A Normal Interview with Joe Oestreich

By Barrett Bowlin

I first met Joe Oestreich through his writing, in an Esquire feature on the best bars in America. Out of two dozen or so places mentioned, the write-up on a Columbus, Ohio, watering hole with a tree growing out of the middle of it stood out. And then I met him proper-like, in person at a bar in Daytona, Florida, in 2008, just a few years before his rock memoir, Hitless Wonder, came out, which was followed shortly by a book centered on an infamous, South Carolina high school football game: Lines of Scrimmage (which he co-wrote with Scott Pleasant). Recently, Black Lawrence Press published Oestreich's first nonfiction collection, Partisans, which starts off with an essay on love, murder, and family pets.

Barrett Bowlin: Let's talk a wee bit about "The Mercy Kill." You published it with The Normal School back in 2012, and I was curious what the impetus was for you to write that piece in that particular period. If you can remember, when did you start work on it, and what made it an essential piece to write around that time?

Joe Oestreich: Back then, there were so many bestsellers about dogs. Dog books were everywhere, man. So I consciously set out to write a dog essay—as a challenge. There was this voice in my head like the one from the film Barton Fink that says, "A wrestling picture!" But my voice kept saying, "A dog essay!" The trouble was, my best dog story wasn't the fluffy kind that appeals to dog people. Mine has more of an Old Yeller kind of ending. Still: A dog essay!

BB: And I love how your dog from that period became kind of the side item in the narrative. Tangentially, when did you know you were going to place John Parsons as the central figure?

JO: I found out pretty quickly that I couldn't write about the dog—an old female mutt named Rex—without writing about the man that did her the kindness of putting her out of her misery. And the guy who did that merciful thing—a neighbor named John Parsons—was the same guy who'd been charged with murder. He’d later be convicted, and my parents would testify on his behalf during the sentencing phase of the trial. He's a complicated man, which makes him a compelling character.

BB: What was behind the decision to include "The Mercy Kill" first in the collection? If we're thinking of the essay collection as an album, it's the opening track. Highly coveted space there, dude.

JO: It was a practical decision, rather than, say, a thematic one. At minimum, the first essay has got to make the reader want to stick around to read the second one. I guess I figured if a reader gets to the end of "The Mercy Kill," says "meh," and puts the book down, then there was nothing I could have done to keep him. If that first essay is not for you, no problem. Don't waste your time with the rest of the book. Maybe go rake the leaves or something.

BB: Don't sell yourself short on it, though. Seriously, it's got murder, euthanasia, the story of your father leaving your mother for another woman. What's not to love?

JO: The dog getting shot in the head. That's what's not to love.

BB: True. But the essay works in that essential—and I'm going to call it essential, damn it!—Old Yeller cultural moment. Why do you think of the essay as more of a threshold than an invitation?

JO: It would be great if "The Mercy Kill" worked as both an invitation and a threshold. With that essay, I'm trying to invite the reader into my—I don't know—sensibility, I guess I'd call it. And then, after that first piece, I'm hoping they want to hang around for a while.

BB: Touching on that, too, much like it served as the central subject matter in your first book, Hitless Wonder, music figures into Partisans as an essential component: as a question of what it means to 'rock' (in "This Essay Doesn't Rock," for example); as an exploration into mood and music theory; as part of the larger narrative of your band, Watershed, and so on. When you were assembling the essays for the collection, did musicality figure into the order? If so, how?

JO: You nailed it earlier, when you compared an essay collection to a record album. I was really thinking of Partisans of having an A-side and B-side. In this collection, the A-side essays are largely memoir and travel writing. They concern stuff I did and stuff that happened to me. The B-side essays deal much more in cultural criticism, stuff I notice rather than do. I was born in 1969, so I come from the era of vinyl records. From my perspective, when you flip that record over to the B-side, you’re preparing yourself for a change in mood rather than a rehash of what you heard on Side A. I'm thinking here of a record like Abbey Road.

Wait. I don’t want to compare myself to the Beatles. Maybe I should have said Heaven Tonight by Cheap Trick. Better yet, Van Halen's Diver Down.

BB: In terms of the collection's content, you really do manage to cover a huge amount of real estate. Regarding geography (the U.S., Mexico, France, Turkey) and subject matter (murders, escaping time-share presentations, marriage, the death of animals, tattoos, migrant workers, etc.) and time (1969 to the present), Partisans gets into a fair amount of disparate material. What made you think the essays could function together in a single collection?

JO: That's a tricky one. Maybe they don't. But the way I see it, there are two types of essay collections. In the first type, the essays have an obvious topical or thematic link. Fifteen essays about waterfalls, say. Or thirteen essays about Montana. In the second type, the essays are linked by the voice and (here's that word again) sensibility of the writer. I'm thinking here of books like Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored, Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem, George Saunders' The Braindead Megaphone, and the Davis Foster Wallace essay collections. I tend to prefer the second type—the wide-ranging type—over the first. I like variety. I also like to fall in love a little bit with the narrator and then have him or her act as my tour guide through a bunch of different places and ideas.

The complication is that unless the author is already famous, it's hard to get that second type published. A wandering, disparate collection by a famous writer like George Saunders is going to be a bestseller. But what if the author isn't famous? Then it’s hard for agents and publishers to identify a clear audience for a wandering, disparate essay collection. Fifteen Essays about Waterfalls might not sell a million, but at least the audience is clear. And in the book proposal, the agent can bullet-point it:

·      Couples looking for moist, outdoorsy places to kiss;

·      Shampoo marketers;

·      Daredevils/barrel makers.

My feeling is that super-cohesive essay collections are easier to sell but not as much fun to read.

BB: I'm curious, then: what was the place or subject matter where you felt most excited about taking the reader to in the collection? Similarly, what was the place you were most worried about taking them?

JO: I always get excited by taking seriously a trivial subject, like, for instance, trying to define what rocks and what doesn't or what it's like to have somebody else rifle through your CD collection. Plus the “CD collection” essay—called "Barreling into Uncool"—gave me a legitimate reason to reference not just one but both of Judas Priest's guitar players. Any essayist can name check KK Downing. It takes real skill to work in Glenn Tipton.

I’m always worried about taking readers into my life. The more memoir-y stuff. The worry isn't that I'm scared to reveal intimate details; the worry is that they'll get bored reading about me. But that's the leap all writers of memoir and personal essay must make. You have to hope that, in writing about yourself, you've transcended the personal and stumbled upon something that resonates with everybody, something universal. I worry about failing at that, about navel gazing.

BB: In my literary hopes and dreams, I envision you with a brushed-nickel frame you've purchased from Target and which you've nailed up above your office door, one that reads: "Don't fucking navel gaze!"

JO: Shouted in the same voice that said, "A dog essay!"

BB: Okay, one last question about the selection process: which subject matters have you written about that didn't make the cut for Partisans? Do you see that material coming together for a future collection?

JO: I left pieces out of the collection not due to subject matter but due to form. Many of the essays I rejected were overly fragmented and lyrical in a way that seemed cutting edge when I was in grad school but seems kind of gimmick-for-gimmick's sake now. I dig lyrical and fragmented essays, just not the ones I wrote.

BB: Dude, I, too, love that you play with a variety of structures for the essays in the book, e.g., braided essays like "The Get Down" and "In Any August," segmented essays like "Two Haircuts" and "This Machine No Longer Kills Fascists (Did It Ever?)," and so on. For someone who works so prominently in creative nonfiction, what goes into the decision-making process for you in terms of structure? When do you figure out what the architecture of a book or a short piece is going to look like?

JO: This sounds trite and obvious, but the goal is try to find the form that's organic to the material. That's hard to do, of course. When beginning a new essay, I experiment a little—with voice, with form. But at some point, you have to stop experimenting and commit to a structure, just to get something down on the page. Then, once it's done, you can step back, take stock, and try to assess if the form you chose worked. I'm never totally confident that I've made the right choice. Could a given essay have been better if I’d tried a different structure? Sure, maybe. But look at the structure I did choose—it actually exists. I sometimes tell my students, "Try not to fall victim to the tyranny of the thing that exists. That initial version of your (essay, story, poem) is a freaking bully. It wants not to be changed."

And I do revise a lot. But I will admit that once I have a completed essay with a given structure, I usually don't radically alter the form in revision. If the first draft of the essay is a solid, split-level suburban home, I try to hone it into an even nicer split-level suburban. I don't change it into an igloo. Or a yurt.

BB: There's a line in the essay "This Machine No Longer Kills Fascists (Did It Ever?):" "I want to believe music makes a difference. I really do. But I'm not so sure."

I love the honesty of this jumping-off point in the essay. That said, if music is having—let's call it 'difficulty'—influencing politics and social change, particularly now, let's focus on music itself. What have you been listening to as of late that's helped to change your perspective on music (if at all)? Or like you did when listening to older, less hipster-approved records in "Barreling into Uncool," what music from your past have you re-examined recently and found something new (and hopefully promising) in?

JO: First of all, there's a shit-ton of great new music out there. I just don't know about it. Yet. As a music fan, I'm always about five years behind. This is by design, kind of. New music gets produced and distributed so quickly that it overwhelms me. It's hard to filter out the white noise to get to the good stuff. Luckily, I have friends whose taste I trust. They tell me everything I need to hear. And then, five years later, I get around to it. So for me, bands like Hacienda and Japandroids are new.

Lots of music fans like to go wide; they listen to everything. I like to go deep. I’d rather listen to one thing. Over and over. Like The Weight is a Gift by Nada Surf. I'll listen to that record for two weeks straight, and I'll hear all kinds of nuance during week two that I missed during week one. This repetition is what it was like when I was a kid and I only owned three albums. And I’m sure I will never love and be inspired by music as much as I was then, when I was going deep out of necessity. All of that said, there's a relatively new singer/songwriter named Aaron Lee Tasjan who’s great. Don’t wait five years on him. One other thing: The older I get, the less I care about what's cool. I concentrate more on what's good. Which is why I can say with 100% certainty that history will be kind to Billy Squier.

BB: I am so going to trust you on that. (Also, thanks incredibly for getting "The Stroke" stuck in my head, you bastard.) Quick follow-up, then: I'm curious what CNF you've come back to in a deep dive recently. What's an example of a solidly good work that you've found again that has way more nuance than what you initially assumed?

JO: You know who the Billy Squier of CNF is? Steve Almond. And I think he might appreciate why I say so. It's because, just as Squier does with a catchy pop song, Almond makes writing catchy essays look easy. And because he's so funny, it's easy to overlook the smarts and thoughtfulness. Almond could probably even bust out the dance moves Squier did in the "Rock Me Tonight" video.

---

Joe Oestreich is the author of Partisans, Lines of Scrimmage (with Scott Pleasant), and Hitless Wonder. His work has appeared in The Normal School, Esquire, Creative Nonfiction, and many other journals and magazines. He teaches creative writing at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC.

Barrett Bowlin is director of the Writing Center at Binghamton University, where he moonlights as a contributing editor for Memorious. His essays and stories appear in places like Ninth Letter, Hobart, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Salt Hill, Mid-American Review, and Bayou, which awarded him the 2015 James Knudsen Prize in Fiction.

The Skips, the Pops, the Hisses, the Clicks: Conversation with Joe Bonomo

In mid-April, writer and musician Joe Oestreich spoke with Bonomo about rock and roll, essaying, and the sneaky thrill of stumbling upon a Carly Simon album cover.

Joe Oestreich: Rock and roll began with Chuck Berry, so let’s start there. Is it possible to separate the brilliance of the music from the misdeeds of the musician?

Joe Bonomo: Chuck Berry is so larger-than-life, you have to remind yourself that he was actually a living, breathing person. You have to turn off all the white noise—everything that’s been said about Chuck, all mythologizing the critics have done, all the self-mythologizing he’s done. You’ve got to take him off that pedestal. I find that I can do that by reading about him, in his terrific autobiography and in other books, learning what his origins were, what mistakes he made, all the stuff that renders him—not small, exactly—but human. You don’t want to ignore the complexity of his life, but reading about the man is one way to pull yourself away from the myth and back into the music, back into what you dug about Chuck in the first place.

A while ago, I was driving through town, running errands, not paying a lot of attention to the radio, when suddenly “No Particular Place to Go” came on. There’s that great moment when a song surprises you—you didn’t drop the needle yourself, you didn’t press the play button—so you didn’t know it was coming. For the first 30 seconds of the song, you’re just catching up. You’ve heard it a thousand times, but you’re a millisecond behind, so everything is still exciting. That’s what happened with “No Particular Place to Go.” Because I couldn’t have willed that moment to happen, I was surprised into the brilliance of Chuck Berry, as if I was hearing him again for the first time. That was a gift from the universe.

JO: In that moment, it wasn’t a Chuck Berry song, right? It was your song. Like what John Fogerty said after not playing those Creedence tunes for so long because of the lawsuit with Fantasy Records: at some point the artist figures out that the songs don’t belong to the songwriter or the record label. The songs belong to the listener.

JB: Nobody really owns this stuff. I think Keith Richards said that he wants his tombstone to read simply: He passed it along. That’s how rock and roll works. Somebody plays it. Then somebody else pulls it down from the air and passes it along to the next guy.

JO: That’s an apt metaphor for the creative process. The best songwriters say that when they’re at the top of their game, they’re not consciously crafting songs at all; they’re channeling what’s already in the atmosphere.

JB: They just put their antennae up and it captures something. That’s not to say that some songwriters—from Tin Pan Alley to the Brill Building on down—don’t sit at a desk and write “work songs.” But yeah, it’s a mystery, isn’t it? How the song comes unbidden?

JO: Do you have to like a song to write about it?

JB: That’s a question I’ve been puzzling over for a long time. I’ve never given myself the challenge of writing about a song I detest, but I think I should. From the essayist’s perspective, it’s always best to test the limits of your understanding, the limits of your own biases.

JO: In the book you say, “photos are, of course, liars.” Are personal essays also liars?

JB: They can be. In two ways. An essay can lie in the conventional, less interesting way of consciously or unconsciously fudging the facts. In other words, poor research. But the more interesting way is in the inauthenticity of the writer’s voice. An essay can lie when the writer’s not being honest about himself, not being honest with himself. I’m not talking about a meta essay, where the essayist is aware of dissembling. I’m talking about the forced epiphany or some other rhetorical gesture that reads as false, when the writer is steering the essay someplace it might not have reached on its own. That’s what I guard against when I’m writing about music. I try to approach the subject from as many different directions as I can and then see where the essay takes me.

JO: Beyond lying or dissembling, a further complication is that the truth changes over time. As you argue in the book, the truth of a current news item changes as soon as it becomes a historical event. Same with music, right? When you’re older you can still love a song you dug as a kid, even though the meaning in that song may have changed for you.

JB: Exactly. I wrote a book about AC/DC’s Highway to Hell in part because I wanted to explore that very question. How is it that a rock and roll album I loved when I was just hitting puberty can still send me now that I’m in my 50s? Beyond irony, beyond nostalgia. That’s an amazing trick. I suppose all art can do it, but pop music seems to do it in an especially vivid, graphic way. A song can score your life without you even realizing it.

In the book I write a lot in the about listening to music at that age—11, 12, 13—because that’s when I started getting glimpses into how complex life was going to be later, how strange and astounding—not just on the level of sex and romance but in larger ways, too. Somehow songs were telling me that about life, before I was able to articulate those ideas to myself. Anything that lodges itself into you at that time—pre-sentiment—stays there. It becomes part of your foundational identity, and then it sticks to you in a way that you can’t rub off.

JO: Conversely, there’s this line in the book: “The song will stop him in his tracks one day when he’s ready to listen.” Is there an artist you first heard as a teenager that maybe you weren’t ready for? One that you appreciated only years later?

JB: Bowie.

JO: Me, too. I wasn’t cool enough for Bowie. I didn’t think he rocked hard enough. I probably didn’t recognize his masculinity as masculinity—at least not in the way I recognized AC/DC.

JB: I remember seeing him on Saturday Night Live when I was 13 or so, and I forget what album he was promoting, but he was doing one of those shock-theatrical, highly stylized personas. The whole thing was kind of kabuki-like, and it was threatening to me, the way he was channeling some sort of abstract human expression that was beyond my ken at that age. So I turned him off.

JO: As you’ve said, when you listen you music as a kid it can teach you things about life that you aren’t yet sophisticated enough to articulate or even consciously appreciate. So I wonder if music is sometimes best heard from a position of ignorance. One of my favorite lines in the book is, “How can something I don’t understand come to mean so much?” I love that idea—even down to the level of how lyrics we’ve misunderstood can take on meaning.

JB: If you’re hearing a lyric wrong, and that lyric over the years has come to mean something to you, then which words are correct? Now, I don’t want to carry that idea too far, because I believe in the intentionality of the artist. But that scenario happens to all of us: You hear a lyric wrong, and you scribble it down in your high school notebook, and it’s burned into you.

JO: I’m afraid to take the conversation where I want to go next, because I know we’re going to sound like two old guys shaking our fists, saying, “Back in my day . . . ,”

JB: That’s inevitable.

JO: True. And yet I love how Field Recordings reminds me that in the old days of albums and cassettes, music wasn’t just a physical object you could hold; it was a physical object you could destroy. Rip open the cassette. Scratch the record. Break into, as you say in the book, “the dark inside of a pop song.” How the heck do you get inside of 1s and 0s?

JB: You don’t. Even with a CD, all you could do was scratch it, but that renders it unplayable. With a 45 or an LP, the skips, the pops, the hisses, the clicks become part of the song. The groove of the record wearing out. The fading of the tape, where what’s recorded on the other side starts leaking in. The way you could injure the song, it gave the thing a dimensional quality that streaming with 1s and 0s lacks entirely, and I do think that is a loss.

When I was a kid, my copy of the Beatles’ second album had a big pop during “I Call Your Name.” Eventually I bought the CD and then later moved on to streaming, but I still hear that pop in the same spot. It became part of the performance—or, more accurately, it became part of my performance of the song.

JO: More evidence that the songs belong to the listener. I love that the book reminds me not just of the physical quality of the medium but also of the equipment. Those huge, wooden stereo consoles weren’t gear; they were furniture. Music seems more real when you physically interact with it.

JB: Even the act of lifting the needle and dropping it. That’s a much more intimate gesture—literally—than clicking on Spotify.

JO: That quiet moment just before the arm drops. And then, when you’ve got a record that skips, trying to figure out which coin you need to place on top of the needle to give it the weight it needs to ride over the skip. A penny?

JB: Two pennies? Maybe the new resurgence of vinyl tempers this a bit, but which generation will grow up without having any vinyl in their house? They don’t own records. Their parents don’t have a shelf of albums. When that kid holds an LP in his hands for the first time, it’s going to feel huge, like it’s 10 feet by 10 feet.

JO: In the book Freakonomics, one of the fun economic facts is that reading out loud to your kids doesn’t necessarily make them more literate. But there is a correlation between just having books in your house and your child’s literacy. So maybe if you keep the physical object of the record at home, then some afternoon when the kid is alone and bored, he can sift though the shelves, pick out the Carly Simon album cover, and say, “Oh my God. What is this?”

JB: Oh my God. Who is this? The kids that only know music through streaming or You Tube, they’re missing out on something, absolutely. But every older generation says that. That’s what the horse-and-carriage driver said about the automobile, etcetera, etcetera. That’s always going to be part of the human condition. So you’re right. We do have to guard against “Get off my porch” kind of thinking. I have to remind myself that somewhere there’s a 13 year old for whom his introduction to music was streaming. In 10 or 15 years when streaming goes away and is replaced by something else, that kid is going to bemoan the loss of streaming in ways I can’t comprehend. But that’s the nature of loss; that’s the nature of growing.

JO: Many of the essays in the book feature the juxtaposition between a writer and a musical act. You’ve got Larry Brown and Hank Williams, Sylvia Plath and the Beatles, Charles Lamb and music writer Lester Bangs. You bring in TS Eliot to help you talk about Elvis Costello. What’s the essayistic instinct there?

JB: It’s not a conscious thing. I don’t sit down and think, What 20th Century modernist could I use to talk about the Rolling Stones? It’s just a matter of me paying attention. Maybe I’ll read something Piet Mondrian said about the visual arts, and it will click with what I’m trying to say about how a certain song moves from the middle eight to the chorus.

I came of age a couple of decades after rock critics like Greil Marcus, Paul Nelson, Lester Bangs, Ellen Willis and others continued the process of dissolving the barriers between so-called “high art” and “low art.” These were some of the first writers to talk about rock and roll and other cultural forms in the same paragraph. For me, pairing, say, literature and music is not a conceit so much as it’s a way of noticing how many common threads there are among different kinds of human expression. Human beings wrestling with what it means to be alive. Painters and art critics wrestle with that in the same way as Sinatra or some one-off punk band playing a Wednesday night in the middle of nowhere: by translating the chaos of being alive.

JO: I so admire your essay “In the Morning I’ll Rise Above,” because I’ve thought for a long time that the two most important words in rock and roll—other than, you know, “rock” and “roll”—are “Saturday” and “night.” In that essay, you remind us that Saturday night is only Saturday night, because it bumps up against Sunday morning.

JB: The pleasure of Saturday night comes because we know it’s finite—even though we like to pretend otherwise. We’re staving off the inevitable. Eventually Sunday’s going to come, and it’s going to require us to take stock.

JO: Two competing belief systems, equally attractive because they’re opposed to each other.

JB: That’s right. Saturday night’s got its own set of promises, a very specific kind of salvation and redemption. And Sunday morning? When you’re reckoning, that’s a very different kind of salvation. But each are valid and valuable and nourishing in their own way.

JO: We talked earlier about how sometimes, especially when you’re a kid, you can hear music and understand without really understanding. Maybe that’s another definition of faith. And speaking of faith, you write a lot about your Catholic upbringing. Is there something about faith or Catholicism that got you into rock and roll? Something about one type of faith competing with the other?

JB: It was fun to be a rock and roll fan when I was a kid in Catholic school—but also scary. Part of the thrill of loving Highway to Hell back then was that at St. Andrews the Apostle, well, AC/DC was not on the curriculum. All the cool guys and girls who disappeared after school, doing things that I could only fantasize about, they were not only fans of that band, they seemed to be acting out the songs. The morality play was being staged right in front of me.

So I don’t know that there’s a direct correlation between growing up Catholic and falling in love with rock and roll, but I like your idea about faith being involved. The Book of Hebrews defines faith as “the evidence of things not seen,” right? There’s that moment of being first turned on by a song when it’s telling you something that you didn’t know you knew. Essays can do that, too. There’s an element of faith involved in music and writing, an element of giving over to the mystery. And allowing yourself to be convinced that the mystery isn’t all threatening or confounding or melancholy. The mystery can tell you something—if you listen. And if you give it time.

---

Joe Bonomo’s books include This Must Be Where My Obsession with Infinity Began, Conversations with Greil Marcus (Literary Conversations Series), AC/DC's Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, Installations (National Poetry Series), and Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America's Garage Band. A five-time “Notable Essay” selection at Best American Essays, he teaches at Northern Illinois University, and appears online at No Such Thing As Was (nosuchthingaswas.com) and at @BonomoJoe.

In addition to being the bass player and singer for the Columbus, Ohio-based band Watershed, Joe Oestreich is the author of three books of creative nonfiction: Partisans, Lines of Scrimmage (co-written with Scott Pleasant), and Hitless Wonder. He teaches at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC. Visit him at joeoestreich.com.

Grid: cassettes via Foter.com / CC BY