Search Results for: David Hill

Judge a Book Not By its Gender

Illustration by Carolyn Wells

Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | May, 2021 | 29 minutes (7,916 words)

I blame Drew Barrymore for two things: the amount of money I have spent on celebrity memoirs and an unfortunate attempt to dye my hair platinum blonde in 1993, inspired by Drew’s locks in a Seventeen magazine Guess Jeans ad.

Little Girl Lost, Barrymore’s 1990 account of growing up as a child star in Hollywood, was my first celebrity autobiography. It ignited my love of celebrity memoirs, especially those by women. My dog-eared copy has survived numerous book purges and cross-country moves. I am not alone in my appreciation for it. The coming-of-age tale was a New York Times bestseller and although the book is now out of print, it has achieved cult-like status. It was even the subject of a 2018 New York Times Magazine Letter of Recommendation.

Barrymore was just 11 months old when she got her start in a television commercial for Puppy Chow. At 7 she starred as Gertie in Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster 1982 film E.T. and that same year became the youngest person ever to host Saturday Night Live. Barrymore’s drug and alcohol use began shortly after E.T. phoned home. The first time she got drunk she was 9. Barrymore started smoking weed at 10 and by 12 had moved on to cocaine. The actress entered rehab at 13; during her second stint in rehab she completed Little Girl Lost, which was published when she was just 16.

Barrymore’s drug and alcohol use began shortly after E.T. phoned home.

Gossip and juicy stories about nightclubbing with Jack Nicholson definitely make for a good read, but what initially drew me to the book was that Barrymore wrote it to counter stories about herself in the National Enquirer. “[I]magining the godawful headlines — ‘Drew Barrymore Cocaine Addict at Twelve Years Old’ or ‘Barrymore Burns Out in Teens’ — and the impression people would get of me was all my worst possible fears come true. I would’ve been the last person on Earth to deny my problems, but I wanted to have the option of confessing them,” Barrymore writes in Little Girl Lost. She wanted to come clean on her own terms. Barrymore’s desire to control her own life story compelled me to read the book and has made me return to it over the years.

Barrymore wanted to redirect her life’s narrative and that’s a popular reason why celebrities embrace the genre, but it is not the only reason. Some stars write their book to revive a stalled career and return to the limelight. For others, memoirs extend their 15 minutes of fame. This is a popular motivation for reality show stars. (Will you accept this rose and this six-figure book deal?) Memoirs also settle old scores. In André Leon Talley’s The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir, the fashion journalist and former Vogue creative director works through his issues with Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Memoirs can also promote the brand a star has built around their celebrity. Reese Witherspoon’s Whiskey in a Teacup, which markets the star’s Southern Lifestyle to y’all, or any book from one of Queer Eye’s Fab Five are great examples.

For readers, celebrity memoir appeal lies in the juicy gossip and name dropping, and the chance to peek inside and live, if only for 500 pages, the glamorous lifestyles of the rich and famous. Social media, reality television, celebrity gossip blogs, and the popularity of TMZ-style tabloid journalism have created an insatiable desire to know more about our favorite celebrities. Celebrity memoirs help fulfill this desire. Sometimes, unfortunately, we learn a little too much about our favorite stars. After reading Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist, her third memoir, I am unable to watch Star Wars without thinking about all the coke Fisher said was consumed on set. I imagine the film’s stars hollowing out lightsabers to use like giant straws to blow rails with. (That’s not how the force works!)

While it’s easy to dismiss celebrity memoirs as guilty pleasure reads or unworthy of serious literary consideration, you cannot deny the genre’s popularity. One of the bestselling celebrity memoirs of all time, former first lady Michelle Obama’s 2018 release, Becoming, is still on the The New York Times bestsellers list and has sold more than 10 million copies. Recent months have seen new books from everyone from singer Mariah Carey to actor Matthew McConaughey to soccer star Megan Rapinoe. Celebrity memoirs are big business and we have Rolling Stones co-founder and guitarist Keith Richards to thank for that. His bestselling memoir Life was published in October 2010 and more celebrity autobiographies were published in the four years that followed than had been in the previous 15.

Life, for which Richards received a $7 million dollar advance, sold over one million copies in its first year. Following the success of Life, memoirs by male musicians from Duff McKagan to Steven Tyler were all bestsellers and it is not just men penning the hits. Remember when we all got together and decided women were funny after Bossypants came out? Tina Fey’s 2011 bestselling memoir preceded an onslaught of popular memoirs by funny ladies, including Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) and Amy Poehler’s Yes Please.

***

Since first reading Little Girl Lost at 20, I have devoured memoirs by female celebrities from punk singer Alice Bag’s Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, A Chicana Punk Story to Jersey Shore star Snooki’s Confessions of a Guidette. I’m interested in how women write their stories, what they leave out, what they focus on, and how much of what they reveal is a reaction to the image of them we have from watching their movies or listening to their music or seeing them stumbling out of nightclubs in Us Weekly.

“How do we edit our life into a decent story? That’s the rub with an autobiography or memoir. What to reveal, what to keep hidden, what to embellish, what to downplay, and what to ignore? How much of the inner and how much of the outer?” says punk icon and Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry in her 2019 memoir, Face It, of a process that is scrutinized and critiqued much more if, like Harry, you’re a woman.

I’m interested in how women write their stories, what they leave out, what they focus on, and how much of what they reveal is a reaction to the image of them we have from watching their movies or listening to their music or seeing them stumbling out of nightclubs in “Us Weekly.”

And while there is no shortage of male celebrities spilling their guts all over my poorly constructed Ikea bookshelf, the fact that they share shelf space with celebrity memoirs written by women is about all they have in common. When it comes to celebrity memoirs there’s a distinct gender bias in everything from how the books are marketed to the type of topics female celebrities are expected to write about and the amount of themselves they are expected to expose to sell books.

The gender divide bias becomes even more problematic, and downright depressing, when you read the reviews and see how critics and the press receive female celebrity memoirs. Rather than celebrate women and their amazing stories, reviewers revert to stereotypes and tired clichés and, in the process, miss the actual story. Women can spend chapters talking about their accomplishments, their awards, and their accolades and reviewers will still only focus on the sex, the scandal, and the bombshell reveals that are expected from female-penned celebrity memoirs if they want to actually sell books. From memoir titles to book blurbs, when it comes to celebrity memoirs by women, sadly, we haven’t come a long way baby.

 

***

Debbie Harry’s Face It was one of the most anticipated celebrity memoirs of the recent past. In the book, Harry chronicles everything from her adoption at only 3 months old, to her days in the hippie band Wind in the Willows and all-girl group the Stillettos, to forming both Blondie the band and Blondie the persona. For Harry, Blondie was very much a character she played, one inspired by the “Hey, Blondie!” catcalls she received from construction workers after bleaching her hair, as well as the 1930s Blondie comic strip character who was a “dumb blonde who turns out to be smarter than the rest of them.” Marilyn Monroe was also an inspiration; Harry describes Monroe as “the proverbial dumb blonde with the little-girl voice and big-girl body,” who despite her appearance has “a lot of smarts behind the act.”

Face It also covers Harry’s acting in films like Videodrome and Hairspray, her time training as a professional wrestler for a role in the Broadway play Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap, as well as her activism and philanthropy work. (Fun fact: She was almost Pris in Blade Runner, but her record company made her turn it down.) There is certainly no shortage of great material for reviewers to discuss. Unfortunately, they responded with the same tired sexist tropes that greet memoirs written by women.

“In her memoir, Debbie Harry proves she’s more than just a pretty blonde in tight pants,” read the headline on The Washington Post’s review of Face It. The headline was later changed to, “In her memoir, Debbie Harry gives an unvarnished look at her life in the punk scene” after social media responded less than kindly to the sexist headline choice. The Washington Post admitted they botched the headline and appreciated the feedback, but the headline was not the review’s only problem.

The review opens with: “Even if Debbie Harry, of the band Blondie, isn’t to your taste—her voice too smooth, her sexiness too blatant, her music too smooth—you can’t dismiss certain truths about her.” While this sentence is a great example of disdain, it is not a great review opening. I read Bruce Springsteen’s 2016 memoir Born to Run at the same time as Harry’s and tried to imagine the Post opening a review of Springsteen’s book in the same way. To be fair I do find his sexiness far, far too blatant.

So how does the Post open Springsteen’s memoir review? “Why, one might ask, would Bruce Springsteen need to write an autobiography? Haven’t we been listening to it for the past half century? Hasn’t he been telling us his story all along?” says Joe Heim in the review’s first paragraph. Springsteen, a talented songwriter, has already shared so much through his music, what more could he be required to give us? It is okay if you want to sit this one out Bruce, I have heard Atlantic City, and do not require any further emoting from you at this time.

The Post’s review of Face It just goes from bad to worse, with criticism that Harry “sometimes comes across as self-interested” to a focus on the more sensationalist aspects of her story like sex and drugs. (This is an autobiography, right? I didn’t see them complaining about the 79 chapters in Springsteen’s book.) “She had a hookup with an Andy Warhol protégé in a phone booth in Max’s Kansas City and began what she blithely calls ‘chipping and dipping’ in heroin,” reads the review. The Post points out that “Harry is quite explicit in her descriptions of her drug use and sex life,” which they seem to interpret as permission to exploit the more sensationalistic aspects of her life and use them as a focal point in their review.

The review also offers a great example of how media likes to promote and celebrate the idea of women as trailblazers, praising Harry for being candid about the realities of being a female musician (an “unvarnished look”), while also painfully reinforcing the realities of being a female musician by using a sexist, stereotypical headline that focuses only on Harry’s appearance and sex appeal.

Control is a central theme of Harry’s book, whether it be of her image, her band, or her art. Early in the book Harry recounts a record company promoting Blondie’s first album using posters with an image of her in a see-through blouse, despite early reassurances that the posters would only feature headshots and would include all band members. She was not happy with the marketing decision, saying, “Sex sells, that’s what they say, and I’m not stupid, I know that. But on my terms, not some executive’s.” And while doing things on her own terms is a source of pride for Harry, reviewers have a serious problem with it.

For Harry control empowers, for memoir reviewers it threatens. “You can’t control other people’s fantasies or the illusion they’re buying or selling,” says Harry early in Face It when talking about people having posters of her on their bedroom walls. While Harry resigns herself to her lack of control, reviews of her work never want to relinquish theirs. Harry’s insistence on doing things on her own terms is panned by reviewers who call her guarded and closed off.

Reviewers want to read a book by a female celebrity and have her completely figured out by the last page. “[W]hat’s a memoir for, if not to pull back the curtain and check out the lady who is pushing the buttons?” asks Harry in Face It. But when the curtain doesn’t pull back as much as reviewers want, they become resentful, sullen, and offended, reacting with “how dare you?” to any resistance on the part of the woman to give them everything they want, every piece of her. The Atlantic’s review reads almost like it’s giving Harry permission to tell her story on her own terms, saying “holding back is an understandable maneuver for someone who’s been stared at so much.”

One way or another, the reviewers keep the sexist treatment coming when discussing Face It. The Guardian was also annoyed that Harry did not give enough of herself in the book. “It’s a shame that Harry passes up the chance to dig deeper into her experiences of objectification and the nature of fame, but more disappointing is that we learn so little about her interior life, and how she really thinks and feels.” I guess talking about being raped at knifepoint by a stranger is not enough for the reviewer. What’s with the heart of glass Debbie? Give us more of your pain! And on page five, not 105!

I guess talking about being raped at knifepoint by a stranger is not enough for the reviewer. What’s with the heart of glass Debbie? Give us more of your pain! And on page five, not 105!

The headline of Rolling Stone’s piece on Face It highlights how Harry’s book “looks back on what she learned from Andy Warhol and David Bowie.” The media loves to position women in relation to the men in their lives as if the only way we can understand work by women is in the context of the men who orbit them. Despite writing 368 pages about herself, according to Rolling Stone, the only interesting thing about Harry is the famous male company she kept.

The New York Times continues the tired pop culture gender bias with a review that manages to make it all the way to the fourth paragraph before it mentions her age. It also talks about the number of memoirs by female rockers being released at the same time as Harry’s book. (“[T]here’s a bit of a pileup of female rockers getting reflective this season.”) I smell a trend. Ladies, they be writing! The review mentions the fact that Harry’s “face is unlined” and talks about her “crisp red collared blouse with white polka dots and red leggings.” I think Bruce was wearing the exact same thing when they wrote their piece about him and Born to Run. How embarrassing.

Two weeks after Face It came out another musical icon released a memoir. Me by Elton John covers the singer’s childhood in the London suburb of Pinner, his early musical days in Los Angeles, his songwriting partnership with Bernie Taupin, successful solo career, and marriage and family with husband David Furnish. Keen celebrity memoir readers might also be quick to point out that the title of John’s memoir is the same as that of actress Katharine Hepburn’s. Is there anything men will not just unapologetically lay claim to?

The review mentions the fact that Harry’s “face is unlined” and talks about her “crisp red collared blouse with white polka dots and red leggings.” I think Bruce was wearing the exact same thing when they wrote their piece about him and “Born to Run.” How embarrassing.

While Rolling Stone’s book review name-checked Harry’s famous male friends in the headline, not surprisingly, John’s does not. “Elton John’s Me Is A Uniquely Revealing Pop Star Autobiography. The long-awaited book covers his hard childhood, struggles with addiction and road to recovery.” It ends with “Elton has never been one to hold back difficult truths, and Me — while a little skimpy on revelations about his brilliant, ground breaking music — is essential reading for anyone who wants to know the difficult road that he walked while creating it.”

Entertainment Weekly’s description of Me is also glowing: “While Me is as colorful as you’d expect from an artist famous for his outlandish stage costumes and outsize temper tantrums, it is also so much more than simply a dishy sex, drugs and, rock ‘n roll tell-all.” The Entertainment Weekly review shows that when it comes to male celebrity memoirs there may be sex and drugs, but no review should reduce their work to just these scandalous and juicy elements.

Can you feel the love tonight? Not yet? Never fear, here comes The Guardian to continue the praise. Their review opens with, “Choosing one’s favourite Elton John story – like choosing one’s favourite Elton song – can feel like limiting oneself to a mere single grape from the horn of plenty.” Reading reviews of the book you have to wonder if John is still standing because he is unable to sit down from all the ass kissing. The Daily Mail calls it “the rock memoir of the decade” while for The Washington Post it is an “unsparing, extravagantly funny new memoir” and “bracingly honest.” It’s hard to find criticism and scrutiny in the reviews of John’s work because there is not much negativity. John’s book is not better than Harry’s; in fact, I think Harry’s is much stronger. She’s more self-aware and can deconstruct the misconceptions and preconceptions that fans, the media, and other musicians have of her.

Can you feel the love tonight? Not yet? Never fear, here comes “The Guardian” to continue the praise.

“You think you’re being difficult, my little sausage? Have I ever told you about the time I drank eight vodka martinis, took all my clothes off in front of a film crew, and then broke my manager’s nose?” he writes of being a father reacting to his son’s temper tantrums. There are plenty of stories about famous friends like Stevie Wonder, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Andy Warhol, and Neil Young. The anecdotes leave readers feeling like they never get to peek behind the shiny veneer of the celebrity that is Elton John. At times it’s all surface and that’s fine, but reviewers do not criticize him for it in the same way they would if he were a woman.

John’s book reviews do talk of his well-documented addiction to cocaine (“If you fancy living in a despondent world of unending, delusional bullshit, I really can’t recommend cocaine highly enough,” he writes), but they are quick to follow it up with redemption stories, which is a standard formula in memoirs written both by and about men.

“Now that he’s sober, there’s the more conservatively dressed, happily married elder statesman of British pop, a proper establishment figure,” writes The Guardian. Not only do they give him a redemption arc and treat his addiction very much like a phase, but they also give his addiction issues a free pass, writing “while his extraordinary talent justified his personal excesses, it is his self-awareness that has counterbalanced the narcissism and made him such a likable figure.”

***

Redemption comes up often in male celebrity memoir coverage, but examine the media’s reaction to another celebrity memoir and it becomes painfully clear that this narrative is strictly for the boys.

Actress, producer, and director Demi Moore’s memoir Inside Out was released a few weeks before John’s. Moore and her book were soon all over the media and it was not for her redemption story. Like John, Moore struggled with addiction, but unlike John the media never lets her forget it, along with other parts of her story.

“Demi Moore drops shocking revelations about Ashton Kutcher, sexual assault and sobriety,” reads the headline of an L.A. Times piece about the memoir. The story proceeds to break down Moore’s childhood pain, her miscarriage, Ashton Kutcher cheating on her, and her struggles with alcohol and drugs.

Unlike In Touch Weekly, they skipped the “Ashton and Bruce Are in Good Places Too” sidebar because like with Debbie Harry, we cannot talk about Moore without mentioning the famous men in her life. More than one review talks about how Willis and Kutcher must feel about Demi airing their dirty laundry. Was Bruce mad? What does Ashton really think? Dude, where’s my sound bite?

Entertainment Weekly’s piece ran with the headline, “Celebrities react to Demi Moore’s revealing memoir Inside Out. From Jon Cryer’s affectionate follow-up to Ashton Kutcher’s cryptic non-response.” They forgot to add “male” in front of “celebrities” though as all the celebrities quoted in the piece were men. Also, if one more reviewer mentions how great Moore looks for her age, I will make them watch that awful scene in St. Elmo’s Fire where Rob Lowe’s character passionately details the origin story of St. Elmo’s Fire while performing pyrotechnics with a can of aerosol hairspray and a lighter on repeat until they beg me for mercy.

Also, if one more reviewer mentions how great Moore looks for her age, I will make them watch that awful scene in “St. Elmo’s Fire” where Rob Lowe’s character passionately details the origin story of St. Elmo’s Fire while performing pyrotechnics with a can of aerosol hairspray and a lighter on repeat until they beg me for mercy.

Most of Moore’s memoir coverage focused on the tabloid aspects of it. Read the headlines to see if you can spot a trend and how many you can read before you want to just set shit on fire (you can borrow Rob’s aerosol can).

“7 Biggest Bombshells From Demi Moore’s Explosive Memoir” (accessonline.com)

“Demi Moore: 8 Biggest Bombshells From Her Memoir Inside Out” (popculture.com, also, take that accessonline.com)

“Demi Moore’s raw Inside Out reveals rape, why marriage to Ashton Kutcher crumbled” (USA Today)

“Demi Moore Gets Real About Her Painful Childhood, Drugs, Ashton Kutcher and Other Exes in New Book ‘Inside Out‘” (Stay classy, Us Weekly)

“Why Demi Moore Fulfilled Ashton Kutcher’s Threesome Fantasies” (E! Online)

The unfortunate thing about these headlines, which would be vastly different if they were referencing a man’s memoir, is that, like Harry, they reduce Moore’s story to only its most scandalous and juicy elements. Moore got her acting start in 1981 as Jackie Templeton on General Hospital (Luke and Laura forever!), the number one show on daytime television at the time. She followed that up with roles in films like the Brat Pack bonanzas St. Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night.

Then she got what many, including Moore, consider to be a turning point in her career. “This could be either an absolute disaster, or it could be amazing,” she writes of reading the script for Ghost, which ended up being a big hit in 1990, grossing over $500 million. It was nominated for five Oscars and four Golden Globes, including a Golden Globes best actress nomination for Moore.

Moore followed the success of Ghost with A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal, and Striptease, a film for which she was offered over $12 million, an amount no other woman in Hollywood had ever received. Moore became the highest paid actress in Hollywood. “But instead of people seeing my big payday as a step in the right direction for women or calling me an inspiration, they came up with something else to call me: Gimmie Moore.” It is worth noting that at the time her husband Bruce Willis had just been paid $20 million for the third Die Hard movie. (Yippee ki yay indeed!)

“She became a movie star in this time where women didn’t naturally fit into the system,” said Gwyneth Paltrow, a friend of Moore’s, in the The New York Times piece on Inside Out. “She was really the first person who fought for pay equality and got it, and really suffered a backlash from it. We all certainly benefited from her,” says Paltrow.

And while it pains me greatly to side with someone who talks a lot about vagina steaming, Paltrow’s right. Moore is an inspiration and fighting for equal pay in Hollywood should be one of the things the media focuses on when they talk about Inside Out, but, sadly, it is not. It is unfortunate that when Moore is discussed it is in the context of Ashton Kutcher and threesomes, at the expense of the many other empowering and interesting parts of her life.

And while it pains me greatly to side with someone who talks a lot about vagina steaming, Paltrow’s right. Moore is an inspiration and fighting for equal pay in Hollywood should be one of the things the media focuses on when they talk about “Inside Out,” but, sadly, it is not.

Remember her iconic Vanity Fair cover? Shot in 1991 by Annie Leibovitz when Moore was seven months pregnant with her second daughter Scout, it’s considered one of the most influential magazine covers of all time. Legendary Esquire art director George Lois describes it as, “A brave image on the cover of a great magazine — a stunning work of art that conveyed a potent message that challenged a repressed society.” Let’s talk about that!

Or her intense training for her role in G.I. Jane, a 1997 film Moore both starred in and produced. “I was emotionally invested in the story, the message and the provocative questions it raised,” she says of the film. The film was panned by critics and Moore talks at length in Inside Out about her disappointment at the reception to a project that meant so much to her.

The parts of the book where Moore talks about Hollywood’s double standard, whether it be the pay gap or reactions to the age difference between her and Kutcher, are some of the best parts of the book. Unfortunately, they are the parts covered least.

The last line of Inside Out is, “we all suffer, and we all triumph, and we all get to choose how we hold both.” It is a great line for a memoir to end on, but in Moore’s case, while she may get to choose how she holds both, the media will only ever focus on the suffer part.

There is the emphasis on opening up, on fighting, on bravery, on revealing — “Demi Moore Lets Her Guard Down,” reads The New York Times headline. This is the way memoirs by women are positioned and even if it isn’t explicitly spelled out, it has become the expectation so much so that when female celebrities don’t expose themselves completely they are resented for it. The reception to Harry’ book Face It offers proof.

***

Jessica Simpson released her memoir Open Book in February 2020. It reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list, but like Moore’s, Simpson’s book soon became tabloid fodder. “Jessica’s Shocking Confessions,” reads the headline on Star’s piece on the book, which focuses on Simpson’s struggles with drug and alcohol abuse and her famous exes from Nick Lachey to John Mayer. Like Moore, Simpson is now sober.

Simpson was signed to Columbia Records in 1997 at 17 as the label’s answer to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and went on to release six bestselling records. She also starred in the MTV reality show Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, which featured Simpson and then husband and 98 Degrees singer Nick Lachey, who at the time was the more successful of the two. If you don’t remember Lachey from MTV you might know him from his recent gig hosting Netflix’s Love is Blind where he greets contestants with “Obviously, I’m Nick Lachey,” which seems to overestimate his place in both pop culture’s canon and our general consciousness.

Newlyweds, a ratings success, aired for two years and while it made the couple a household name, it was Simpson who stole the show with her ditzy, dumb blonde antics. Her confusion over whether Chicken of the Sea was chicken or tuna earned her a place in both reality television and pop culture history. The most interesting parts of Open Book are when Simpson talks about her reality television persona and the identity crisis it led to. “How was I supposed to live a real healthy life filtered through the lens of a reality show? If my personal life was my work, and my work required me to play a certain role, who even was I anymore?” she writes.

Open Book is Simpson’s attempt to distance herself from her Newlyweds role and change perceptions of her, a common reason people write memoirs. Some get it —“You Remember Jessica Simpson, Right? Wrong,” reads the headline on The New York Times piece about her memoir — but, unfortunately, most of the reviewers discussing her book don’t. Simpson has moved beyond her Newlyweds character. She’s built a billion-dollar fashion and licensing business and is a mom to three kids, but the media seem uncomfortable embracing Simpson in her new roles, preferring to keep her forever stuck in 2003, in her UGG boots and pink Juicy Couture tracksuit, confused about tuna.

Simpson has moved beyond her “Newlyweds” character. She’s built a billion-dollar fashion and licensing business and is a mom to three kids, but the media seem uncomfortable embracing Simpson in her new roles, preferring to keep her forever stuck in 2003, in her UGG Boots and pink Juicy Couture tracksuit, confused about tuna.

Simpson talks about the effect this identity crisis had on her and her struggles with her weight and body image, as well as her sexual abuse at age 6, and her addiction to alcohol and pills. She started to increasingly rely on alcohol during her relationship with Mayer in 2006, insecure that she wasn’t smart enough to date Mayer. My heart breaks when I think of Simpson wasting time worried about being the intellectual equal of the man who gave us the musical depth that is “Your Body is a Wonderland” and later referred to sex with Simpson as “sexual napalm.”

It is also troubling that after talking about how Mayer brought out her insecurities, the media thinks it is a good idea to focus on Mayer’s reaction to Open Book. I know you thought you were never good enough for this guy and that he was always judging you, so let’s get him to judge you some more by asking what he thought of your book!

***

Simpson’s attempts to challenge the dumb blonde perception of her are not the only example of a female celebrity going off script or off brand in their memoir and failing to give the media, and readers, what they want or expect. Singer and songwriter Liz Phair’s Horror Stories says “a memoir” on the front cover, but the book is more a collection of essays and stories by Phair than a straightforward linear memoir. Reviewers did not respond well to Phair’s artistic license with the storytelling form.

“It’s hard to tell the truth about ourselves. It opens us up to being judged and rejected,” Phair writes in Horror Stories and that may be one reason she chose to tell her story the way she did. Through stories about blizzards, blackouts (from lack of electricity, not drinking), marital infidelity, giving birth to her son, and getting dressed up to go to Trader Joe’s, Phair reveals a lot about herself and about identity, insecurity, fame, and regret. “In the stories that make up this book, I am trusting you with my deepest self,” she writes in the book’s prologue. Her deepest self just might be a bit harder to find for those fuck and run readers who are too busy complaining about the book’s nontraditional memoir style to actually read it.

Horror Stories does not talk a lot about her music, including Phair’s critically acclaimed, influential 1993 album Exile in Guyville. A song-by-song reply to the 1972 Rolling Stones album Exile on Main St., it was the number one album in year-end lists from Spin and The Village Voice and was rated the fifth best album of the 1990s by Pitchfork. “At the time, it was a landmark of foul-mouthed, comprised intimacy, a tortured confessional, a workout in female braggadocio, and a wellspring of penetrating self-analysis and audacity,” reads The New Yorker’s piece on the 20th anniversary of Exile in Guyville’s release.

“Frankness is Liz Phair’s brand. Her 1993 breakthrough album, the brilliant and profane Exile in Guyville, chronicled her post-college experiences in Chicago’s male-dominated music scene. Phair’s new memoir Horror Stories makes little mention of the album or her artistic life,” reads The Washington Post’s review. Remember how the Post thought that Bruce Springsteen did not need to write Born to Run because he had already revealed so much in his songs already? Why doesn’t Phair get the same consideration?

“Though there are anecdotes about flopping on live television and scrapping a record after learning of a collaborator’s abuse, the absence of concrete stories about Exile in Guyville is palpable,” writes Pitchfork. Just give us the hits, Liz! “Her relationship to music seems to have been the longest and maybe the most demanding love of her life, the one for which she has been willing to get lost, to fail, and to try again over and over for decades. Call me a selfish fan, but I have to say that is one story in all its horror and passion I would love to hear,” reads the review in The New York Times.

Reviewers spend so much time focused on what’s missing from Horror Stories that they miss what’s there. Well, maybe not all of what’s there. In chapter 14 of Horror Stories, called “Hashtag,” Phair writes about waking up one morning to headlines about the rock star who was supposed to produce her next album. Multiple women had come forward to accuse him of sexual harassment and emotional abuse. The FBI was also investigating him for exchanging sexually explicit communications with an underage fan.

Phair never specifically names Ryan Adams, but, in February 2019, seven months before Horror Stories was released, The New York Times broke the story about multiple women, including his ex-wife Mandy Moore, coming forward to accuse Adams of manipulative behavior, sexual misconduct, emotional and verbal abuse, and harassment.

In the chapter, Phair talks about her own experiences with sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalkers, and the sexism she experienced in the music industry. She writes about being instructed by a record label president to let radio programmers “feel her up a little” because it would help boost her career or about being told that she would never work again if she didn’t go along with sexy photo shoots. But her personal stories are not what the press focused on when she was promoting Horror Stories.

Phair was frequently asked about Adams and her experience working with him. “I don’t want every headline about this book that is so important to me to be about Ryan Adams,” she tells Entertainment Weekly. She becomes understandably annoyed with a male reporter from New York Magazine who asks her several questions about Adams, including one about his process as a producer. (I know when I hear about a man accused of sexual misconduct the first thing I wonder about is his artistic process.) “Out of everything in the book, why is the Ryan Adams thing such an interesting topic?” Phair asks him. “You’re not the only one singling out Ryan Adams as a hot talking point, and it’s sad. It does need to be talked about, but so do the larger issues.”

It’s unfortunate that Phair shares intimate details about herself, and her own experiences with sexual harassment and assault, and the media takeaway from that is that they don’t like the format of her book and would rather talk about the famous man in her life. Congrats on your book Liz, did Ryan ever send you inappropriate texts?

***

While Phair is criticized for not talking about what is expected of her in her memoir, men who follow the same course do not hear “how dare you?” The reaction to Acid for the Children, the 2019 memoir by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea (aka Michael Balzary), proves that.

Acid for the Children details Flea’s childhood growing up in Australia, his relationship with his older sister Karyn, his family’s move to the U.S. when he was 4, his first crush, how Kurt Vonnegut Jr. changed his life, and his love of basketball and the Sony Walkman. He talks about meeting Red Hot Chili Peppers lead singer Anthony Kiedis in 1976 at Fairfax High School, about learning to play bass, about his first band Anthym, about shooting coke and taking speed, his time in the California punk band FEAR, and about acting in the 1983 movie Suburbia. There are also lists of the concerts that changed his life, books that blew his mind, and movies that grew him. Lots of great material, right? You know what’s missing? Anything about the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the bestselling, Grammy-winning, Rock-and-Roll-Hall-of-Fame-inducted band he founded, plays bass in, and is most strongly associated with.

Flea’s book ends just as Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem, what would later become the Red Hot Chili Peppers, play their first show at the Grandia Room in Los Angeles to 27 people in February 1983. This performance comes up on page 375 of the 385-page book. There’s no mention of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, his movie roles beyond Suburbia (My Own Private Idaho being one of his most famous), his role as a father of two girls, how he founded the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, or his work with other musicians from Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace to Alanis Morissette. (Flea played bass on “You Oughta Know,” her hit single from 1995’s Jagged Little Pill.)

The book is about Flea’s journey to the band, rather than with it. Surely, reviewers were as outraged by this omission, as they were when Phair failed to talk about Exile in Guyville in Horror Stories. It will not surprise you to know they were not bothered at all. Rather than focus on what was missing from Acid for the Children, the coverage focuses on what’s there and praise for it. Reviews focus on Flea’s gift and skill as a writer and fail to mention that if you want to dream of Californication, you will have to do that somewhere else. Reviewers can see, and appreciate, Flea as something other than just the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. There is a very distinct set of rules female celebrities writing their memoirs must follow. The more tell all, the more trauma and the more tabloid, the better. They are not free to write about what they want. They must bare it all, page after page. Men like Flea have the freedom to operate by a very different set of rules. He can leave his scar tissue out and reviewers have no problem with it. Book coverage focuses on Flea the writer, rather than Flea the bassist. This same courtesy, and basic level of respect, is never extended to women telling their stories. Female celebrities like Debbie and Demi are never just human beings writing about their lives. Reviewers are unable to abandon their preconceived notions, their ideas of who these women are, their celebrity personas and just see them as people who should be allowed to tell their stories their way.

“[H]e’s actually a lovely writer, with a particular gift for the free-floating and reverberant. He writes in Beat Generation bursts and epiphanies, lifting toward the kind of virtuosic vulnerability and self-exposure associated with the great jazz players,” reads the review in The Atlantic.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly Flea said that his goal with Acid for the Children was that “it could be a book that could live beyond being a celebrity book or a rock star book and just stand on its own as a piece of literature.” I can only imagine the outrage if Debbie Harry wrote Face It and the book ended with, “And then I started this band Blondie. See you later!” Or if Demi Moore ended Inside Out with, “Then I got the part in this movie St. Elmo’s Fire. The end.” Or if Courtney Love wrote her memoir (please do this, Courtney) and the last page read, “And then I met this guy Kurt, but I have to go be the girl with the most cake now. Peace out.” The fact that Love and her accomplishments are forever tied to her husband is a whole other gender bias problem all together.

The book is about Flea’s journey to the band, rather than with it. Surely, reviewers were as outraged by this omission, as they were when Phair failed to talk about “Exile in Guyville” in “Horror Stories.” It will not surprise you to know they were not bothered at all.

Of course, Flea is not the first Red Hot Chili Pepper to give it away in a celebrity memoir. In 2004, lead singer Anthony Kiedis wrote Scar Tissue, a New York Times bestseller about his life, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and his time in and out of rehab, as well as in and out of various women. If you have ever thought, “I bet Anthony Kiedis does well with the ladies but would really like to get a better sense of his success rate,” then this is the book for you. In his memoir Kiedis gets away with writing about debauchery, depravity, and drug abuse in a way that reads like a Behind the Music episode on steroids. (See any book by a current or past member of Mötley Crüe or Guns N’ Roses for a further look at this style.) A woman would never get away with writing about drugs like Kiedis does.

When women write about their addiction there’s an apologetic, self-aware tone male memoirs don’t have: “I know I am a drug addict, and I keep messing up, but I’m really sorry, and please stick with me cause I am gonna sort this out.” (See How To Murder Your Life by fashion and beauty journalist Cat Marnell and More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction from Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel, who passed away in 2020, for great examples of this.) Also, I would like to point out the blurbs on the backs of Scar Tissue by Kiedis and How To Murder Your Life by Marnell in case you still doubt there’s a gender bias when it comes to how celebrity memoirs are received.

“Hot Bukowski” —Rolling Stone on Marnell

“A frank, unsparing, meticulous account of a life lived entirely on impulse, for pleasure, and for kicks” —Time on Kiedis

Oh, and, if you’re reading this and in charge of greenlighting Red Hot Chili Pepper memoirs can you please get John Frusciante working on his? Frusciante is known for talking at length about both his connection to spirits (he might already have a ghostwriter!) and different dimensions and worlds. If there’s a book by a band member to be written this is the one.

It is also impossible to talk about Flea’s book without mentioning the title, which comes from the song by a band called Too Free Stooges. A man can get away with calling his memoir Acid for the Children, while a woman certainly cannot. I would like to see Demi Moore title her memoir Whippets for the Wee Ones and see how far she gets. If I look at memoir titles by women on my bookshelves there is Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, by Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, The Girl in the Back by 1970s drummer Laura Davis-Chanin, Girl in a Band by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, and Not That Kind of Girl by actress and Girls creator Lena Dunham.

A man can get away with calling his memoir “Acid for the Children,” while a woman certainly cannot. I would like to see Demi Moore title her memoir “Whippets for the Wee Ones” and see how far she gets.

All the titles mention “girl” as if there is a need to announce that early on and get it out of the way, before the book has even been opened. Let us compare these with titles of the celebrity memoirs by dudes that I own. There’s Life by Keith Richards, Slash by Slash, The Heroin Diaries by Nikki Sixx, and In the Pleasure Groove by John Taylor. I do not know what the pleasure groove is, but I do hope it is also the name of the kick-ass yacht in Duran Duran’s “Rio” video.

***

Acid for the Children is not the only recent celebrity memoir by a man to resist the traditional memoir style and not receive criticism for it, although in the case of singer and songwriter Prince’s The Beautiful Ones, named for the song from Purple Rain, it’s understandable why it lacks the typical style of a life story given that its subject died just one month after the book’s publication was announced.

“He wanted to write the biggest music book in the world, one that would serve as a how-to-guide for creatives, a primer on African American entrepreneurship and a ‘handbook for the brilliant community,’” he told Dan Piepenbring, an editor at The Paris Review, who was writing the book with Prince. Notoriously private, to the point that reporters were not allowed to record their interviews, many were surprised Prince would want to write his life story at all. He wanted his book contract to state he could pull it from shelves if he felt the work no longer reflected him, which just seems like a very Prince thing to do.

Prince had completed just 30 handwritten pages before he died of an accidental fentanyl overdose on April 21, 2016. The pages detailed his childhood and his early days as a musician. Piepenbring returned to Prince’s Paisley Park compound months after the singer’s death to find additional material that could be used in the book. This material includes personal photos, drawings, song lyrics, and a handwritten synopsis of Purple Rain, Prince’s 1984 film that marked his acting debut. The addition of personal artifacts to round out the story means The Beautiful Ones is more scrapbook than memoir. “The Beautiful Ones does not offer a clear-eyed view of who Prince really was — he would have hated that, but it illuminates more than it conceals,” reads The Washington Post’s piece on the memoir.

Reading reviews of The Beautiful Ones, I wondered if the book would have even been finished and released if Prince were a woman or would it have been indefinitely shelved because of the death of its star. Maybe it would have focused on the singer’s drug use, final days, death, and the reaction to his death. The media has a way of making a female celebrity’s story about her death, not her life, which was noticeably lacking when the media talked about Prince and The Beautiful Ones.“It’s up to us to take what’s there and make something out of it for ourselves, creating, just as Prince wanted,” said NPR in their piece on the memoir. Prince’s life ended with respect and a beautiful tribute in book form, and glowing reviews for it. This respect is definitely missing when we pay tribute to female celebrities who have died. Their deaths provide another opportunity for the media to pick them apart and let their scandals overshadow their contributions. Following Prince’s death there were no pieces like the gossip-heavy Vanity Fair piece from 2012 on the late singer and actress Whitney Houston, “The Devils in the Diva,” which “investigates Houston’s final days: the prayers and the parties, the Hollywood con artist on the scene, and the message she left behind.” Or the, at times, less-than-respectful movies made about female celebrities after their deaths that focus more on their personal lives and troubles than they do on their art. Even in death, women like Houston and Amy Winehouse are still expected to bare all even though they are no longer with us.

This year will give us new memoirs from actresses Sharon Stone, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and Julianna Margulies, as well as singers Brandi Carlile and Billie Eilish. We are also getting a Stanley Tucci memoir and I think we can all agree he is the sexiest bald man (sorry, Prince William). Women are not just turning to books to tell their truths, with recent documentaries from the likes of Paris Hilton and Demi Lovato giving female celebrities the opportunity to tell their truths, clear up misconceptions, and control the narratives around their lives. We can only hope the way these stories are received starts to change, and that women can be free to tell their stories the way they want to (embrace your inner Flea, ladies!) without fear of negative reviews, sexist reviews, or questions about Ryan Adams’ artistic process. And please, no one ask John Mayer for his opinion.

***

Lisa Whittington-Hill is the publisher of This Magazine. Her writing about arts, pop culture, feminism, mental health, and why we should all be nicer to Lindsay Lohan has appeared in a variety of magazines.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Lost Album, Human Highway

CSNY, January 1, 1970. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

David Gambacorta | Longreads | March 2021 | 15 minutes (4,190 words)

They needed a song, but not just any song. It had to be a throat-clearing, lapel-grabbing, hey-what’s-that-sound number that could open what was shaping up to be one of the most anticipated albums of 1970: the debut of the super group to end all super groups, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. “We don’t have that song where you know that a listener will not take that needle off the record,” Graham Nash told Stephen Stills sometime in the fall of 1969, after they’d already labored for countless hours in a recording studio in San Francisco. “We need that song where we’ve got them from the very beginning.”

Nash, a skinny, shaggy former member of the British group The Hollies, and Stills, a soulful, straw-haired survivor of Buffalo Springfield, knew plenty about grabbing listeners by the ear. A year earlier, they’d discovered — at Joni Mitchell’s house in California, maybe, or Cass Elliot’s, no one’s quite sure — that they could create heavenly harmonies with David Crosby, the ex-Byrds singer who wore a droopy mustache, and the amused grin of a man who was in on some cosmic joke. They released an album, Crosby, Stills & Nash, that was filled with instant classics like the soaring “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” Then, at the urging of Ahmet Ertegun, the owlish Atlantic Records honcho, the trio turned themselves into a quartet, adding — with some reluctance — Neil Young’s reedy voice, barbed-wire guitar playing, and unpredictability to the mix. After the four of them played in front of 400,000 swaying, stoned people at Woodstock, their own concerts started to take on the feel of what Rolling Stone described as “mini-Woodstocks” that unleashed “effortless good vibes.”

Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

LOS ANGELES, CA - DECEMBER 17: During the coronavirus pandeimic a covid positive patient lays prone on his stomack to help his oxigene levels inside the ICU at Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital on Thursday, Dec. 17, 020 in Los Angeles, CA. ICU availability in Southern California at 0% amid deluge of COVID-19 patients. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from David Armstrong and Marshall Allen, Jesselyn Cook, Jason Sheehan, Tom Lamont, and Heather Stokes.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. Dying on the Waitlist

David Armstrong, Marshall Allen | ProPublica | February 18, 2021 | 22 minutes (5,663 words)

“In Los Angeles County and around the country, doctors have had to decide who gets a lifesaving COVID-19 treatment and who doesn’t.”

2. ‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents

Jesselyn Cook | HuffPost | January 11, 2021 | 24 minutes (6,000 words)

“What it’s like to lose the person who raised you to a far-right cult.”

3. Remnants on a South Philly Stoop

Jason Sheehan | Philadelphia Magazine | October 1, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,600 words)

Chef Omar Tate caught the attention of the food world with a pop-up celebrating the Black American food experience. He was right on the verge of blowing up. But instead, everything else did.

4. The Student and the Algorithm: How the Exam Results Fiasco Threatened One Pupil’s Future

Tom Lamont | The Guardian | Febuary 18, 2021 | 27 minutes (6,759 words)

“Bright students in historically low-achieving schools were tumbling, sometimes in great, cliff-edge drops of two or three grades, because of institutional records they had nothing to do with.”

5. Voices on Addiction: A Thief in the Night

Heather Stokes | The Rumpus | February 16, 2021 | 9 minutes (2,303 words)

Heather Stokes recounts what addiction has taken from her and her mother. To feed crack addictions, her bother and uncle stole not just possessions from the family house, they robbed the women of personal safety and any chance at stability.

Shelved: Yoko Ono

(Photo by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns — Getty Images)

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | January 2021 | 9 minutes (2,485 words)

Much is known about John Lennon’s self-described “Lost Weekend” — an 18-month separation from his wife Yoko Ono from the summer of 1973 to early 1975 — in which the former Beatle made records, produced records, drank, and took drugs to excess, and got kicked out of The Troubadour and various Los Angeles studios. Much less is known about how Ono spent her time back in New York.

In 1974, Ono recorded A Story at The Record Plant in New York. More than just another solo album, A Story was to be Ono’s first musical effort independent of her husband. Lennon produced or otherwise participated in all four of her previous recordings. Because of this, and the circumstances surrounding its creation, A Story is a statement of independence, a kind of personal manifesto. As a direct result of the couple’s reconciliation the following year, A Story was shelved at Ono’s direction. Most of its songs would resurface in later releases, sometimes in an entirely different emotional, as well as musical, context.

Read more…

‘We Told You So’: Revisiting the Bleak, Pandemic-Filled World of 12 Monkeys, 25 Years Later

Bruce Willis as Cole, the time-traveling protagonist in 12 Monkeys. Universal Pictures.

Director Terry Gilliam’s 1995 science-fiction film, 12 Monkeys, presented a desolate future in which a virus exterminates most of the world’s population and forces survivors to live underground. James Cole, the movie’s protagonist and a prisoner in this subterranean civilization in 2035, is sent back in time — to the 1990s — to find the original virus and bring it back to scientists in the future to develop a cure.

In the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak, many people stuck at home during lockdown turned to movies about fictional pandemics, including Gilliam’s surreal, chilling vision, which was brought to life by its three big stars — Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, and Madeleine Stowe. And 25 years on, as producer Charles Roven tells Eric Ducker in The Ringer, the movie “holds up really well.”

In this complete history of the making of 12 Monkeys, Ducker talks with Gilliam, its screenwriters David and Janet Peoples, and others who worked on the film.

The movie Outbreak came out several months before 12 Monkeys, and journalist Richard Preston’s 1994 book The Hot Zone about lethal filoviruses was a national bestseller. Still, for most of the world’s population, a massive pandemic had not been a pressing concern since the Spanish Flu killed 50 million people between 1918 and 1920. Now there is a rising feeling that the next one won’t come a century from now. It could arrive much sooner and could be far worse. “I think the very first spoken words that aren’t voice-over in our show are, ‘It’s never been about if. It’s always been when,’” Matalas says. “When you start to really dissect that data, it’s terrifying. Right now we’re on the precipice of a vaccine, but are we truly ready for the next [pandemic]? I don’t think so.”

In 12 Monkeys, Railly has written a book called The Doomsday Syndrome and gives a lecture at a museum about madness and apocalyptic visions. She discusses the Cassandra complex, the idea taken from Greek legend about figures who know the future but whose warnings aren’t heeded, leading to what Railly describes as, “[T]he agony of foreknowledge combined with the impotence to do anything about it.” In the 25 years since its release, 12 Monkeys is increasingly seen as a Cassandra of its own kind.

“We told you so,” Gilliam says.

Read the story

Longreads Best of 2020: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday. Read more…

Find Yourself

Photo Collage: "Find Yourself" by Stuart Horn/ Carolyn Wells

Elizabeth Isadora Gold| Longreads | September 2020 | 4,633 words (18 minutes)

It was 1981, in the Olde City section of Philadelphia. I was six. My parents were artists — my dad a cellist/composer/arranger and my mom a potter and teacher — and our tiny bathroom showed it. On one whole wall, my mom hung a poster of the San Francisco baths circa 1890, with lots of gents in one-piece suits and ladies in frilly bathing bonnets. By the toilet, on cinder block-and-board shelves, were stacks and stacks of magazines, New Yorkers, mostly. Postcards framed the mirror over the sink, fleshy vintage nudies with bobbed hair, standing in chorus lines.

Read more…

Inside the Chaos of Immigration Court

Photo collage: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) / Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Gabriel Thompson | Longreads | September 2020 | 6,849 words (24 minutes)

 

The Equitable Life Building, at 100 Montgomery Street, sits in the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District. Named after an insurance company, it was the first skyscraper built in the city after the Depression, a symbol of optimism rising 25 stories high with marble walls that sparkled in the sun. Today, it is home to all sorts of buzzy Bay Area companies, from Spruce Capital Partners (“investors and thought leaders in the Life Sciences industry”) to the OutCast Agency (“strategists and creatives” with “a hyper-growth mindset”). To get away from the hectic pace of investing, strategizing, and creating, tenants can burn off calories inside the building’s private gym or take their lunch break atop a luxurious rooftop deck. 

The Equitable Life Building is also home to the San Francisco Immigration Court, though it’s easy to miss. On my first visit last winter, the only hint that a court lay within was the scores of families in the lobby, clutching summonses and looking confused. The court is above, occupying the fourth, eighth, and ninth floors. Up here, the elevators opened into a slightly off-kilter dimension: A security line snaked into a cramped waiting room, which led to a winding and windowless hallway, from which one entered identical windowless courtrooms. It was deeply disorienting. I often encountered people fumbling around in the hallway, not sure how the hell to get out.    Read more…

How to Learn Everything: The MasterClass Diaries

hand with bowl with ravioli in the background
Photo credit: Jure Gasparic / EyeEm (Getty Images) and Vladimir Sukhachev (iStock / Getty Images Plus)

Irina Dumitrescu | Longreads | August 2020 | 5,406 words (21 minutes)

When I was a teenager I read James Thurber’s Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I fell in love with this story of a meek, middle-aged Connecticut man whose daydreams afford him temporary escape from a dreary shopping trip with his overbearing wife. Maybe it was because I was an incorrigible daydreamer too. Or maybe I read in his fantasies of being a fearless Navy commander, a world-famous surgeon, or a brandy-swilling bomber pilot a sense of my own opportunities in life, at that point still wide open if you left my gender out of it. Unlike Walter Mitty, I could still learn anything, be anyone.

With time I found a calling, studied for a doctorate in medieval literature, published a book only a handful of people would read, and gained a longed-for professorship. But new desires arose. I discovered I want to write books for more than five readers, and that doing so is remarkably hard. I started to feel afraid of being trapped in one role for the rest of my life. That sense of endless possibility I once had was slipping away.

One day, when MasterClass sends its millionth paid ad into my Facebook feed, I decide this is the answer to the Walter Mitty lurking inside me. MasterClass seems to offer everything: from writing seminars with over a dozen famous authors to celebrity-driven inspiration to take my hobbies further. Clearly, all I was missing were the right teachers, filmed professionally and beamed into my living room. I may not become a surgeon or a pilot, but what if the renaissance woman I’d hoped to be is just a $200 subscription away?
Read more…

The Proving Grounds: Charley Crockett and the Story of Deep Ellum

Photo credit: Bobby Cochran

Jonny Auping | Longreads | July 2020 | 32 minutes (8,734 words)

In 1912 two musicians were playing near the Union Depot on the corner of Elm Street and Central Track in a pocket of Dallas, Texas where, if you believed what the local papers wrote, you’d be wise to keep your money in your shoe. One was 24, likely playing his signature 12-string guitar. The other was 18 or 19 and blind with an acoustic guitar strapped across his imposing frame.

People passed by, some dropping change they could afford to part with. To hear the older one tell it, their music sent women running over to give them hugs and kisses. From there, they’d head a few blocks down Elm Street or Commerce, talking about women, music, and survival, the 24-year-old with the 12-string leading the blind man. They’d stop outside of local businesses, most likely pawn shops, and play. The older one would learn plenty about the blues from the blind one. Their little pocket in the middle of Dallas is known as Deep Ellum. You could walk the whole area in 15 minutes.

Around 1915 the two would part ways and never see each other again. The older one left Dallas with his 12-string. In 1918 he went to prison for murder. He spent the next 20 years in and out of incarceration and was dead by 1949. His name was Huddie Ledbetter, but he went by Lead Belly. The blind man would purportedly die in a Chicago blizzard in 1929. People called him Blind Lemon Jefferson.

In his Nobel Prize lecture, Bob Dylan credits Lead Belly’s records with getting him into folk music. George Harrison stated that without Lead Belly there would be “no Beatles.” Kurt Cobain would make similar sentiments about Nirvana. In his autobiography, Blues All Around Me, B.B. King wrote that he “flat-out tried to copy” Blind Lemon Jefferson. That line of influence traces directly through Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones.

Almost exactly 100 years later, a modern songster named Charley Crockett would stand at about that same spot playing for people’s change, though the Union Depot had been gone for over 70 years. Anyone with an ear for musical history would hear Crockett’s stories-disguised-as-songs and his blues style as an homage to men like Jefferson and Lead Belly and to a long-ago era of music, but Crockett wasn’t standing in that spot for its history. He was there for a particular kind of foot traffic; the kind where feet were attached to bodies that found street music endearing. By that point in 2014, he had survived for nearly a decade as a musician living on the streets. He’s said to be a distant relative to Davy Crockett, and he’s covered more of the United States, hitch-hiking and hopping trains, than the Texas legend ever did.

Almost exactly 100 years later, a modern songster named Charley Crockett would stand at about that same spot playing for people’s change, though the Union Depot had been gone for over 70 years.

While the journey reflected in his songs has since garnered him national acclaim and landed his music on both the Blues and Americana charts, Crockett is barely a chapter in the story of Deep Ellum. Then again, the stories of Deep Ellum tend to be written in disappearing ink. You won’t find plaques commemorating Blind Lemon Jefferson or Lead Belly’s time there, though it’s more responsible for Texas Blues than any one place could claim. It was a haven for punks and counterculture in the ’80s and breakout stars in the ‘90s. A “Deep Ellum act” can mean anyone from T-Bone Walker to the Old 97’s to Erykah Badu to St. Vincent to Leon Bridges.

For over a century, Deep Ellum has been a spot where Dallas has put either the people it didn’t want or didn’t know what to do with. Crockett fit right in. There’s no way to quantify how different modern music might sound if Lead Belly and Blind Lemon Jefferson never spent that time together. But Crockett’s journey to Deep Ellum is as good a start as any to try to explain how music has managed to keep returning to this neighborhood whose own city has never fully understood.

***

By the early 1920s, one third of eligible male residents in Dallas were reportedly members of the Ku Klux Klan. In the first quarter of the 20th century, the few blocks of Elm Street, Main Street, and Commerce that made up Deep Ellum were a center of activity for African Americans in the heart of a city that some claim was run by deep prejudice. “Dallas was an intensely racist place,” said Alan Govenar, co-author of Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas, the most exhaustive text on the history of Deep Ellum.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


Technically, Deep Ellum has never really been a neighborhood. Rarely have many people lived there. Recently immigrated Jews opened up pawn shops. The Model Tailors sold suits. Black-owned movie theaters and vaudeville houses opened. Places like the Gypsy Tea Room and Park Theater, managed by Ella B Moore, offered live jazz, gospel, blues, and vaudeville shows.

All this happened based on a confluence of realities. Deep Ellum was about a half mile from downtown Dallas. African Americans who had to venture to the heart of Dallas, perhaps for an errand at City Hall or to purchase something, would find few places where they could eat or even use the restroom. “Segregation was formal,” said Jay Brakefield, who co-wrote Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas with Govenar. “It was legal.” African Americans could buy clothes most places in Dallas, but in Deep Ellum they were allowed to try them on beforehand. And once there, they could enjoy live music. It was within these circumstances that a Black and Jewish business and entertainment district formed right under the Klan’s nose.

Check out “Easy Rider Blues” by Blind Lemon Jefferson.

It was only natural that musicians found their way to the streets of Deep Ellum, many trying to escape a life of manual labor, singing about the harshness of the world around them. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s lyrics covered the spectrum of human suffering, as mundane as mosquito bites and as crushing as destitution or incarceration. “The lyrics that he sang were about the breadth and depth and scope of human emotion,” said Govenar. Jefferson was from East Texas, and his ability to move around Deep Ellum and in and out of greater Dallas on an apparently daily basis is a testament to how much people loved hearing him play. Jefferson claimed that he could get around just fine by himself, but Lead Belly isn’t the only guitar player who is said to have led him around Deep Ellum. T-Bone Walker claimed that, as a young boy, he used to pass Jefferson’s cup around and collect tips. Walker would have been only 19 when Jefferson died, but it was in that same year that Jefferson would release two recordings that showed Jefferson’s influence and an evolution of his style. Walker’s electric blues guitar innovations and his brand of showmanship became commonplace with live guitar music. Chuck Berry cited Walker as his influence.

But Jefferson is the Father of Texas Blues. In the ‘20s commercial recording scouts found Dallas, and Jefferson’s songs were impossible to miss. Paramount Records sent him to Chicago for numerous recordings, and he became a radio star. “He was the first commercially successful solo blues artist,” Brakefield said. His songs reached the Delta and helped inspire the modern blues movement. “It was like him and his guitar were part of the same being,” B.B. King wrote of hearing Jefferson as a child in Blues All Around Me. “You didn’t know where one stopped and the other started.”

***

The city of San Benito, where Charley Crockett was born in the 1980s, is in Texas, but it was worlds apart from Deep Ellum. Also the birthplace of Tejano music legend Freddy Fender, it’s about 20 minutes from the Mexican border and eight hours from Dallas. Soon after his birth, Crockett and his mother moved 11 miles east to Los Fresnos, a city with less than 6,000 residents, more than 90 percent of them Latino. Crockett’s arrival coincided with his father’s departure. “He was living a rough life,” Crockett said of the man whose last name he claims. “He was pouring concrete and working on shrimp boats and ending up in ditches on the side of farm roads instead of making it home. He wasn’t around.”

Crockett, his mother, and eventually his grandmother shared a small trailer parked on Old Port Road with nothing to see but the oranges, grapefruit, and sugar cane growing around them. Most of his memories of his time in South Texas fall under two categories: poverty or music. Tejano singers like Freddy Fender and Johnny Canales would perform nearby, and Crockett’s mother would encourage singing while doing chores or just to pass the time. “Music was really kind of everywhere in that rural area,” Crockett said. “I think it was just part of the culture.”

Looking for more opportunities, Crockett and his mother moved north to Irving, just outside Dallas, when he was 9. His mother worked non-stop in those days, but their lives didn’t seem to be improving as Crockett grew old enough to understand their struggle. Sometimes a “city of opportunity” only paints a clearer picture of one’s poverty by contrasting it with the expensive shops and generational wealth that’s flaunted in Dallas. In the summers Crockett would go to New Orleans to live with his uncle, who worked in a restaurant in the French Quarter. Before Katrina there was still a heavy street culture in the city. Bands played everywhere. Crockett arrived in New Orleans for the first time as a 10-year-old who had spent much of his childhood in isolation. Suddenly he was immersed in a city of diversity, music, and mischief, playing cards for his uncle in bingo halls. The food, jobs, and agriculture weren’t unlike Los Fresnos. New Orleans had the soul of the Gulf Coast he was born into but injected with vibrancy.

Back near Dallas, his mother lost her job while Crockett was still in high school, but still managed to buy him a guitar from a pawn shop. By the time he was 18, he was completely purposeless. He took that guitar and just started “hobo-ing” around Texas. He’d squat with people he’d meet without a thought or plan for the next day, let alone the next week. “I really felt limited by what I thought my future had to offer me,” he said. He was learning how to steal to survive, “and just kind of becoming a delinquent, getting into trouble, doing stuff I shouldn’t be doing.”

One day, he was sitting on a park bench near a baseball field in the town of Farmers Branch when a woman walked by and threw him 50 cents. In those days, music wasn’t an ambition as much as an introduction to other musicians he could pass the days with. Jamming with street musicians in Carrollton, Crockett met a man who was planning to drive to Northern California the following day. Crockett begged the man to let him join. He knew nothing about the area and had no real reason to want to be there. “I just wanted so badly to get out of my situation,” he said.

So, Crockett rode along on the ride west, but as they neared their destination, the driver decided he had no intention of bringing a new friend to his town, so he stopped in Vallejo, California and let Crockett out in a parking lot with nothing but a guitar.

***

Pre-World War II Deep Ellum served a purpose to the future of music by putting musicians in physical proximity to each other before they went their separate ways and made their names elsewhere. “There was a cross-fertilization that occured between musicians and among musicians who got together,” Govenar said.

It wouldn’t be the last time those same streets would play that role, but as would be the case in later eras, its real lifeblood were musicians whose music was never recorded and whose names were never written down. In a preview of “Exploring 508 Park,” a yet-to-be-released documentary directed by Govenar about the recording studio about a mile from Deep Ellum where Robert Johnson recorded a significant portion of his catalog, 508 Park committee member Carol J. Adams said that, in the area around Deep Ellum, the 1920s and 1930s were, “a time of displacement that created musicians who were practically homeless traveling around with their guitars.”

Then again, the stories of Deep Ellum tend to be written in disappearing ink.

The Great Depression hit some of the local businesses hard, and Deep Ellum’s deterioration became apparent. In the 1950s, Elm Street was converted into a one-way street heading into downtown and away from Deep Ellum, and perhaps not-so-coincidentally, making it much less convenient for drivers to happen upon the largely Black and Jewish area. A collection of merchants came together to carry a coffin down Elm Street in a mock funeral for Deep Ellum.

By 1969, an elevated Central Expressway was built directly over the 2400 block of Elm Street, plowing over what was once the center of gravity for what used to be Deep Ellum and making a distinct line between downtown Dallas and a place where something else once existed. By that point, Deep Ellum had long died its first death under the traffic of a rapidly growing Dallas.

“For me, the sound of the cars rattling overhead evokes the ghosts of Deep Ellum,” Govenar said.

***

The parking lot where Crockett was dropped off wasn’t far from Vallejo’s town square. It seemed as good a direction as any to start walking. He and another musician who was dropped off with him started playing music in front of local businesses and met some young musicians doing the same. They were heading to Santa Rosa and had room in their van, so Crockett hopped in, discovering a culture that would dictate the way he lived the next few years of his life. “Kind of immediately, to be honest with you, there was this acceptance of the drifter thing I was becoming,” Crockett said. “There was no judgement from a bunch of people I’d never seen before.”

As he met more people, he wandered and played in more environments. There were hikes in the hills of Santa Rosa. There were jams on rural open land. There were open mics in town or trips to San Francisco when someone was heading that way. He stayed in Northern California for about a year. In that time, he worked on farms, slept in pastures or barns or spare rooms, lived on communes, did co-operative work or work-traded for food and board, and hitch-hiked with everyone from musicians and hobos to Hare Krishnas. “That’s where I really got comfortable hobo-ing,” he said. “Then I took that [skill] to the rest of America with me.”

The transience that followed Crockett’s time in California might have you believing that the country is far less vast than it actually is. He traveled east and eventually north to New York City where he played on the streets and subway platforms. He still wasn’t much of a musician. “I had a couple songs, but I was comfortable on the streets. I knew how to blend right in with street culture.”

Crockett continued this lifestyle for the majority of his 20s. There was strategy and deliberateness to his survival. It required an ability to befriend people and a willingness to sleep on floors or on benches outside. Seasons dictated what city he might be in. New York City in the summertime. Heading back to North Carolina as it started to get cold. Try to make it to New Orleans by October and potentially stay there until May and try to move along before the hottest months. There were stretches of the New York trains where he could get a few hours of unbothered sleep. During the Occupy Wall Street movement, he was regularly sleeping and living in parks, not because he was part of the movement but because “it was a window when that was being tolerated,” he said.

If the itinerant musician sounds like a relic of the past, Crockett would invite you to look at the current statistics for poverty in the U.S. He was living his life on the fringes of society, and a guitar was the only thing separating him from much darker existences. “I saw an enormous amount of homelessness traveling around this country,” he said. “I’m talking about homeless people with disabilities, veterans, people from outcast sections of society, people with mental problems, deep systemic multi-generational poverty, [and] drug addictions. It was never lost on me how close I was to that, sharing the same space.”

He was living his life on the fringes of society, and a guitar was the only thing separating him from much darker existences.

***

Plenty of people have their own stories about Jeff Liles, but no matter who’s telling the story, they all seem to agree that he’s someone who’s lived many lives. He’s a guy who could refer to founding NWA member Easy-E as “Eric” (he was also the first DJ in the country to play an NWA song on the radio, in Dallas, and was fired the next day for it). He’s likely booked more ultra-famous bands in Dallas than there are albums in your record collection. He performed an alternative spoken-word act on the same Lollapalooza tour as Snoop Dogg and Devo.

But in 1985 he was just a kid trying to convince a guy named Russell Hobbs at the Theatre Gallery, a rundown venue Hobbs had just opened up in an even more rundown stretch of warehouses, to let his band perform there. In-between booking the show and the date of the performance, Liles’ band broke up. He went back to Theatre Gallery to tell Hobbs.

“I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t walked through those doors,” Liles said, parked outside of where Theatre Gallery used to stand, over 35 years later.

Hobbs asked him if he’d be interested in a different task: helping him book bands. Together, Liles and Hobbs would become the early architects for what some would refer to as the “golden age” of Deep Ellum. It wasn’t called Deep Ellum then, in the sense that a place where no one went to with nothing to offer didn’t need a name. It was Hobbs who had read about a bygone era of music in a place called Deep Ellum. Liles was originally afraid to use that term as it was essentially a reference to an African American pronunciation of Elm Street. Liles lost the argument.

Theatre Gallery was a refuge for musically inclined misfits as much as it was a concert venue. Everything about its early days was DIY and, in all likelihood, very illegal. “We just gave away free beer,” Liles said. “You paid $5 and got beer all night. There were no licenses.” The Republican National Convention was held in Dallas in 1984, and the Dead Kennedys performed outside the convention in protest. According to Liles, when the police came to break it up, they mistook Hobbs, who was simply watching the performance, as being involved and demanded he get the stage off the property. That stage made its way to Deep Ellum and became the Theatre Gallery stage.

Soon, Hobbs opened up the Prophet Bar and Club Clearview in 1985, Club Dada in 1986. A new Gypsy Tea Room opened up in homage to the old Deep Ellum. Liles says a movement started with three specific bands from three Dallas suburbs: Three On a Hill from Carrollton, Shallow Reign from Richardson, and End Over End from Highland Park. “Those three bands were bringing in suburban kids,” he said. “They were hiding from their parents. Those kids started the music scene in Deep Ellum.”

Those bands were eclipsed by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, arguably the first great band to come out of modern Deep Ellum — The New Bohemians would break up after the release of their second album, in 1990, and Brickell would marry Paul Simon. Liles and Hobbs hired Jim Heath to be the “sound guy” for Theatre Gallery and Prophet Bar despite his lack of experience. Heath would form The Reverend Horton Heat, a modern “psychobilly” band with a large cult following.

In the mid-80s, Deep Ellum was a scene with no rules and no definition of cool. It was the height of J.R. Ewing’s Dallas and rebellious teens were being suffocated by the images projected on their North Texas lives. It coincided with radical punk movements also manifesting in New York and Los Angeles. In a 1987 story in D Magazine, Skip Hollandsworth wrote of Deep Ellum, “The little underground scene, mostly centered in new-music nightclubs, was so ephemeral that by the time mainstream Dallas had heard of one of these clubs, it had already shut down and another had opened somewhere else.” Deep Ellum became a place where Dallas parents were terrified their children would be exposed to drugs, crime, skinheads, and violence. None of those worries were unfounded.

Still, it was growing rapidly, partially on the strength of Liles’ bookings. Dinosaur Jr. played Theatre Gallery for $50. The Replacements played and hung out in Deep Ellum for three days. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction, the Flaming Lips. Liles has a story of Michael Stipe of REM doing yoga naked on the Theatre Gallery roof. It was a mixture of bands, kids, punks, and misfits walking the streets in the shadow of downtown Dallas.

Then Trees opened in 1990. “Trees took it to the next level,” Liles said. A venue on Elm Street with a capacity of about 500, it would book Radiohead, Soundgarden, Elliott Smith, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, and Geto Boys, all at the height of their popularity. Pearl Jam performed for less than 40 people at Trees and played basketball in the parking lot beforehand.

But to some people, Trees, and Jeff Liles, will always be known for the night they booked Nirvana in 1991. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had come out four months earlier and there were more people outside trying to get in than had tickets. Trying to accommodate Nirvana’s label, Liles hired more bouncers to prevent the crowd from rushing the stage, but a few songs into the performance Kurt Cobain lept over a bouncer with his guitar into the crowd. The guitar hit the bouncer in the head. Furious, the bouncer punched Cobain in the face. Cobain retreated backstage.

…a few songs into the performance Kurt Cobain lept over a bouncer with his guitar into the crowd. The guitar hit the bouncer in the head. Furious, the bouncer punched Cobain in the face. Cobain retreated backstage.

One thing was clear to everyone there: If Nirvana didn’t finish their set, there would be a riot in Deep Ellum. Liles had to convince Cobain. He found him hiding in a broom closet sniffing heroin and managed to get him back on stage.

“The rest of the show was great,” Liles said.

***

By 2008, Crockett had mastered survival, but he was just starting to master music. He’s a self-taught guitar player, originally unable to play the most basic G or C chords. Instead, he would wrap his thumb around the top of the guitar’s neck to hold down strings, “like choking the neck of a chicken.” He wrote his first song (“Fool Somebody Else”) this way, by experimenting with this finger and thumb placement, moving up and down the guitar’s neck until he’d found enough strums that sounded right. He went 10 years before recording that song.

“Why don’t you fool somebody else.

Do it to yourself. Tell me how it feels.

When you hold somebody tight

And the trust is gone

In the middle of the night

Got to fool somebody else.

Do it to yourself, tell me how it feels

When you hold somebody tight

Then they gone

Like the middle of the night.”

To this day, he has almost never used a guitar pick for a live show or recording. His travels and the musicians he met influenced his music. Older musicians heard him play open-mics and told him he was playing the blues, something he was barely conscious of. He realized that Robert Johnson’s lyrics sounded a lot like the life he was living.

It was in Manhattan, in Lucky Jack’s, that Crockett got the invitation to go to Europe. A regular there from Denmark had heard him play multiple times and told him he’d be a hit there. He offered up his place in Copenhagen and said he’d set him up with gigs at bars and cafes. Crockett took him up on the offer but ended up making as much playing on the streets as he did in bars and cafes, and before long, he’d overstayed his welcome. So he took the money he’d made and bought a train ticket to Paris without knowing a word of French.

He started playing the streets with a surprising amount of success. Perhaps to the French, there was a novelty to this American playing his version of the blues. “They could hear the Louisiana thing in me, which obviously the French have a big connection to that culture,” Crockett theorized. Remarkably, Crockett survived in Paris for almost a year without ever learning the language. “The language barrier was a surprising gift in that it separated me from the culture and put me in a place where I lost all fear,” he said. He couldn’t understand what anyone was saying about him, anyway, so he just played with confidence.

American culture tends to demand that we create self-narratives by which to live by, false identities that dictate the person we become. “I think in the streets of Paris, I killed that person,” Crockett said. “When I hit New York stateside again, I was a changed person. I just had no fear.”

American culture tends to demand that we create self-narratives by which to live by, false identities that dictate the person we become.

Back in America, he was starting to expect to make money playing on the streets, and he was getting results. He’d mapped out cities like New Orleans and figured out where to play and when in the day to move from Royal Street to jostle for space and ears in Cafe Dumont before finding a blues jam later that night. He was playing at least eight hours a day, whether in New Orleans or New York. “Do you know how good it feels to go from begging and stealing to having $30 in your pocket?” he asked. “And as soon as that money goes out I could just make $30 more right then.” Some of his music might lean toward country, gospel, or even jazz, but now he could command a room or a block of street, which was more important than any technical skill he’d learned. Even now, he won’t commit to a traditional genre of music, coining the term “Gulf Coast Boogie Woogie” for what he does.

One day in 2010, Crockett was busking on the subway platform at the Lorimer stop in Brooklyn. Riding the G-train was a 19-year-old street musician named Jadon Woodard, rapping to passengers for tips. When the doors opened, Woodard could hear the rhythm of Crockett’s guitar playing and thought he could rap over it. He convinced Crockett to move from playing on subway platforms and get on actual trains with him. Crockett had a song called “You’re So Strange” that Woodard loved. Together, they each started making more money than either had on his own.

The next time Crockett returned to New York the following year the two linked up with another guitar player and a trumpet player. The group would play on moving train cars for 12 hours a day. “We were making hella money,” Woodard said. On a good day they’d pull in $600 or $700. They called themselves the Train Robbers.

The four band members and a videographer who filmed their performances split a $500 apartment in Bushwick and paid the deposit in small bills. Crockett convinced them to play folk and blues rhythms and Woodard found them easy to rap over. New York runs off the subway system, and thousands of people were seeing them perform each day, some of them in the music industry. They were getting interest from record labels and getting offered residencies to play a few hours a night. A lost Train Robbers album was recorded in the women’s bathroom of a rehearsal space in Brooklyn. Eventually they were making enough money to split two apartments among themselves.

‘Do you know how good it feels to go from begging and stealing to having $30 in your pocket?’ he asked.

Thinking they’d finally made it, they signed a management deal that would ultimately tear them apart. Looking back, Woodard and Crockett agreed that the management was determined to change their sound to something more mainstream and was unfair in terms of publishing rights. That same management arranged a deal with NBC that would largely increase their visibility but would surely push them in a different direction musically. As they walked into a Manhattan office to sign the deal, Crockett backed out and disavowed the management label. “The band didn’t even know how I was feeling,” Crockett said. “I just dropped the bomb on them in that office.” They were still technically handcuffed to the management deal, but Crockett’s decision essentially ended the Train Robbers.

“I harbored some [negative] energy for a while,” Woodard said. “But we were all young and we were all caught up in everything.”

***

The first time Ken Bethea, guitarist for the Old 97’s, went to Deep Ellum was in the fall of 1987. He’d just graduated from the University of Texas. In Austin, he had been indoctrinated to believe that everything in Dallas was lame, but his favorite band, the Butthole Surfers, was playing at Club Clearview on Main Street, just off of Elm. “I thought, ‘I bet that’s in the Deep Ellum place they talk about. Elm? Ellum?”

He left the show with a black eye and a notion that there was something special about the area. “I went there on a Wednesday night and had the best time that I’d ever had in my life going somewhere solo,” Bethea said.

After that night, Bethea ended up living in Denton, Texas for a year, where he’d meet the drummer Philip Peeples. When they moved back to Dallas, Deep Ellum was evolving quickly and driven by music. Bands were meeting other bands, breaking up, and the best members of each band were forming newer, better bands. Rhett Miller and Murry Hammond were hanging around the scene, playing in bands or individually. Eventually the four of them would meet and form the Old 97’s.

The Old 97’s didn’t originally try to play Club Dada or the early days of Trees. They aimed lower than that and played in places without cover charges. One of those places was a cowboy/country bar called Naomi’s Lounge about the size of a Starbucks. “I’d be standing right next to the door as people would come in and I’d have to lean away while playing guitar to let them in,” Bethea remembered. They were winning over fans, and the physical area that made up Deep Ellum was so condensed that the whole scene could hear about a great performance in the same night. “We were playing all the time,” Bethea said. “Rhett was writing so many songs.”

The seeds of Deep Ellum that were planted in the ’80s were growing uncontrollably in the ’90s. Suddenly, along with national acts that Liles and others were bringing to the area, homegrown bands were catapulting from Deep Ellum to national success. Tripping Daisy was a Deep Ellum act that became a household name. Toadies, a Fort Worth band that broke into the Deep Ellum scene, released Rubberneck in 1994, which would sell over a million copies. The Old 97’s would go on to have an enormous national following — one they enjoy to this day. In all likelihood, each member of each of those bands saw each other perform multiple times in Deep Ellum. “The butterfly effect of hearing that things were working out for Tripping Daisy was huge for us,” Bethea said. “We thought, ‘if they can do it, and Edie Brickell can do it, we can do it.’ You want to keep up.”

Every North Texas band with any semblance of success that decade had to play Deep Ellum. The band Funland was an area favorite. Deep Blue Something and Bowling For Soup would be loosely affiliated with the scene. A young St. Vincent saw Tripping Daisy perform at Trees multiple times before eventually joining the Polyphonic Spree, a large choral rock band founded by Tripping Daisy front man Tim DeLaughter.

Meanwhile, when the New York rap duo Mobb Deep came to Deep Ellum, a local singer named Erykah Badu opened for them. Badu’s 1997 debut album, Baduizm, has sold over three million copies. Labeled “the queen of Neo-soul,” Badu has mostly remained in Dallas for the past two decades, almost like she’s looking over its music scene, popping up for surprise performances or guest DJ sets in Deep Ellum and hosting a birthday concert event there every year.

But as Deep Ellum’s streets were packed every night, the crime didn’t seem to be receding. The depiction of crime in Deep Ellum over its various eras has usually been exaggerated but rarely unfounded. Fights broke out, and rich kids were mugged, and for the first time, perhaps ever, greater Dallas was paying attention. A shift was happening in the early aughts as devotees to the scene grew frustrated seeing it be co-opted by polite society, and polite society was just as quick to label it dangerous.

Things came to a head in 2004 when the Old 97’s, by then a popular national act, returned to Deep Ellum for a show at the Gypsy Tea Room. A man named David Cunniff attended the show with his two teenage daughters. Cunniff got in an altercation with a man that quickly turned violent. It would end with Cunniff temporarily immobile, his neck broken in front of his children.

The man who Cunniff fought had affiliations with skinheads. By most accounts, any legitimate skinhead presence in Deep Ellum was long gone and largely an ancillary product of the ‘80s punk movement. But greater Dallas had heard the stories. “I remember people saying, ‘If you can’t be safe at an Old 97’s show, something’s wrong,’” Bethea said. Within a year, Deep Ellum was basically a ghost town.

“This area went dormant in the 2000s,” Liles said. “Trees closed. Dada closed. Bomb Factory closed. Clearview was gone.”

***

Crockett’s journeys can sound like a romantic ode to a simpler time, but outrunning poverty can bring mistakes, and risks can seem smaller when you have almost nothing to your name. Even before Crockett left Dallas his half-brother got him in legal trouble by getting him involved in stock manipulation. “My brother got me into some under-world Dallas stuff when I was younger,” he said. “All that stuff blew up and everybody went to prison.” His brother was sentenced to seven years. Crockett says he had to defend himself in court but wasn’t convicted based on his apparent ignorance of the scheme’s machinations.

In 2014, he says he’d find himself on the wrong side of the law again, when Virginia police caught him with a considerable amount of marijuana. A sentencing was pushed back and jail time was a possibility, but even probation could prevent him from traveling state to state and ending the musician’s life that he’d adopted.

Photo credit: Bobby Cochran

With that hanging over him, he realized he hadn’t seen his mother in nearly four years. He decided it was time to go home. While in Dallas, he decided to check out a blues jam happening in Deep Ellum. He met a guitar player named Alexis Sanchez, who currently plays guitar in Crockett’s band. That same night, Sanchez introduced him to a guy who had been performing in Deep Ellum named Leon Bridges. This was before Bridges would release his debut album with Columbia Records and win a Grammy, but his name was bouncing around those few blocks. “Something about meeting Alexis and Leon allowed me to realize that there was a renaissance happening in Deep Ellum,” Crockett said.

Crockett was as confident in his abilities as he’d ever been, but his publishing rights were still controlled by his old managment for almost another year. So he went back to Northern California and worked manual labor, waiting out his contract with a head full of songs. When the time came, he recorded an album on his own and received donations from locals up there in order to print copies of it. He called it “A Stolen Jewell.”

In 2016 he faced a judge who held his future in his hands. Crockett told the judge about his musical journey, his progress, and his determination to make a real career of it. He even had a record he could show as proof. “They were going to take everything away from me,” he said. “I begged him. Told him I wanted to be legit.” Crockett’s plea resonated with the judge, who spared him any serious punishment for the 2014 marijuana charge. Armed with a guitar, an album, and a second chance, he went to make a name for himself, and he knew exactly where to go.

“It was from that moment,” Crockett said. “I hit the bars in Deep Ellum [as a performer] harder than I ever had.”

***

Kendrick Lamar was performing at a re-opened Trees in 2012, and Cam McCloud just wanted a minute of his time. “I was at the front of the stage at the dead center,” McCloud said. “I’m watching him and turning around and watching the whole crowd, and I was like, ‘Yeah, this is what I want to do.’” After the show, he freestyled for Lamar, who validated his skills.

A few years later, McCloud was fired from his job at Olive Garden for missing a shift to open for Florida rapper Gunplay at Trees. In 2015, McCloud would become the rapper and visionary behind Cure For Paranoia, a genre-defying hip-hop/soul group that D Magazine deemed “the poster boys of the new Deep Ellum.”

Trees had been reopened in 2009 by Clint and Whitney Barlow — Clint was a former drummer for Vanilla Ice. They also reopened Bomb Factory, a 4,000-plus capacity venue that books national acts. “The Barlows, as far as I’m concerned, are responsible for the revitalization of Deep Ellum,” said Pete Freedman, the president and co-founder of CentralTrack.com, a daily cultural guide to Dallas named after the street that Central Expressway demolished and separated downtown from Deep Ellum.

Freedman has witnessed and chronicled nearly every step of that revitalization, which represents the most eclectic era of Deep Ellum. Hip-hop had never gotten much substantial coverage or attention in Deep Ellum. Bands ruled the golden era. But hip-hop is arguably the most popular genre in America now, and it’s helping carry today’s Deep Ellum with acts blowing up and being surpassed before mainstream Dallas even hears of them, like the punk acts of the ’80s. “Deep Ellum always reflects the zeitgeist of whatever’s popular,” Freedman said.

A Dallas collective of individual hip-hop acts known as Brain Gang made waves in Deep Ellum at the beginning of last decade. From that group, Blue, the Misfit would go on to have a collaborative relationship with Kendrick Lamar, Bobby Sessions would sign with legendary hip-hop label Def Jam Recordings, and the producer, Justus, signed with Interscope and was pegged as Dr. Dre’s protege.

Cure For Paranoia reached a turning point when McCloud snuck backstage at Bomb Factory for a performance by West Coast rapper The D.O.C. and saw Erykah Badu and her entourage walking towards him (Badu and D.O.C. have a child together). McCloud approached her and freestyled, impressing her. The next week he got a call. Badu wanted them to open for her birthday concert. The group played at Three Links on Elm Street every Tuesday before bars temporarily closed due to COVID-19, typically packing the venue.

“Deep Ellum is just all over the place,” McCloud said an hour before opening for Houston rapper Bun B, his hair dark purple with a strip of lavender running through it. “I think that’s why it definitely shaped me as an artist. Because you can put us anywhere. We can literally play anywhere. We’ve opened for rock bands. We’ve opened for country bands. You name it. It’s the ultimate domino effect.”

The variety in Deep Ellum, which has expanded in size over the years, but still mostly extends to about six blocks of Elm, Main, and Commerce, is staggering. Every weekend there are hip-hop, punk, country, blues, jazz, folk, and metal shows. “The Deep Ellum music scene is the Dallas music scene,” said Freedman.

“I’ve been to every town in the U.S. and played gigs,” Bethea said. “There are very few places like Deep Ellum in the United States. It’s singular.”

***

Freedman can tell you exactly when Crockett came back to Deep Ellum in 2016. “I couldn’t go to a bar without sitting on one of his CDs,” Freedman said. Crockett had taken his signature hustle, as well as the guerilla marketing he and the Train Robbers had learned, and applied it to the streets of Deep Ellum. Unlike New York, he could canvass all of Deep Ellum in an hour.

“The first night I met Charley I saw copies of his CDs on toilets,” Liles said. “I grabbed them and said, ‘Is this you?’ He said, “Yeah, man.’ I said, ‘C’mon man, have a little respect for yourself as an artist.’ I gave them back to him and told him to just hand them out to people.”

“I put them on top of urinals in every bar in Deep Ellum,” Crockett said.

Crockett was playing two sets a night all over Deep Ellum. On Commerce is a New Orleans-themed Cajun/jazz bar called The Free Man — about the same size as the now-closed Naomi’s where the Old 97’s got started. It’s hard to imagine a crowd more suited for Crockett’s music. Next door is Adair’s Saloon, a tiny dive bar Crockett could play for hours. It cost nothing to walk in and hear Crockett play and sing in rooms where he wouldn’t even have needed a microphone. After Leon Bridges broke as a national sensation, a collection of lucky Wednesday night patrons in 2015 at Twilite Lounge on Elm Street saw Crockett perform with Bridges providing backup vocals.

When he was playing in Deep Ellum he let customers name the price they wanted to pay for a copy of “A Stolen Jewell.” It wasn’t the first time people were appreciating his music, but something was happening on those streets that was new to him: He was gaining reputation. “‘A Stolen Jewell’ was the break for me because Dallas writers and Dallas musicians and the Fort Worth community started championing me immediately.”

Soon, Crockett moved from cleared out corners of bars to stages in venues all over Dallas. He was drawing paying crowds and things were snowballing behind his work ethic. Since 2016, Crockett has released seven albums to critical success with another album Welcome To Hard Times, coming out in July. He toured Texas, and then the United States. Last summer, he headlined an international tour, returning to Europe with his name on marquees in Spain, Sweden, and Paris.

“He didn’t start recording until he’d had all this time on the streets,” said Thomas D. Mooney, a music critic for Rolling Stone and Texas Monthly. “So he had a late start actually recording, but once he started making albums he had this hard-working, hustler mentality that’s in his songs. And he’s not pretentious when he’s on stage. Fans realize that he’s working just as hard at his job as they are at theirs.”

And he’s not pretentious when he’s on stage. Fans realize that he’s working just as hard at his job as they are at theirs.

In June 2019, he was invited to headline the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, arguably the most legendary country music venue in the world. For someone who’d played the streets and “backdoored” bars and clubs all over the country, it’s a surreal accomplishment. “I believe that stage was built up by a lot of artists back in the day who came at it like I have, with the real hard work,” he said. In November, Crockett headlined The Troubadour in West Los Angeles, a stage that’s helped make countless stars.

“[Being in this industry], you know when people are the real deal or not,” said Liles, who now books shows for The Kessler, a venue in a different Dallas neighborhood called Oak Cliff. “Charley Crockett is the real fucking deal.”

“I’m really happy that my brother blew up,” Woodard said. “Make sure you tell Charley he owes me that song, ‘You’re So Strange.’ I’ll come to Texas and we’ll record it.”

Crockett once begged a man to take him to Northern California just to get away from Dallas. At the time, he didn’t understand that the music he’d travel the country and world learning owed such debts to the place he was trying to escape. Knowing what he knows now, having become an obsessive historian of music, he doesn’t waver on its impact. “Deep Ellum is as important to American music as New Orleans or Memphis,” he said. It’s only fitting that when he returned, Elm Street, Main Street, and Commerce were ready for him to come back and play his part in bridging Deep Ellum to its past. He represents both the street musician whose name you never heard and the nationally touring acts that began in those same streets.

“Areas that have a micro-culture of music are based on a foundation of artists who didn’t necessarily ‘make it out,’” said Mooney. “They keep the scene what it is. I think why Charley’s been able to transcend that area and still have such respect in Deep Ellum is that he’s a lifer. He’s lived his music.”

“I feel like Crockett is the human embodiment of Deep Ellum,” McCloud said before taking the stage to rap for an audience of hundreds.

***

In 2022, Uber plans to operate over 3,000 employees out of a soon-to-be-constructed 23-story tower with adjacent parking garage on the westernmost edge of Deep Ellum. The project officially broke ground last November. “The live-work-play environment of Deep Ellum, honestly, it just has us psyched out of our minds,” Uber spokesman Brian Finch reportedly said last fall.

What this means for the culture of Deep Ellum going forward depends on who you ask and what they think about the current commercialization happening there. There’s been an influx of boutiques, restaurants, breweries, and bars with waitresses who dress like they’re catering to a college fraternity clientele.

These aren’t unique developments for an American city. “Creative people create an identity for the neighborhood, they give it a cool factor, then the real estate developers come in and price them out of the neighborhood,” Liles said. Few people have traditionally lived in Deep Ellum (though that is currently changing), so it’s not people who are being pushed out. It’s places, and if you believe those lamenting the death of Deep Ellum, it could be the music. “A building that’s committed mostly to local bands and the local music scene isn’t going to generate a whole lot of revenue,” Liles said.

It won’t surprise you to hear that this isn’t the first time that Deep Ellum has been pronounced dead, and while it’s certainly changed over the years, devotees of the scene were panicking over its changes during the height of its most exciting movements in the ’80s and ’90s. Freedman believes that Deep Ellum operates in 30-year cycles and attributes much of the hysteria over its current changes to “good ol’ days syndrome.” He points out that Uber is building its tower over four vacant lots and that most of the trendier places popping up are doing so in empty building spaces or struggling businesses that the frustrated parties weren’t supporting anyway. “Deep Ellum of today shouldn’t be the Deep Ellum of 1988,” he said. “Under what guise should it be? There were skinheads.”

Deep Ellum’s music survived during the racism of the 1920s (and the less transparent racism since). Will it survive the capitalism of the 2020s? Prior to the restrictions due to COVID-19, the streets of Deep Ellum were flooded with people every weekend, even as crime in the area remains a talking point. Deep Ellum’s cool factor is built on the credibility of places like Trees, Bomb Factory, Twilite Lounge, Three Links, The Free Man, Club Dada, Adair’s Saloon, and so many more. Dallas has woken up to Deep Ellum. “I think it’s amazing,” said McCloud, the last person to be accused of conforming his music to anyone. “It just means more money coming in. The music will be fine. That’s what they’re coming for.”

Dallas has woken up to Deep Ellum.

The rapper Post Malone, from the Dallas suburb Grapevine, is not a Deep Ellum artist — prior to his national ascent, he was characterized as a soundcloud artist — but after his single “White Iverson” went viral in 2015, making him a household name overnight, his first Dallas show was at Trees. He played “White Iverson” two times during a 25-minute show, latching on to a bit of the neighborhood’s credibility. “These things don’t happen by accident,” Freedman said. “Deep Ellum is still unequivocally, without a shadow of a doubt, the proving grounds.”

The story of Deep Ellum is the story of music’s relationship to physical space. It can feel like there are no traceable links of influence or even knowledge between the various musical eras of Deep Ellum. Whenever an era ended, it must have been impossible to imagine music ever coming back. But it always did, behind musicians and the people who wanted to hear them play. “In 25 years there won’t be anything wrong with [Deep Ellum] turning over a little bit,” Bethea said before smiling. “As long as they’ve got a statue of the Old 97’s down there for people to worship.”

“Maybe one day all this will go away,” Freedman said from a dark booth in Twilite Lounge. “But for now, I’m still going to play in it.”

***

Now, imagine it’s a Friday night at some point in the future when public gatherings and live music are allowed and deemed safe, and you just saw a show at Trees that you’ll talk about for weeks, exaggerating whatever details you still remember. You’re walking out the front door onto Elm Street with about 400 other people. It’s entirely possible you haven’t been sober since halfway through the set list. It’s 11:30 and the streets are packed with people, some of whom are probably going to manage to find a little trouble to get into, and you haven’t yet determined if you’ll be one of them. Maybe you aren’t ready for the night to be over. You could grab another drink somewhere or find some late-night food. Or you could walk around the area and settle for the first place that’s playing the kind of music you want to hear.

As the Trees crowd pushes you about 50 feet down Elm Street and you try to determine your immediate future — the only future that seems remotely important in that moment — you might look up and see a mural facing you from the brick wall across the street. It’s a tinted image of a man dressed in black with sunglasses and a cowboy hat standing in a field of bluebonnets. The man’s name isn’t on the mural, which is fine. A mural like that in Deep Ellum is for the type of person who already knows who Charley Crockett is.

Or maybe, you’re ready to go home and bask in the buzz of the performance you just witnessed. You’ll have to find your way to the designated ride-share pickup zone on Commerce — the necessity of which is a testament to just how much Deep Ellum has changed. It’s two streets over, so you’ll probably want to cut through Radiator Alley to get to Main Street. As you breeze through the alley, you might see another mural of a stout man wearing a suit and holding a guitar with two musical legends flanking him on each side. Their names are Freddy King and T-Bone Walker, and little crowns are painted above their heads. But those two are clearly in the background. It’s the stout man who’s front and center. No crown is above his head; only a bright circle, almost like a halo. The image is a recreation of the only known photograph to ever exist of this man. His name was Blind Lemon Jefferson.

The people and businesses that make up this era’s Deep Ellum have been drastically impacted by COVID-19 and its attendant restrictions. If you would like to support and help keep this tight-knit and historical community vibrant in the future consider donating to Deep Ellum 100, an organization giving grants to workers, musicians, and artists who have helped make Deep Ellum what it is.

* * *

Jonny Auping is a freelance writer based in Dallas, Texas. His work has been featured in Texas MonthlyThe New YorkerVICENew York MagazineSlateand McSweeney’s.

Editor: Krista Stevens

Fact checker: Matt Giles