Novels from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s
I wrote Mountain View in the late 90s while living in San Francisco. I recently came across some old photos in a box, taken from the window of the room where I used to write.
I left SF in 2000. All my friends were moving away (mostly to the East Bay or Brooklyn) and the place was really starting to change.
I really do miss 80s/90s SF sometimes! What an incredible time and place.
Miss the N Judah!
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Recently I was thinking about what I read as a kid, and how I eventually decided to try writing myself.
Looking back there seems to be four phases, each represented by two authors.
The first phase was reading on my own in elementary school in the mid-70s. I first became obsessed with Robert Arthur’s Three Investigators books and then with the John Christopher trilogy.
After that I stopped reading for several years. I don’t remember much of a “YA” category to bridge the gap. I read a little C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien, but fantasy was not my thing. I was more into BMX and sports.
In high school I didn’t pay a lot of attention to reading until around junior year in 1984 when an English teacher assigned 1984 and Brave New World. These books definitely got my attention. This was “real” adult writing to me.
The first writers that got me to read on my own again were Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson. I was very into punk rock and these authors seemed to have a punk rock, anti-establishment attitude.
In college I decided to be an English major, and began reading all the classics. But then I found Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski. These were the first writers that made me think about writing myself. Something about their simple, clean lines and direct stripped-down storytelling gave me permission to try.
What were the books that got you into reading and maybe even into writing?
In Firenze, our hero Kevin takes a latest issues of Thrasher with him to Florence. And since it was the 80s and there was no internet, he reads Thrasher over and over for much of the book.
I was bored. Normally I’d just watch TV or something. I didn’t really know what to do. I’d brought along the latest issues of Thrasher, which I’d already read twice on the plane. What the fuck, I’d read it again.
This issue had Tommy Guerrero on the cover. Looking through the article I got homesick. Tommy was from SF. He was my hero. I’d seen him skate once in Oakland and the dude had blown me away.
I flipped through and read all the ads. Then I read Skarfing Material, my favorite column by Chef-Boy-Am-I-Hungry. If you remember the scene in Rocky where he drinks all those raw eggs, that’d kind of like a Chef-Boy-Am-I-Hungry recipe, except he’d maybe add something to the eggs first, like hot sauce and peanut butter. Each recipe was preceded by an existentialist rambling of some kind. Chef-Boy-Am-I-Hungry had a recipe for a Squid Eyeball Sandwich and Vito’s Vittles. After the nasty dinner with Sr. Gasperi they both sounded pretty good.
Pic via ThrasherMagazine.com
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I had fun putting together this short playlist on Spotify for Mountain View. Welcome To The Jungle gets mentioned on the first page, and Gordie is later described as a King Crimson fan. Lunatic Fringe is heard playing in a car driven by Mercedes Steve. But the rest are all the sorts of songs Colin (or I) would have been listening to in 1988. I’ll drop a link in a story and it’s featured in the highlights above! Playlists for Kato and Firenze to follow.
Listen to the playlist on Spotify!
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If you grew up in the 70s or 80s, you were guaranteed to have at least one copy of the Guinness Book of World Records, most likely ordered through Scholastic at school.
While QCing the Mountain View audiobook (coming soon!), I was reminded of this passage, when the narrator walks into his old friend’s room back home:
I checked under the bed. The stack of porno mags was gone. The bookshelf was filled with trophies, framed photos, and model cars. There was only one book: The Guinness Book of World Records.
I took it off the shelf and started thumbing through it. There were the fat twins riding motorcycles—with the plaid pants and cowboy hats. Then there was the guy who was so huge they had to bury him in a coffin the size of a piano case. 1,069 pounds. Why did they put the fat people up front? I flipped to the cool color photo section in the middle and saw the guy with the fingernails. They were each about three feet long and they were twisted and had these strange stripes. I had nightmares about that guy when I was a kid.
Did you have a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records? What do you most remember from it?
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We took a lot of our design inspiration from album covers, and as you can see Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love was a big reference point. I bought the album on vinyl when it came out in 1989, but it looks like one of my kids “borrowed” it at some point…
This cover is an especially appropriate influence for Kato, which is set in Seattle in the late 90s.
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I wrote these stories on a Mac 512 between 1990 and 1994. They were saved on floppy discs and printed out on a dot matrix printer.
I’ve always considered the design of these early Macs to be absolutely iconic. I recently discovered that mine is still in the shed at my parents’ house, yellowed with age.
This little “Maclock” came into my feed the other day. I usually avoid buying this kind of crap but I couldn’t resist this time. It’s surprisingly accurate. And it’s darn cute.
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In getting ready to publish Firenze, I revisited some of my favorite Italian writers, including Italo Calvino. I picked up a copy of his first novel The Path to the Spiders’ Nest and was particularly struck by a few passages in the the preface, which Calvino wrote years later when revisiting his early work.
What you read and what you experience in life are not two separate worlds, but one single cosmos. Every life-experience, in order to be interpreted properly, evokes certain things you have read and blends into them. That books always derive from other books is a truth which is only apparently in contradiction with the other truth, that books derive from practical existence and from our relations with other people.
There is another point: for those who start writing after one of those experiences that leave you with ‘so many things to say’ (the war in this, and in so many other cases), the first book instantly becomes a barrier between you and that experience, it severs the links that bind you to those facts, destroys your precious hoard of memories – a hoard in the sense that it would have become a reserve on which to draw permanently if you had been patient enough to husband it, if you had not been in such a hurry to spend it, to squander it, to impose an arbitrary hierarchy on the images that you had kept stored there, to separate the privileged images, which you believed contained a genuinely poetic emotion, from the others, those which seemed to concern you too closely or too little for you to be able to portray them; in short to set up in your arrogance a different memory, one that has been given another shape instead of your whole memory with its blurred outlines and its infinite capacity for retrieval… Your memory will never again recover from this violence that you have done to it by writing your book.
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I woke up this morning thinking about SF Bay Area radio in the 80s and how I discovered new music. When I was younger, I mostly listened to the rock station KOME (don’t touch that dial, there’s KOME on it!”). I was in 7th grade and listening to KOME on December 8, 1980 when it was announced that John Lennon had been shot.
KQAK “The Quake” launched in 1982 with a new format that consisted of new wave, punk rock, post-punk, reggae and ska—one of the first commercial stations in the country to play this kind of music. A buddy and I used to drive up to San Francisco early in the morning to be part of the studio audience for the morning show with Alex Bennett. I first heard bands like The Smiths and The English Beat on KQAK.
Sadly The Quake went off the air in 1985, but by then I had started listening to KFJC, a college station based at Foothill College, that would play, literally, anything. I discovered so much punk rock through that station and learned about so many local $5 shows–Dead Kennedys, Butthole Surfers, Red Hot Chili Peppers. I was listening to KFJC in 1989 when I first heard Negative Creep by Nirvana. I immediately drove down to the Mountain View Tower Records and bought Bleach on vinyl. I managed to see Nirvana in 1990 at the Kennel Club in San Francisco (along with Tad and Dickless).
Those years and those sounds ended up shaping the world of my novel Mountain View.
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How do you pair a distortion pedal with a novel set in Florence, Italy? Here’s how:
One night our hero Kevin misses the last bus home after being out at the bars. So he pops Zen Arcade into his walkman and walks back home through the cobblestone streets.
Bob Mould was known for plugging his MXR Distortion+ straight into the mixing board, a trick he likely used while recording Zen Arcade back in 1983.
From Wikipedia: As their EP Metal Circus was being released, Hüsker Dü entered the Total Access Studio in Redondo Beach, California to record their next album with SST producer Spot. The band recorded 25 tracks, with all but two songs (“Something I Learned Today” and “Newest Industry”) being first takes, in 40 hours. The entire album was then mixed in one 40-hour session; the entire album took 85 hours to record and produce and cost $3,200.
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