Style & Culture |

Rocking between the lines

Maine authors pay homage to musical greats with books examining their classic albums

By Kegan Zema

Posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009, 12:54 am

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Certain albums have a reputation for changing peoples’ lives. Nearly everyone can think of that one CD that didn’t leave their car stereo for an entire summer, or the one they listened to during every study hall their sophomore year of high school. Two Maine authors, Michael Fournier and Zeth Lundy, have each contributed books to the “33 1/3” series devoted to these types of classic albums, and will be reading and discussing them on campus Saturday.

There are nearly 70 books in the “33 1/3” series, published by Continuum Press with titles ranging from “Led Zeppelin IV” to “OK Computer” by Radiohead. The books are written by a diverse group of authors, primarily music journalists, historians and musicians, including Decemberists vocalist Colin Meloy.

Lundy and Fournier, the only authors from Maine, have come together to form an unlikely team. Fournier wrote a book on “Double Nickels on the Dime” by punk pioneers The Minutemen, while Lundy wrote about Stevie Wonder’s classic “Songs in the Key of Life.” Fournier is a graduate student and English professor at the University of Maine and Lundy is a writer for the Boston Phoenix. Soul and punk tend to have little common ground, but the authors are determined to make it work by finding where the two genres coincide.

“I think that both of us are expansive enough in our geekery that there’s gonna be all these different topics that we touch on,” Fournier said about the lecture. “It goes well beyond just the rock music aspect of it.”

“I love taking things that seem so disparate like that and putting them together and seeing what similarities they have,” Lundy said. “Hopefully we’ll find where punk and soul meet.”

Their reading will take place Saturday in Daniel P. Corbett Hall, room 105. They will also be doing readings in Portland on Sunday at the SPACE Gallery, with special guests Huak performing Minutemen covers.

Fournier’s punk affinity

Each author took a separate approach to their work. Fournier wrote about the Minutemen album because of his deep personal connection to the band’s work. Punk music was and still is a key part of Fournier’s life. According to him, The Minutemen exemplify some of the greatest achievements in the genre. They were a unique and iconoclastic band whose sound will never be duplicated.

“I started listening to The Minutemen in 1991, and their music was the soundtrack in all the skateboarding videos,” Fournier said. “So, if you told the 15-year-old me that I would be doing this, it would have blown his mind. And it still does.”

Fournier was able to contact some high-profile members of the early California punk scene, idols in his eyes, to help with the book. He met with The Minutemen’s bass player Mike Watts — now bass player for The Stooges — in the band’s hometown of San Pedro, Calif. There Watts gave Fournier a tour of the town, mapping out the band’s history.

He also worked with punk legend Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi. Fournier said MacKaye even went as far as looking through his journal for entries about The Minutemen.

Fournier, who has done multiple tours for his book already, said he is often an ambassador for the band.

“In a weird way, when I do all the reading, I am this intermediary,” Fournier said. “People tell me their Minutemen stories because there is no one from the band around. It’s really flattering, but it’s really weird also.”

Fournier’s knowledge of The Minutemen’s career is vast. According to Fournier, singer/guitarist D. Boon and bassist Mike Watts started the band because Boon’s mother wanted them off the San Pedro streets.

“They didn’t realize that instruments need to be tuned together,” Fournier said. “So for the first however long, they thought it was personal preference, like ‘I like to play my bass loose,’ so he’d loosen the strings. And D. Boon would be like, ‘I like to play mine tight,’ so they tried to play ‘American Woman’ and it’d sound terrible.”

Fournier said The Minutemen thrived in the creative free-space that the punk scene, which had not yet been solidified, had to offer. They combined punk influences with artists like Parliament — Watts learned bass lines on guitar and then transferred them to bass. On top of that, their drummer George Hurley was proficient in jazz.

Fournier said he admired The Minutemen’s attitude of creativity and originality. “Double Nickels on the Dime” was a reaction to Sammy Hagar’s song “I Can’t Drive 55.” The Minutemen decided they were dangerous, not because they drive fast, wear leather pants and have big hair, but because they write innovative songs.

Lundy’s soul obsession

Lundy used a more removed tactic when dissecting Stevie Wonder’s album.

“I took a very impersonal approach to it which is a little bit different than a lot of people in the series,” Lundy said. “A lot of the books are that author’s favorite record or favorite record by that artist. ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ isn’t my favorite Stevie Wonder record, but I love soul music, especially from the ’60s and ’70s.”

Lundy explained he picked Wonder because of his run in the ’70s of consistently immaculate albums and that he sees “Songs in the Key of Life” as the culmination of that period. The book discusses Wonder’s entire career in the’70s.

Originally, Lundy’s idea was to examine what happens to make an artist’s genius run out.

“You get an artist like Stevie Wonder, The Beatles or Bob Dylan and you look at their classic period, and it’s like, what makes them put out such great stuff in a span of years and then sort of all the sudden they have one last final gasp and everything they put out after that kind of sucks?” Lundy said.

His plans on what he was going to write about changed after “33 1/3” accepted his offer to do Stevie Wonder’s album.

Part of Lundy’s examination has to do with Wonder’s songwriting and his ability to bridge the gap between multiple genres. According to Lundy, Wonder is great because of his mass appeal.

“If you put on a classic Stevie track from the ’70s for anyone who’s into music, it’s just undeniable,” Lundy said. “I really was intrigued by it being universal like that — across age, race and your preference of genre.”

Lundy also discussed the idea that decades ago, commercially successful music, like Wonder’s, was also a critical success. He used The Beatles as a prime example.

Lundy plans to play some obscure, underrated Stevie Wonder tracks, and possibly show some old footage.