Walk away! (Walkin' After Midnight - Lauren St John)

Member Name: caro

Product:	Walkin' After Midnight - Lauren St John
Date:	13/06/01 (92 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: An interesting topic

Disadvantages: Terribly written

This book is a study of the country music industry in Nashville, written by a former golf correspondent for the Sunday Times. Laurent St John is also a country music fan, and made a number of journeys to Nashville in order to research this book. Her aim was to find the ‘heart of Nashville’ behind the record company glitz.

I really wanted to like the book, partly because I enjoy ‘alternative’ country music, and partly because I’d spent a small fortune on a hardback copy! Sadly, I found it a real disappointment. Well-structured, strong material can make up for poor writing and vice versa, but neither good writing nor good structure were on offer here. The material shone through in places, but was too often submerged under its poor presentation.

Like other journalistic books (Jon Ronson’s ‘Them’ uses a similar approach very well), Walkin’ After Midnight is based around interviews and anecdotes. Often entertaining and enlightening in themselves, they also form starting points for commentary upon issues such as Nashville’s treatment of lesbian, gay and black artists.

However, this approach has its risks, and they are amply demonstrated here. The book lacks structure, and the reason for choosing particular interviewees is not always apparent to the reader. At one moment, Laurent St John is with a once-famous band on a reunion tour; the next, talking to a series of unknowns; then, we suddenly move to an interview with Steve Earle. The effect is rather disorientating as there is no clear link between each episode, particularly in the first half of the book.

To add to the confusion, little pieces of travelogue go absolutely nowhere, leaving the reader somewhat bemused. A chapter opens with Lauren St John taking the ‘Nash Trash tour’. As early as paragraph three, ‘I slid down in my seat and took refuge in thoughts of a calmer, more melodic time.
’ She moves to discussing a completely unrelated musical she watched the night before, and never returns to the tour we have just joined. The reader is left suspended, wondering why we never went back.

In fact, Lauren St John leaves the reader suspended so often that you wonder whether she quickly bores of some of her stories, or just likes to wind up her readers. When she alludes to an anecdote with a couple of facts and the injunction, ‘don’t ask’, you think, ‘But of course I’m asking. If I wasn’t interested, I wouldn’t be reading the book!’ By the end of the book, the reader also wonders why it was restricted to Nashville-based artists when there is little ‘travelogue’ or sense of place and no other obvious reason for so limiting the subject matter.

The lack of a clear focus leaves the book badly adrift. It vacillates between a commentary on the iniquities of the major labels, an account of the alternative scene (difficult, when so much of that music comes from outside Nashville), and a series of portraits of Nashville characters. There is no commentary and precious little context provided to interviewees’ accounts: they are simply repeated uncritically. With some subjects, notably Steve Earle, the writing is cringingly obsequious, like the worst sort of fanclub article. Frankly, an average magazine interview will provide more critical perspective.

The writing style can also be rather clumsy in places (suprisingly so for a book written by a journalist). For example, try this paragraph-long sentence:

"Days before, when they received the Nammy for producing Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Ray Kennedy, his co-producer at Room & Board, the studio division of Earle’s indie label E-Squared, had turned to him and quipped: ‘Remember when we started and we said we wanted to break all the rules and piss everyone off?
Well, it didn’t work.’"

Agh! Surely it’s enough to know that Ray Kennedy was his co-producer? If we needed to know his label’s structure, couldn’t that have been done separately? By the time I got to the ‘quip’, I’d pretty much forgotten who was making it and where! Other times, Lauren St John is much less rigorous about setting out the facts and leaves the reader to guess connections. It’s hard to decide which of the two is more frustrating.

The layout of the book is also relatively unattractive. Each chapter has a title page with a badly-reproduced black-and-white photograph. You need to look carefully at each murky image to try to work out who it is, and how they relate to the chapter, as there are no captions. While good-quality reproductions do add to the cost of a book (but are nonetheless fairly standard in hardback books), captions cost absolutely nothing. It is difficult to imagine why there is no information on the pictures anywhere in the book.

In summary, this was a book which should have really interested me. I was looking forward to an enjoyable read and the chance to be writing this as a positive review. However, the lack of direction and structure in the book combine with the uninspiring writing to make ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’ a real disappointment.

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