

‘‘I was an electrician for a while,’’ Federici said. ‘‘I worked construction. Actually, Allan Berger – he was the bassist with Southside (Johnny Lyon) for a while – his dad was the super on a construction job I worked. A couple of times, I worked at a paper place up in Wanamassa (in Ocean Township). And of course, I worked in a surfboard factory with ‘Tinker’ (Carl West), Bruce’s first manager – Steel Mill and Child’s first manager. He’d throw us a few bucks.’’

Said Federici of his early Asbury Park days: ‘‘I lived on Bangs Avenue for a while, almost right across from the police station. I had to move closer to the buses and the trains – I lost my license as a kid.’’

Federici is remembered for playing the accordion on ‘‘4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)’’ and glockenspiel on ‘‘Born to Run.’’ But he didn’t take credit for the latter innovation.

‘‘It was Bruce’s idea to try the glockenspiel,’’ Federici said, ‘‘because of all the early Philly, Phil Spector stuff that was out there, the Ronettes stuff. They all used the glockenspiel on that stuff. They were doing string lines and horn parts with odd instruments in those days. So that was kind of the Philly sound.’’

As for the accordion: ‘‘I wish I had done more of it, because it’s the only instrument that gives me a chance to walk out, walk around. I can actually get out from behind the front of the keyboard and go up to the front of the singer and move around like a guitar player.’’

Tags: bo diddley, born in the u.s.a., born to run, diddley, federici, magic, ronettes, springsteen

Strauss’ eyes go round as full moons when she’s talking Springsteen. It’s not just that she’s a fan—and she’s a fan, all right. It’s the interlocking inner mechanics of Springsteen’s oeuvre that inspires I-95.

She talks about the way he structures albums with songs that correlate to other songs so there’s something in each album for new fans and deeper, more nuanced corridors of meaning for fans who have followed his work since the beginning.

In terms of presentation, she likes how his concerts are very tightly laid-out but allow for improvisation. Most important, despite addressing difficult aspects of the American identity, Springsteen’s work is designed to end in pride and joy.

“It seems mental when you think about a big stadium full of drunken doofuses sometimes,” she says. “And it’s spectacular.”

The whole story:  http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/articles/17900/cover-story

Tags: e street band, lesbian, springsteen

IMAGE :2 of 2

 

 

 

 

Report by Cathy Galvin. Portrait by Platon

 

Annie Leibovitz is marching towards destiny with a giant stride – and today it’s her fate to be photographed for this magazine. It’s not a thing she welcomes. The most famous female portrait photographer in the world is about to be scrutinised by one of the trendiest. She knows he’ll be focusing on every line in her 59-year-old face – “But I don’t want to be an asshole about it,” she says. So instead she’s encouraging me to keep up as we bounce from her offices to a nearby studio in Greenwich Village, New York.

Awaiting her is the diminutive Platon: dynamic young photographers love a bold brand name. She’s nervous, muttering: “What do I call him? Plat?” We’re crushed into what appears to be a large black box with just enough room for Leibovitz and her assistants, Chad and Kathryn, Platon and his team of three, and some scorching lights. I’m on the floor, watching Little Platon and Big Annie, him at her knees in every sense as he stares up at her. “Couldn’t you get a ditch dug in your studio?” she quips as he pleads for her to keep still. He adores her but he seems to adore everyone, and I know she’s clocked that. His technique is to hunker down and shoot up at his subjects, a plankton’s perspective on the world. “The smallest movements, Annie, the smallest movements,” he begs.

Leibovitz is a challenge. For any woman, such close examination is agonising, but the pain is even greater for someone who lives their life behind, not in front of, the lens. She’s gripping her camera for support, determined to make her face and body obey him, but her booming voice rebels: “Kathryn. Where’s Kathryn? Can we have some good music here? I’m going crazy. Have you got some Springsteen? Some early Dylan? Some Emmylou?”

He wants her to look down, but every atom in her body is exploding with an instinctive aversion to that instruction. Her iconic status in the photographic pantheon is based on stamina, 35 years of consistent and often brilliant work, not neurosis. We may like our heroines to have a touch of the tragic about them, but she’s having none of it. “I do not want to look sad,” she tells me later, though in the moment she wants to help. At one point she can’t contain herself any longer, grabs a camera and shoots back at him.

He tries to chat, to warm her up – not something she has much time for. She’s written: “I don’t like trying to make something happen in the studio. It feels cheap to me.” When he questions her about her mother, she patiently explains that she died not too long ago. So, as it happens, did her father and her lover, the novelist and essayist Susan Sontag. When he asks, in the same way he once apparently asked President Bill Clinton, to “give him love”, she roars with laughter. All the while, she’s giving him a masterclass. The key to success, she says, is to go back: “Don’t think that you’ve got it from one sitting. If you don’t like what you see, go back. I do it all the time. Build relationships. It has to be intimate.”

None of it, she’s suggesting – the body of work, the attention, the reputation – comes in a moment. And none of it necessarily reveals the soul of the sitter or the photographer. She sees what she does as a series of one-dimensional fragments in a complex world. “What is reality anyway?” she asks me.

It’s a good question, and one that has a particular bearing on the flood of celebrity portraits she’s been shooting for magazines and advertising campaigns since the 1980s, photographs that helped define a particular era. When her cover shot of Demi Moore, pregnant and naked, appeared in 1991, some outlets displayed it in a white wrapper. There were howls of protest, followed by applause for her daring feminist take on female nudity, none of which she had intended. She simply loved the picture.

The range of her portraiture is breathtaking: from her trademark Hollywood group shots, as lavish as any film set, to quirky conceptual pieces – Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk or John Cleese dangling from a tree – to her elegant black-and-white portraits of dancers, writers and musicians. The Queen, according to the BBC, stormed out of a session with Leibovitz at Buckingham Palace last year. In fact, she was storming in. And they’re all at it –Hollywood stars, international politicians, big corporates and magazines, all rushing towards her, ready to fly her anywhere, pay her anything, in the hope she will immortalise them. It’s formidable work, and the familiarity of it can breed contempt. The photographic critic Vicki Goldberg once said Leibovitz had captured a culture, “and what a shabby culture it is”. Leibovitz is aware of that tension: selling a cover has little to do with truth or art.

What’s real for Leibovitz comes in the shape of three-year-old twins, Susan and Samuelle, angelic girls in a halo of blonde curls who are playing at dressing up in their bedroom at the top of a fairy-tale brownstone house. They’re at the centre of a personal reappraisal of her life and work. She wants to snatch a few moments with them before I skitter after her to the dreaded photoshoot. When I ask how many people there are in Team Leibovitz, from studio, personal and photographic assistants to housekeepers and nannies, she laughs. She laughs a great deal, despite the austere appearance. There’s no definitive answer because she’s absorbed in tickling Samuelle, and I get drawn in to the play, but it’s a significant number. There’s a business, two homes – one here at the heart of New York and a 200-acre estate at Rhinebeck, near the Hudson river – to run with her staff. You notice the portraits around the house, because they aren’t by Leibovitz. “I’ve got enough pictures of the children. I want to be with them, not photograph them,” she says. Scattered about are snapshots of some of the wider Leibovitz clan, many in sepia. She’s collating their family past and saving it for her children and five siblings.

At around the age of 50, Leibovitz made the bold, unconventional and life-changing decision to have children. It was her choice to be a single mother, not one that involved Sontag assuming the role of second parent. She doesn’t discuss it. Her first child, Sarah, was born in October 2001, reportedly by sperm donor, when she was 51; the twins arrived by surrogate birth 3½ years later.

The other reality for Leibovitz is contained within the vast range of her photography over a lifetime: her love affair with reportage, not studio, photography. It’s work that can still astonish. At her best, her journalistic instinct is acute. It was this that allowed her to take the remarkable photograph of a naked John Lennon coiled against the clothed figure of Yoko Ono just hours before he was killed in December 1980; to virtually live with the Rolling Stones and shoot some of the most memorable reportage of the 1970s. From the moment she left the San Francisco Art Institute and student photography to pursue a dizzying magazine career with the embryonic Rolling Stone magazine, hitting the road with the writers Hunter S Thompson and Tom Wolfe and establishing herself as the leading music photographer of the time, she felt guilt that her photography wasn’t art: “But that’s the thing that drives the work, that tension between selling out and not selling out, doing it or not doing it, and I still maintain magazines are interesting vehicles for doing it. Sometimes you get squashed and then sometimes you just break through and you get to do something that’s a complete surprise.”

This month, a retrospective of her work, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, drawn from photographs that appeared in a book of the same name in 2006, will open at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The exhibition celebrates her personal story: hanging with memorable portraits of celebrity and power are gentler images that capture those moments when supercharged Leibovitz has stood still. There are surprises: landscapes, family photographs, erotic memories, even some war images, the private collection of a very public figure, at times disturbingly intimate.

It’s an account of the years 1990 to 2005, the years she spent with Susan Sontag, before both Sontag and her father died – Sontag in December 2004 and her father, Samuel, in early February the following year. The project began when she started to sift through undeveloped film and other personal images to find images of Sontag for her memorial service. She dismisses the idea those years were intense: “Yes of course, but everyone has this. We’re going to have babies and we’re going to die. This is everyman’s story.”

Yes and no. That collision of life and death in her middle years has changed Leibovitz’s work. It’s softer in the sense of being more revealing, yet carries the distinctive toughness of her journalistic instinct. Not everyone could reveal their own experiences of mortality in this way, or the experience of their loved ones.

In addition to the book and soon-to-open exhibition, another book called Annie Leibovitz at Work, aimed at answering every question that a young photographer might want to ask her, is published this month. All this retrospective introspection marks her awareness of her legacy: the story she will be leaving behind for her fans, her family, for history. What will she be remembered for – her shots of Demi Moore naked, or those that appeared in A Photographer’s Life of her father and Susan Sontag dead? Or something else entirely – other work still to be published?

Few who see the exhibition will fail to be impressed by Leibovitz’s scale and range; some will argue about whether a magazine photographer’s output can be of lasting quality. She’s unsure what the verdict will be on her life and work. “I remember meeting [the legendary US photographer] Ansel Adams in his late seventies, and they had him in his dark room – he only came out for five minutes – working on his master set. He did a whole series of master sets, and it’s interesting to think along those lines… The thing that holds up, the thing that is remarkable, that I can stand outside of myself and look at and feel so lucky, is that it’s all getting more interesting.”

There are also regrets. She swings between confidence in her achievements and a rawness that shows it’s too soon to have recovered from her losses. For all the pleasure in showing her family pictures, she knows that she and others have paid a price.

Did any of the family try to stop her showing their private moments; their struggle to cope with her father’s death and his death-bed scene? “My mom. I showed my mom the book and she was worried about pictures of my dad and then she let it go. When I look back now, I wouldn’t do what I did then. In Paris [the exhibition was held there this summer] when I was walking through the show, oh my gosh, I realised I’d left my family so vulnerable. God knows why you do it, on some level, but it came out of these moments and I won’t do it again. I won’t touch my family again. I have great respect for that moment – you know it was crazed and sad and vulnerable, and it’s probably my best work.” Visitors to the exhibition will find themselves drawn to a small black-and-white photograph that carries a heavy weight of bitterness, the most controversial she has taken. It shows the body of Susan Sontag laid out in a funeral home, her once beautiful, distinctive face almost unrecognisable, racked by the struggle to beat a virulent form of blood cancer. Leibovitz acknowledges: “There are good deaths and bad deaths. And Susan’s was a bad death.” The image spares the viewer nothing.

Earlier this year, I had interviewed Sontag’s son, the writer David Rieff, who has written an anguished account of his mother’s death and is now editing her journals and letters. When I tell her this, it throws her. She’s known for checking out her interviewers, and has earlier told me how many children I have and listed some of the more inane projects I’ve worked on as proof of her investigative powers, but this detail had escaped her. She asks her assistant, Karen, to bring her the article, and reads it in front of me. In it, Rieff makes plain his contempt for Leibovitz – not for taking the photograph, but for showing it in her book and exhibition. “I think she had a choice. But for whatever purposes it served in her psyche or her career, there was no way I could stop her,” he had said.

It’s clear the two of them were uncomfortable with each other while Sontag was alive, and Leibovitz comments on their capacity to have made each other miserable after Sontag’s death. Rieff called Leibovitz Sontag’s “on-again, off-again lover”, while friends of Leibovitz recall the abruptness of Rieff’s behaviour in death, failing to acknowledge the love and support Leibovitz had offered his mother during her life. She had renovated a cottage for Sontag on her estate, had bought both of them a home at the Quai des Grands-Augustins in Paris; and had chartered planes to take Sontag to hospital for a bone-marrow transplant and later back to New York.

Recovering herself, Leibovitz says: “I showed the book to everyone I was worried about before it was published – with the exception of David Rieff. Most of those people were close to Susan, like Joan Didion and Susan’s sister, Judith. The most important person I showed it to was Andrew Wylie [Sontag’s agent], who knows David and was executor of Susan’s estate, and he was very supportive and said leave David to me and I’ll talk to him.”

She says of Rieff’s book, Swimming in a Sea of Death, which charts his mother’s final months: “I thought it was terrible. Only because it was so cold. But if you notice, nobody else was there in David’s book except David.”

But was she there for Susan’s final moments? “I wasn’t there. It was the first death that I ever experienced. Would I do it differently now? I certainly would. But at the time even David was going away, and my father was dying. I had this trip to Florida to see him, and I was taking my Christmas vacation and splitting it between Susan and my father… so I was with Susan up until that Sunday, and she said I love you and I said goodbye, and I left and felt sure she’d be fine for a few days. Then I got down to Florida and had literally just landed, and David called me and said there was a turn for the worse. I tried to get on a plane to get back, and there wasn’t a plane until the morning. She died when I was in the plane. “I begged him to keep her there until I saw her, and he did. In retrospect, David was desperately trying to hold on to his mother in some way, and of course pushed everyone else away – and it was painful to a lot of people. He had a lot to deal with.”

Has she questioned her decision to keep the picture of Sontag in the funeral home in the exhibition? In her book, Leibovitz admits she was in a trance when she took the picture, and had provided Sontag’s funeral clothes: a dress they had bought in Milan, scarves from Venice, a favourite black velvet coat she liked to wear to the theatre. “No, I think it is a strong picture. I have absolutely no problem about it. I think there’s a genre to it and I’m a photographer and I feel like it was totally appropriate.” She wouldn’t release the picture for publication here.

We can’t know what Sontag would have thought. She loved photography, wrote eloquently about its cultural impact and there’s something prescient about one of her later books, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), an analysis of how horrific images can make voyeurs of us all. Sontag had encouraged Leibovitz to broaden her work, and the two had travelled together twice to Sarajevo during the Serbian siege. In her book, Sontag notes: “People are often unable to take in the sufferings of those close to them.” She also wrote: “Photographs turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.”

Leibovitz continues: “I went down to the funeral home and I did it. I think David is quoted as saying it was some kind of circus-like picture. I shot it with a digital camera, and I got home and the printing machine had run out of ink, and it came out this kind of strange green, which I thought was interesting at the time… it just happened.” Those painful green images make a spread in the book.

She doesn’t attempt to present either the book or the exhibition as a kind of truth: it is, she says, a moment: “You see things in the work. You can start to create fictions some time. That’s all right. The whole thing is a kind of fiction. We made up a story for you to see… there’s just enough pictures to tell a story.”

And what drives Annie’s own story? The sense of never stopping for breath? It began young, the patterns established in childhood. Anna-Lou Leibovitz has been on the move since the day she was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1949. Her father was in the air force, and the family – she was lost in the middle of five siblings – were used to being bundled in the car and transported from base to base, the classic American road story. They never stayed anywhere long. There were fights between them all: “I think the fact that we were on the move saved us. It kept us together, and it’s interesting because I’m thinking now what it must be like for my kids growing up in one spot; because for us, for good or bad, the fact we were moving every couple of years, it solved all our problems. I never even knew you saw people again. That made us closer, because your siblings became your best friends and you travelled together. I do see a parallel with taking pictures – you go in for a quick study and you get out.”

Leibovitz was the third child in an exuberant, physical family. Their vitality, and her love of them, bursts out of the photographs on display in the book and exhibition: strong father and brother; a mother who had been a dancer. None of them afraid of the camera. “There were kind of two halves. I had an older brother I was enamoured with, and an older sister who was a bit too old for me… so I was the youngest of the oldest set and the oldest of the younger set.

“When I got older, I felt like I was totally abandoned. I was left to my own devices pretty much. And by the time I was older my mom was too pooped to do too much with me.

“If you talk to my siblings, they just can’t sit down. I think there’s something chemically wrong with us all! We all have this kind of workaholism – I think they’ve now labelled it attention deficit disorder. I’m sure there’s something in that.”

Others have observed her inability to settle, including Susan Sontag, whom she met in 1988. “She said I was always passing through.” Another kind of speed caught up with her in the 1970s, when she became briefly addicted to drugs. “Cocaine propelled you. It kept you believing you were thinking,” she has said.

I suggest she thrives on being at the calm centre of chaos, but she says the rush is over: “When I had the children, I finally hit the wall. Okay, it just seemed like you were going and going and going – and then you had the children and you are finally filled up. It takes care of every single thing that you have, even to the point that you realise you have too much to do, and you try to figure out how to manage that the best you can.”

It’s unstated but evident that Leibovitz worries her children may be left without her before they are grown up. “I feel like a summer-camp director. Having a family, especially being a single mother, having the sense of family for my children is so important, so that they understand there’s this extended family.

You know, I probably work to see my siblings more than I would – just so my children understand they are not alone, that they have a bigger family. With my parents gone [her mother died last year], I thought I’d maybe have a break from my brothers and sisters for a while – but on the contrary, we kind of closed rank.” She spends August at Rhinebeck with the children and an assortment of her siblings, nephews and nieces. At an age when others consider stepping off the treadmill, Leibovitz is flirting with the idea of slowing down – a little. She may work a four-day week from July.

The feminist writer Gloria Steinem once said of Leibovitz that she was the most authoritative, uncertain person she knew. It’s easy to see why, particularly at this point in her life: “You absolutely continue to question what you’ve done. It’s an interesting time. I was very pleased when A Photographer’s Life was published: I’d been trying to express that work for so long, and it has emotional impact. You get that opportunity in your lifetime – where you know that you really did do art; though you really didn’t know what you did until you’d done it.”

Now she wants to make time for more projects close to her heart. “Because of the children, I have a cause. I have to question myself about whether I am doing what I want to do or should be doing, and I’m trying to sort it out.” Meanwhile, the jobs roll in, including presidential candidate Barack Obama for Men’s Vogue, though she recently said no to his running mate, Joe Biden, because she wants to work fewer weekends. The Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin would, however, be irresistible.

Who makes her laugh? She roars. Pointing at her facial muscles she says: “These muscles are so underused… I’m not kidding! There are those people who never smile and they just get that look? And then when I had the children – my Samuelle is like my own little Lindsay Lohan, a little troublemaker: if she can put her finger in a socket, she’ll do it. But you have to admire her. It’s funny how they come out of the box like that.

“I have to say right now I haven’t quite figured out how to walk and chew gum at the same time. I go to bed pretty early and I’m with the kids and I don’t really go out that much – and it’s pretty much work or kids, work or kids… What the hell – but it’s definitely a two-man job. I’d like to have one more relationship in my life. I’ve always had great help and a great nanny but…”

She may be taking a quieter road – and a tough one – but the Leibovitz journey is far from over. “Beautiful, Annie. F***ing wicked,” Platon had barked at the end of our photo shoot. It’s hard not to agree. ForYou

 

Tags: bill clinton, demi moore, dylan, leibovitz, rolling stone, sontag, springsteen

Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, 1979. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 101.6 X 101.6 cm. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Founding Collection, Contribution Dia Center for the Arts. 1997.1.10a ©Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts / SODRAC (2008).

MONTREAL.- For the first time in the historiography of Andy Warhol (1928-1987), the exhibition-event Warhol Live, presented from September 25, 2008, to January 18, 2009, will explore the all-pervading and fundamental role of music and dance in the artist’s work and life. Music is an essential narrative element that is present throughout the exhibition and will guide visitors as they rediscover Warhol’s work. From this unusual angle, viewers will be treated to a chronological and thematic reading, from the film music Warhol discovered in his youth to the disco scene at Studio 54, the legendary nightclub that opened in 1977, where he was one of the most famous regulars. The exhibition will bring together some 640 works and objects, paintings, silkscreens, photographs, works on paper, installations, films, videos, album covers, as well as objects and documents from the artist’s personal archives. It will juxtapose Warhol’s major emblematic works (Elvis, Marilyn, Liza Minnelli, Grace Jones, Mick Jagger, Debbie Harry, the Self-portraits and the Campbell's Soup Cans) with other, lesser-known works (album covers, illustrations, photos and Polaroids). There are also the artist’s films, including Sleep and Empire, as well as the Screen Tests of the musicians of the famous Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol’s TV and video clips produced for groups like The Cars and Curiosity Killed the Cat. The exhibition Warhol Live is produced by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in partnership with The Andy Warhol Museum, one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.  The works come from The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and from leading public and private collections in Europe and North America. A collection of some fifty album covers belonging to Montreal collector Paul Maréchal will be presented together for the first time. It includes The Velvet Underground & Nico, Sticky Fingers (Rolling Stones), Love You Live (Rolling Stones), Silk Electric (Diana Ross), Aretha (Aretha Franklin) and Rockbird (Debbie Harry).  Music: An Essential Part of Warhol’s Work  While Warhol’s interest in music comes across highly anecdotally and briefly in his Journal and his numerous interviews, music and its representation in his work is remarkable and predominant: it is an invisible yet essential component.  From a drawing in 1948 for the cover of Cano – the student magazine at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, which depicts an orchestra in the “blotted line” technique – to the celebrity portraits of Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli and Prince, Warhol created dozens of portraits of twentieth-century pop icons, from Elvis to the Rolling Stones, from the Beatles to Michael Jackson, throughout his career. From 1949, the year he arrived in New York, to 1987, the last year of his life, he also illustrated some fifty album covers, from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake to Aretha Franklin, Count Basie, Artie Shaw, the Velvet Underground, the Rolling Stones, Diana Ross and Blondie. Attesting to Warhol’s changing commissions and affinities, the thread that runs through this iconography reads like a history of postwar American musical tastes, from classical to jazz, rock, pop and soul, disco and hip-hop.  In Warhol’s world, music goes far beyond mere iconography. Warhol orchestrated the “All Tomorrow's Parties” at the Silver Factory, providing an ideal, ephemeral stage for Edie Sedgwick, his moving muse and first alter ego; he served as a producer for the Velvet Underground; he made an artistic contribution to Merce Cunningham’s choreography Rain Forest; he turned Studio 54 into an extension of his studio. Set to music, the invisible art that animates bodies and situates beings in space and in their time, he imagined the entire work of art that was Exploding Plastic Inevitable. He imagined himself in Sculpture Invisible. He used music in his films and filmed concerts. He produced music videos and met with musicians, notably for Interview, the magazine he founded in 1969. And above all, through the play of mirrors and osmosis he projected on his contemporaries, he himself became a rock star equal to Mick Jagger or Debbie Harry, his final inspiration.  Exhibition Design  Guillaume de Fontenay’s exhibition design will evoke some of the highlights in this relationship between art and music through reconstitutions that, while not exact re-creations like “period rooms,” will provide a closer look at the Silver Factory, with a mise en scène by photographer Billy Name, the multimedia show Exploding Plastic Inevitable to music by the Velvet Underground, Silver Clouds created for Merce Cunningham’s choreography Rain Forest to music by David Tudor, and the musical ambience of Studio 54, a veritable extension of Warhol’s studio from the 1970s to the end of his life.  Curators  The exhibition is curated by Stéphane Aquin, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Emma Lavigne, curator at the Musée national d’art moderne/CCI, Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Matt Wrbican, archivist at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Greg Pierce, assistant curator, The Andy Warhol Museum, put together the exhibition’s film and video programming.

Tags: andy warhol, aretha franklin, debbie harry, diana ross, elvis, grace jones, liza minnelli, mick jagger, montreal, rolling stones

Vineet Sharma  One artist who has over the decades represented the bourgeois rock and roll fraternity with panache, it is undoubtedly ‘The Boss’ Bruce Springsteen. He has been one of those mavericks, who took on the concept of ‘The Great American’ dream and subverted it to damask the reality that lurked behind it all through his music.  A man who has his roots of belief in the enigmatic appeal of rock, he has been at the helm of the rock genre’s affairs for more than two decades. He has given instrumental passages to numerous artists who have crossed over the different forms of music using the bridge. He is one of those rare gifted ones who induced folk-music with the progressive rock fraternity, thereby amalgamating two of the best moving forms of songwriting to his fore.  Springsteen is the working classes’ rock star as his lyrics often dwell into the lives of the common people trying to eke out a decent life, struggling at every bend and crossing of everyday mundane life. A whopping 18 Grammies and an Academy Award for his path-breaking songs like ‘Streets of Philadelphia’, ‘The Rising’ and ‘Devils and Dust’ go on to prove the true genius he is with his brand off song making.  A ‘Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’ artist, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle man has done session work apart from collecting the dues for his band members, a recognition of which resulted in him being nicknamed ‘The Boss’, a name that stuck with him despite his abhorrence of it till the time he actually came to terms with it.  Many of his works were introspective in nature and ‘Darkness’ was one album that looked into his turbulent times, but the fact that every hard working man and woman could connect with it made the artist more heard than before.  Springsteen has also addressed the diaspora and its identity related crisis through his single ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’. An excellent track that is set on the Nebraska way of writing, the masses were moved to the helm by this number. A constant performer, he continued with his touring and concerts even when he could simply lie back and enjoy life. It is this quality of this man that makes him an artist to be remembered for a long time.  He has remained low-key over the years but his music always permeates through our existence time and again and we are fortunate enough to get glimpse of the pre-lapsarian era through the ‘Springs’ of his genius. He makes one believe in one thing quite easily, “In God we trust, Rock we must”.

Tags: boss, darkness, nebraska, springsteen

Tags: ask men, bruce springsteen, kansas city, springsteen, st. louis, super bowl

When she was a fledgling short-story writer and novelist living in Long Island, the idea of penning lyrics for a country band did not top Rennie Sparks' list of literary ambitions.

But necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.

Upon marrying musician Brett Sparks -- who is the other half of alt-country duo The Handsome Family -- she suddenly found herself in a band that seemed in serious need of a wordsmith.

The act was still in its formative years in the early 1990s when Brett decided to show his new wife some lyrics he had been working on.

"He was much better at writing melodies," says Sparks in an interview from her home in Albuquerque, N.M. "He had a lot of 'Baby, I'm sorry' and 'Baby, I miss you' and all these 'babies' in there. So I said there were too many babies and why don't I write a nice story about a girl being dragged into a cave . . . And he was into it."

That song eventually became Arlene, just one of many Handsome Family tunes that blend black humour, violence and quirky characters. Sung in her husband's plaintive baritone, Sparks' lyrics are evocative, odd and often unsettling, owing more to the dark romanticism of the American Gothic literary movement than any traditional singer-songwriter influences.

And over the course of eight albums, Sparks' reputation as a literate rocker has nearly eclipsed her band's role as pioneering alt-country stylists.

In 2000, she released a book of short stories entitled Evil. She is currently hard at work on her debut novel. And while she keeps fiction and lyric writing separate, it's safe to say that Sparks has been among the songwriters responsible for elevating the level of lyric writing over the past decade.

The Calgary Folk Festival is as good a place as any to look at the evolution of the lyricist-as-serious-writer movement. This year's lineup features a number of artists -- be in the Handsome Family, Winnipeg's the Weakerthans or singer-songwriter Josh Ritter -- whose lyric-writing goes far beyond utilitarian service to the song.

Besides, it was arguably the festival-dwelling, folk-boom poets of the 1960s -- Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell -- who helped convince a generation of rock lovers that lyrics could be regarded with the same seriousness as other forms of literature.

From Jim Morrison and Patti Smith drawing inspiration from "proto-rock-star" poet Arthur Rimbaud; to Bruce Springsteen's obvious debt to American writers John Steinbeck and Thomas Wolfe; to the Rolling Stones' copping the idea for Sympathy for the Devil from 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire, songwriters have often harboured lofty literary ambitions, says Richard Sutherland, who teaches communications and culture at the University of Calgary. It's a thread that can still be seen today in the poetic sensibilities of bands such as Of Montreal, Vancouver's Destroyer and the Weakerthans.

"I think it made a transition in the 1960s," Sutherland says. Rock 'n' Roll "went from being seen as youth culture to something more considerable. In its first flush it was really seen as teeny bopper music. In the 1960s it started to be taken more seriously. Audiences were growing up, they weren't high school kids anymore. They were in college and university. The artists also matured. Dylan starts off with folk and his embrace of rock 'n' roll brought an influence to it that took it to another level. Dylan was an artist with a capital 'A.' "

Dylan attempted to show off as much in 1971, when he released an experimental novel entitled Tarantula. While it was not terribly well-received, it did show how he had been influenced by "serious" writers such a Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg.

Idaho songwriter Josh Ritter has been one of many young songwriters tagged as a "New Dylan." But in interviews, Ritter is always quick to point out the non-musical writers who have influenced him, be it Philip Roth or Pete Dexter.

On the surface, his brilliant 2006 album The Animal Years seems to share common ground with other modern political songwriters such as of Steve Earle, Springsteen and Bright Eyes.

But Ritter says his main inspiration for the songs, which look at an America divided by religion and war, came from an unlikely source: satirist Mark Twain.

"He has given me the idea that, if you do your job right, you can question the choices made by your country without giving up your love for it," he says. "If you find your spot to stand, you can question the necessity of sacrifice without disparaging the sacrifice itself. That was something he did so well. You never questioned the fact that he was committed to the country and he was saying these things because he loved his country."

As a result of his interest in Twain and other writers, many of the lyrics on Animal Years and its less-serious followup The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter read like stand-alone short stories or poems.

Similarly, Weakerthans songwriter John K. Samson's lyrics are full of literary allusions and quirky characters -- often resulting in a sort of complex storytelling that seems miles beyond the woe-is-me, naval-gazing angst of his punk brethren. As a lyricist, Samson avoids the verse-chorus template of modern songwriting, allowing the particulars of the story to dictate the structure.

"My goal when I write a lyrics is to be certain that someone can sit down and read it and get something from it that is separate from the music," he says.

"It can be read and understood as something and taken out of context of the song."

Samson has certainly earned his literary stripes. He is co-founder of the left-leaning Winnipeg collective Arbeiter Ring Publishing and has had both poetry and prose published in literary magazines in recent years.

On top of that, he is the reigning champion two years running for CBC's Canada Reads, a competition where star Canadians face off by championing various CanLit titles. In 2006, Samson successfully argued Miriam Toews' A Complicated Kindness to the top spot, beating out choices presented by filmmaker Nelofer Pazira and authors Maureen McTeer and Susan Musgrave, among others. He followed the win with another in 2007, when he convinced fellow panelists that Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals was the best choice of that year.

All of these interests have resulted in a deep pool of influences to draw from.

"There are a lot of short story writers -- Lorrie Moore, George Saunders, Alice Munro," Samson says. "I guess I try to think of my songs as very small short stories."

Which is not to say there aren't differences between writing fiction and writing lyrics. At its heart, rock 'n' roll still needs to maintain its cathartic nature and ability to quickly connect to the listener, no matter how intellectual or literary the lyrics. Sparks says she keeps her husband's voice in mind when writing the words to songs. She also keeps in mind the lessons learned from one of her early, less-than-literary writing jobs.

"I learned a lot about lyrics as a copywriter for the Sears catalogue," Sparks says.

"I was writing about women's underwear. There's these little squares of space and I had to write about these ugly polyester bits of lingerie. I became good at selling these horrible things with very few words. With a story or novel you can ramble on. Lyrics are more like selling underwear." ForYou

Tags: alice munro, baudelaire, burroughs, dylan, ginsburg, joni mitchell, kerouac, leonard cohen, of montreal, philip roth, rolling stones, springsteen, steinbeck