Fagen - Eminent Hipsters

Y ou may be thinking, oh no, another rock-and-roll geezer making a last desperate bid for mainstream integrity by putting out a book of belles lettres. The fact is, until I got out of high school, I was pretty sure Id end up in journalism or teaching English or working in a bookstore or something along those lines. I had a little piano trio in high school but, by jazz standards, I was strictly an amateur. Then it was the summer of 65 and my friend Pete gave me that psychedelic sugar cube. After the universe stopped squirming around and the colors dimmed down a bit, I was left with a new sense of possibility. When I started college that fall, I noticed that guys who played even worse than I did were all in bands and seemed to be having major fun. By the time I hooked up with my partner, Walter Becker, a couple of years later, Id pretty much given up on a literary career.

In the mid-eighties, when I was in the midst of a severe episode of creative torpor, Susan Lyne, who was starting up Premiere magazine, asked if Id be interested in writing a film music column. Although I didnt know that much about the subject, Id seen a lot of movies and I thought it might be therapeutic. It turned out it was, and Susan didnt seem to mind if the stuff I turned in was a little on the self-indulgent side. I got a lot of nice mail and kept writing.

From time to time, people have suggested that the pieces Ive written over the last thirty years might be arrayed in such a way as to form a kind of art-o-biographythat is, how the stuff I read and heard when I was growing up affected (stretched, skewed, mangled) my little brain. Thats the organizing principle here. When my editor, Paul Slovak, agreed that my grouchy tour journal from the summer of 2012 might be entertaining, we stuffed that in too. Also written especially for this book: an account of my college days and an essay on the magnificent Boswell Sisters. I dont want to be a critic. Its fun only if Im writing about creative work that, as Willie The Lion Smith would say, is what you call... real good.

Youll find that many chapters in this book are about people and things that intersected with my life when I was a kid. I apologize up front: I tried to grow up. Honest. Didnt quite happen. I guess Im someone for whom youth still seems more real than the present, or the half century in between. And why not? Im deeply underwhelmed by most contemporary art, literature, music, films, TV, the heinous little phones, money talk, real estate talk, all that stuff. The Internet, which at first seemed so fascinating, appears to be evolving into something even worse than TV, but well see.

So here it is. Folks around my age might recognize incidental references to various Cold War and counterculture phenomena: Oldsmobiles, fish sticks, nuclear war, Bosco, psychedelic drugs, Haight-Ashbury, the Groovy murders. My mom, my dad and my baby sister Susan make occasional cameos. But the main subjects are the talented musicians, writers and performers from a universe beyond suburban New Jersey who showed me how to interpret my own world. There are countless definitions of the word hipster. In the title of this book, Im using it to refer to artists whose origins lie outside the mainstream or who creatively exploit material from the margin or who, merely because they live in a freaky space, have enough distance to see some truth.

One more thing: some folks bug out when they see their names in print. On the advice of the Penguin legal departmentI know, that sounds so cuteIve changed the names of a few people and places.

DF, January 2013