Author Interview

Author Interview

Interview with Thom Jurek

By Lou Hillman

Thom Jurek is a free-lance writer living and working in Ann Arbor. He was Arts Editor at the Detroit Metro Times for seven years and his articles on popular music appear in several national magazines. His first book of poetry, "Dub," was published in 1986 by In Camera Press. His second book, "Memory Bags," published in 1995 by Ridgeway Press was review here in AGENDA in the 1995 July-August issue. His newest book is due to be published by St. Martin's Press in New York in the Fall of this year.

Hillman: I wanted to talk about the body of work you've built up: two books of poetry, and a third book, which sounds more like cultural theory.

Jurek: I'm actually working on two at once. One I've got a deal for and is coming out and the other one is in process.

Hillman: And I forgot about the weekly radio program and the scores of articles on music for Rolling Stone and Spin...

Jurek:...Musician, New Musical Express, MoJo, Melody Maker and I write for a slew of newspapers around the country. I don't want this to sound pretentious but I hope when it's all done--when I'm done doing this, you know when I'm old, I just hope when you total it up--that it looks like not a life in writing but a life by writing. Because that's what I feel. In some ways, in some areas I've been more "productive" than others, but I feel like through all of it, there was never a time when I wasn't doing anything.

Hillman: The thing I noticed in your poetry when I look at "Memory Bags" or "Dub," is that there's a line between them. There's a development of subjectivity in relation to desire, in very different ways.

Jurek: They're different. I have all the remaining copies of "Dub" in a box buried in my basement, and if I ever see another one, I'll buy it just to get it out of circulation. It was a response to some heavy things. One, was probably just discovering a language in which to write--and the fact that I had read George Bataille and figured out that I could say anything I wanted. Previously, I didn't believe that. That just opened up a whole world for me. But just like anything else, when you're getting started and you make a new discovery, there's an accumulated weight of other stuff that's built up that you have to free yourself of. I look at that book and that's what it was, and then I spent nine years continuing to get rid of that stuff, to move it out.

Where "Memory Bags" is a book that's almost pastoral in terms of the way it sounds. It's much more musical. It's not like this angry wail. I mean, it examines desire certainly, but in a much broader sense. It's not just based around the sexual impulse but around desire in life and how it plays out: not just in terms of how we remember, but how we grieve and how we love, how we work together as human beings.

"Memory Bags" is the real beginning for me, because even with all the baggage that the word moral entails, when I read it back I was blown away by the spiritual element of the book which "Dub" went out of its way to obliterate. When you get to the end of "Memory Bags," it welcomes it [the spiritual element] in, not in a salvation sense, but more in the sense of human possibility. But there's a line there for sure and I'd like to think that the line now moves in an even wider direction. Because it has been a couple of years and I've written a couple of really long pieces since. Weirdly enough, my work is --I don't want to say narrative-- but it's more so than it was then.

Hillman: I'd love to see some of that stuff. Is that the second book, a book of poetry?

Jurek: No. They're critical books. I'm working on a book with Dave Marsh and Dave Cantwell on the 150 greatest American music performers of the 20th century, in all genres. So you'll have figures like James Brown right up against Hank Williams. You'll have figures like Screaming Jay Hawkins perhaps, sitting next to Coleman Hawkins.

It's an interesting book because it has lists of other things as well. There are essays on all the people, there are lots of weird lists like "the ten greatest performers who never recorded." We take those from evidence, from old newspaper articles and other research that we do. It's going to be a book that everybody has a problem with because it's so totally subjective. But there's no other way to do a book like that. We decided it would be fun to really try and tell an historical story.

The other one is a social history on the German music group CAN. There's a really good book about them, sort of a straight biographical book. But this thing I'm working on is talking to all the individual members and really having them recall their life and times as a band, and the whole crowd rock scene in the late '60s and early '70s. Because that's really influenced a lot of music afterward. And so when I say "social history," it's theirs and not mine.

Hillman: It seems to me there's a consistency between what you do on a poetic level and what you do as a music critic. You're trying to tease apart the obvious until what's underneath it comes through.

Jurek: There's a line in a Leonard Cohen song that says, "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." That's what I'm always looking for, that flaw that exposes what's in everything. Not for everybody else's edification necessarily, not because I'm a detective. But because you can hear a great song and you try to figure out what it is about it that pulls you in, that makes you listen to it. What is it about that song and how does it link up to all the other crazy songs that have hit me in my life? What is it that it holds in common with, or what sets it apart so drastically that I have to pay attention to it?