steve almond

Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

I just finished reading Steve Almond’s collection of essays, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, and I loved it… It’s all about the author’s love for music and the ways in which being what he terms a drooling fanatic has affected his life for better or for worse (but mostly for better!). Among the more hilarious passages in the book is Almond’s description of the Macarena:

  • The dancer extends his arms forward, palms down, then flips his arms over on the beat.
  • The dancer sets his hands on his shoulders, the back of his head, and his hips.
  • The dancer executes a pelvic rotation in time with the line “Ehhh, Macarena!” simultaneously executing a 90-degree jump-and-turn maneuver so as to repeat the same routine all over again.
  • Steve shoots himself in the skull.

It’s a fun book for anyone who’s ever fallen head-over-heels in love with a band — especially one that no one else ever seems to have heard of. And in that spirit, I offer the following series of posts, On Being a Name-dropping Groupie for a Lesser-known Pop Band with Roots in Philly. A much shorter version of this essay appeared in Origivation magazine in 2005 or thereabouts. This is the extended dance remix…

Click here to read on…

Interview with Steve Almond

Thanks (again!) to Steve Almond, this time for a great interview in The Nervous Breakdown. We chatted electronically about a number of subjects — including but not limited to my writing process, working with the Permanent Press, and any similarities I might see between my own mother and Audrey Corcoran, the heroine of The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl.

This interview appears hot on the heels of my interview with Peter Schwartz in Dogzplot, so I hope my responses don’t contradict each other from one week to the next.