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January 24, 2020
Luke Geddes' Playlist for His Debut Novel "Heart of Junk"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Luke Geddes' debut novel Heart of Junk is quirky, moving, and hilarious.
Publishers Weekly wrote f the book:
"[A] rambunctious, oddly touching debut…[Geddes] offers even his most misguided characters the opportunity to bumble towards redemption. This one's a quirky treat for fans of flyover state humor."
In his own words, here is Luke Geddes' Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Heart of Junk:
Deep cuts from the record collection of Seymour Longwell and Lee Fallon
My novel Heart of Junk follows the vendor-denizens of a Wichita-based antique mall, each obsessed with a particular category of collectible or antique: postcards, art glass, Barbie dolls, etc. Naturally, this required a fair amount of research, except in the case of record collectors Seymour Longwell and Lee Fallon, whose interests, of all the characters, overlap most with my own. A friend who's read the book asked me what I did to so accurately capture the monomaniacal music collectors’ patter about obscure micro-genres and rare-issue vinyl and vintage stereo equipment; I explained that there was no research necessary, only a friendless adolescence and lots of free time.
Below, I present you with a selection of deep cuts from Seymour and Lee’s collection (and, I admit, my own) and/or songs that otherwise influenced the writing of the novel.
"The Village Green Preservation Society" / "People Take Pictures of Each Other" – The Kinks
The first and last songs from the The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, a favorite of both Seymour and Lee and, as it’s a loose concept album about nostalgia, pastoralism, the inexorable passage of time, etc., one that embodies many of Heart of Junk’s themes. These aren’t the deepest of cuts, but although the album is critically and cultishly beloved, it’s not as widely lauded as similar watershed 1968 pop albums like Electric Ladyland, The Beatles, or Cheap Thrills.
On its own, “Village Green” might come across as a "good old days" celebration of retrograde culture and values but read in the context of the album as a whole, it's not so straightforward. By the final track, "People Take Pictures of Each Other," songwriter Ray Davies' ambivalence toward nostalgia is clear: "Picture of me when I was just three / Sat with my ma by the old oak tree. / Oh how I love things as they used to be / Don't show me no more, please."
“Celebrity Art Party” – The Embarrassment
Probably the best ever band to come out of Wichita and the most terminally underrated in punk/post-punk history. If they'd been based somewhere trendier, they'd be regarded with the same reverence as Mission of Burma or Gang of Four. I like them better than those two, actually, and just as Memphis could only have birthed Big Star, the idiosyncrasies of The Embarrassment’s sound and style probably have a lot to do with their relative isolation. Lee uses them as proof that there could still be an underground coolness to the city; Seymour, although a fan, doesn't buy it. To him, they're the exception that proves the rule. "Sex Drive" is probably their most well-known song, but I'm partial to "Celebrity Art Party," the lead track off their 1981 EP.
“Randy Scouse Git” – The Monkees
Headquarters is one of the first albums I ever bought on vinyl, for a few bucks from the now sadly defunct New Frontier Record Exchange in Appleton, Wisconsin, which somehow remained open even during the nadir of vinyl sales in the early 2000s. It was just the sort of shop Seymour most respects: it only sold used records; its operating hours were erratic at best; it was well organized but overstuffed and covered in dust; there’s no conceivable way it was profitable—its owners seemed to run it as a mere hobby. After he rang me up, the guy at the counter, a true head, mentioned that one rare edition of Headquarters, known as the “beard variant,” replaces a back cover photo of the clean-cut band with a photo of them sporting stubble, a wonderfully useless bit of trivia that years later made it into the novel.
“Sodom and Gomorrah” – The New Creation
This is from Troubled, an exceedingly rare Canadian private-press Christian garage album from 1970. It’d be a holy grail for someone like Seymour. You could spend your whole life looking for an original issue and never find it. But unlike a lot of rare private press records, it’s interesting for more than its scarcity. Kinda sounds like The Shaggs meets The Velvet Underground with gonzo religious lyrics. One of my personal favorites.
“Egyptian Shumba” – The Tammys
Once totally obscure but now fairly well-known owing to its placement on key girl group compilations, “Egyptian Shumba” nevertheless retains its singularity. Dig the orgasmic nonsense-yelps of the chorus and the oddly psychedelic use of the clarinet. Should I brag that I own the original 45?
“Malcontents” – Reversible Cords / “Skeletons” – Inflatable Boy Clams / “Our Secret” – Beat Happening / “No Side to Fall In” – Raincoats
Seymour and Lee are both veterans of the '70s and '80s underground music scenes, but I intentionally tried not to get too specific in describing the various (fictional) bands they spent time in. In a nutshell, I imagine them as punk in my favorite sense—that is to say, in ethos rather than idiom, using limited musical skillsets to innovate rather than imitate, like these four bands.
“Sadie and the Fat Man” – Benjamin Dean Wilson
Though it’s never explicitly stated, the novel is set around 2010, not coincidentally the same time I myself lived in Wichita, so this song, from the 2016 album Small Talk, doesn’t yet exist for Seymour, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that would stop in his tracks even a jaded record collector who thinks he’s heard all there is to hear. At least that’s how I felt when I first heard Wilson, having bought the album on a whim after reading an eBay listing that compared him to Jonathan Richman. His songs are Cheever stories set to music, eccentrically constructed in a way that can combine say, doo wop and prog rock and talking blues in a way that feels seamless. I’ve so fallen in love with his music that I used some of my book advance money to start a boutique record label for the express purpose of releasing his second album, The Smartest Person in the Room, on vinyl.
Luke Geddes and Heart of Junk links:
Kirkus review
Publishers Weekly review
Westword interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
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