Killing Yourself to Live By Chuck Klosterman Faber and Faber, 245pp. £12.99
The brief was simple: drive across the US and visit as many rock'n'roll death sites as possible, from the Iowa beanfield where Buddy Holly's plane crashed to the Rhode Island nightclub where 100 Great White fans perished in a fire, hopefully picking up a few insights along the way, and gathering up some valuable lessons about life, death and the destructive power of fame. This was Klosterman's mission, given to him by his "striking blonde" editor at Spin magazine; initially, the idea was to drive to various rock-related landmarks around the US, but that would have taken, by Klosterman's estimation, about 400 years, so the itinerary was narrowed down to some of those semi-mythical crossroads where rock music and the Grim Reaper met.
And so, with nothing except a small stash of pot, his own fevered thoughts and at least 600 CDs to keep him company, Klosterman starts up his rental car and sets off on this tragical history tour, which begins at the New York offices of Spin magazine and will end, 18 days later, under a bridge near Seattle where Kurt Cobain once claimed to have slept while still an unknown grungehead.
Klosterman, however, is never alone on this odyssey: strapped into the passenger seat beside him is the hapless reader, who becomes a captive audience to Klosterman's inexhaustible stream of consciousness, as he muses on modern life, love, death, drugs and a zillion unrelated topics.
Also taking up spiritual residence in the backseat are a bevy of Klosterman's ex-girlfriends, current girlfriends and sort-of girlfriends, each one pulling on the strings of his heart and conscience. Riding shotgun are the ghosts of deceased rockers, from Sid Vicious to Ronnie Van Zant, from Duane Allman to the Big Bopper, all spurring our hero on in his quest for musical and personal enlightenment among the ashes and bones. Sitting pretty behind the steering wheel, Klosterman comes across as the lone star of his own vehicular epic. Hold tight - this is gonna be one hell of an ego trip.
Klosterman probably fancies himself as the new Hunter S Thompson, tooling across the American heartland in search of home truths and hedonistic pleasures, going boldly where lazy rock journalists daren't venture. Like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it's not what's happening outside the car that matters here - it's what's going on inside the head of the protagonist. Klosterman doesn't drive under the influence of class-A drugs, the Highway Patrol will be relieved to hear, but he does use this trip as a starting point to go off on his own personal tangent, swerving and skidding recklessly through the convoluted backroads of his own imagination, and going up quite a few intellectual dead-ends along the way.
Klosterman is like a real-life version of Rob, the music-obsessed anti-hero of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity - with added anal retention. Every event in his life is marked indelibly by a tune, every relationship is tied up in a neat little compilation tape, and every action and emotion comes with its own sonic colour code. He sees divine significance in the most obscure B-sides; he sees serendipity in the tiniest musical coincidence; and he sees odd connections between music and life that should make us laugh, but only prompt us to reach surreptitiously for the door handle in readiness to abandon automobile. His theory that Radiohead's Kid A inadvertently predicted 9/11 is charming if a little morbid, while his ability to equate his past girlfriends with past members of 1970s glam metal band Kiss is just plain creepy.
For all the endless driving (10,550km of it) and non-stop rumination, we don't actually get to visit any interesting rock death sites; most of them are lonely stretches of road, quiet intersections, empty fields.
We pass the flat expanse where Ozzy Osbourne's guitarist Randy Rhoads's twin-engine plane crashed into a farmhouse (he was buzzing Ozzy's tour bus at the time) and peek into the apartment where Replacements guitarist Bob Stinson drank himself to death. What these nondescript places are meant to tell us about life, the universe and rock music is not exactly clear; it's not clear to Klosterman either, so he symbolically shrugs his shoulders and gets on with the business of forensically picking through his own psyche, and choosing tracks from his vast backseat record collection to soundtrack the journey.
In the absence of on-the-road action, Klosterman fills in the gaps with anecdotes and observations from his own life, and recounts his mostly failed efforts to have a meaningful relationship with a member of the opposite sex. Back east is Diane, his hippie chick colleague who he compares to Dolly Parton's Jolene; out west awaits Quincy, who's like a Ben Folds song crossed with The Lemonheads's My Drug Buddy; and somewhere in the midwest is Lenore, who is a complex amalgam of Mötley Crüe's Looks that Kill and the Big Bopper's Chantilly Lace. And so it goes on.
Klosterman's pathological need to relate everything to a song title, an album or a band becomes more than a little tiresome after a few hundred miles. It doesn't help that Klosterman's personal repository of rock trivia is larger than Jupiter, and his musical tastes are as wide as they are shallow (he believes Fleetwood Mac's Rumours is the best album of the 1970s.
Still, at some points along the way, Klosterman's concerns manage to cross paths with other people's experience of rock'n'roll life. He nails down the reason why guys love Led Zeppelin more than the Beatles or the Stones, and he fully comprehends the cultural knock-on effect of Kurt Cobain's death. But, with still a long way to go before his final destination - the small logging town of Aberdeen where the Nirvana singer grew up - we're ready to get off this crazy, solo road trip.
Kevin Courtney is an Irish Times journalist
Kevin Courtney
Music