Quiet desperation: reading The Wit & Wisdom of Music

A small, square-shaped coffee table book of music-related quotes compiled by someone who also appears to put together books on sport and quizzes (eg The Mammoth General Knowledge Quiz Book: 2,800 Questions and Answers) isn't, you might suppose, too promising. And The Wit & Wisdom of Music doesn't disappoint. It is indeed pretty terrible. Yes, with its clunky orange-and-black design, its annoyingly laddish bits of commentary, its narrow range and almost meaningless chapter choices, W&W is generally terrible but still - just about - worth skimming through for the occasional quote. Just about. Or, if like me you've bothered to go through the whole bloody thing cover to cover I guess you'll try telling yourself it was worth it. Anyway, in my case I'm going to recycle a few quotes for the purposes of this mighty blog. So these are, I reckon, the best bits from this ragbag of quotes from musicians, snatches of music criticism from journalists and other musical odds and sods - including fragments of song lyrics (thrown in as padding?): 

*"One chord is fine, two chords are pushing it, three chords and you're into jazz" - Lou Reed

*"Either be hot or be cold. If you are lukewarm, the Lord will spew you forth from his mouth" - Jerry Lee Lewis

*"I'm a smoke-screen expert. I lie all the time. It's the price of fame" - Paul McCartney

*"If you take everything in the universe and break it all down to a common denominator, all you've got is energy. That's the essence of the urban sound" - Wayne Kramer

*"I asked a ouija board once if I'd ever be in a rock band. It said no, and I was crushed" - Fred Schneider

*"Mostly, punk was funny. We couldn't believe we were getting away with it" - Pete Shelley

*"The funny thing about touring is that you rehearse all the wrong things: the music, the stage show. That stuff isn't a problem, it's the other 22 hours of the day. That's the weird part" - Michael Hutchence

*"I couldn't talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching" - David Byrne

*"Punk was just a way to sell trousers" - Malcolm McLaren

*"I got a pair of salmon-pink jeans and ran e'm up on my mum's sewing machine. They used to stop traffic" - Pete Shelley

*"When the Heads started speaking in French, the Ramones plunged to the depths of misery and horror" - Tom Verlaine on the Talking Heads/Ramones tour bus  

*"The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen" - Quentin Crisp

*"We just did our own thing: a combination of rock 'n' roll, Fellini, game-show host, corn and mysticism" - Fred Schneider

*"If I had a good quote, I'd be wearing it" - Bob Dylan responding to a journalist asking for a "good quote" 

*"We're kidding you, we're kidding ourselves, we're kidding everybody. We don't take anything seriously except the money" - John Lennon

*"There are only forty people in the world, and five of them are hamburgers" - Captain Beefheart

And that, dear reader, is just about that. These 15 quotes are more or less the only ones from the several hundred in this shoddy book I thought worth highlighting (just 15, even fewer than the number of people in the world ...). OK, yes, I left out a few from Nik Cohn (culled from his Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom book) because I've already discussed Cohn's excellent book on this blog. And yes, I've doubtless mostly gone for quotes from people whose music or wider work I like, but ... you get the idea. This is a rip-off publication which, consumed too wholeheartedly, will leave you feeling distinctly underwhelmed. Empty. Even sickened. It's candyfloss, not food.      

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated: The Wit & Wisdom of Music

There are, as a matter of fact, one or two other quotes in the book which caught my eye, but these are - so to speak - anti-quotes. Remarks from people which only rebound to their detriment. When Noel Gallagher says, "the first band I ever felt part of were The Jam. I was a teenager and they were the best group in England", I'm not thinking "yeah, cool", I'm thinking ... well, you can probably guess what I'm thinking. Ditto with Mr Weller himself when he pops up to say, "I hated most of the punk bands. There was only the Pistols and the Clash that I really liked. I thought the rest were fucking rubbish". OK, Paul, you reckon your angsty soul-pop stuff was better than the combined output of Buzzcocks, Damned, Stranglers, Subway Sect, Slits, X-Ray Spex, Banshees, Wire et al, not to mention Voidoids, Ramones, Talking Heads, Pere Ubu, Suicide, Devo, Electric Eels and others? OK, whatever, Mr Modfather. Another negative appearance comes - predictably - from Nick Cave, with his inglorious pronouncement, "I'd hate to go down in history as the man who spawned a thousand Goth bands". To which I can only reply: don't flatter yourself Nick. You almost certainly didn't inspire anywhere near that many bands. And to the extent that you inspired any of the better goth outfits you ought to be pleased (even humble), rather than exhibiting this rather revolting arrogance and superiority. And yet another anti-quote comes from Ian McCulloch, whose "I'm the only genuine sex symbol in the current pop scene" crashes straight through the insufferability barriers. I don't know about sexy, Ian, but stuff like this definitely makes you seem like a rather desperate Jagger wannabe. Spare us ... the rock god arrogance.

Anyway, this book is a dispiriting read. The good quotes are few and far between, the humdrum ones predominate, and the bad ones stick in the craw. Add to this the fact that Holt peppers the text with normative little editorialisms ("How profound" he jeers in response to Garth Brooks' "The greatest conflicts are not between two people but between one person and himself"), refers to "Peter" Shelley not Pete, takes quotes from Mojo, Q, Uncut and The Word (but not Sounds, ZigZag or any underground press or fanzines whatsoever), and it's pretty clear that the Wit & Wisdom is basically a cash-in quickie designed for the middle-aged rock dad, probably the sort of thing an unimaginative partner would buy as a birthday present for a bloke who listens to remastered CDs of "classic" Hendrix, Sex Pistols and Manic Street Preachers. Hmm, listen to yourself, Niluccio, you're sounding mightily superior now. Anyway, this book ain't for me. One final thing about W&W is that it pads out its not-especially-impressive pages with chunks of song lyrics as supposed reinforcement for the little nuggets from the pop stars and the journos. I don't think they add much - if anything they just remind you that the words of the best music can be incredibly powerful/moving but, used like this, they're reduced to trite snippets (cheap essential scenery, as John Lydon might have said). But here and there they do, it's true, retain a little of their value. I reckon Dylan's "How does it feel / To be a without a home / Like a complete unknown / Like a rolling stone?" still packs a punch, especially complete unknown. And for different reasons I also fastened onto Pink Floyd's "Hanging on in a quiet desperation is the English way", with its reworking of Henry David Thoreau's famous lines from Walden. I don't know if it's true that the "mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation", but after reading The Wit & Wisdom of Music I'm beginning to think they probably do.