Ball the Wall (1989)

This collection of pieces and excerpts by Nik Cohn seems just slightly ahead of its time from its subtitle, Nik Cohn in the Age of Rock, as few were prepared to see "the Age of Rock" as finite in 1989, or anyway I wasn't, more fool me. Cohn always did seem to be living a few years ahead of the rest of us—in some ways so far ahead of his time his parents haven't even met yet, as the old joke goes. Cohn is also an outrageous fabricator and this collection includes perhaps his greatest in "Another Saturday Night," published originally in New York magazine in 1976 as "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" and going on to serve as the basis for the movie Saturday Night Fever. Cohn made the whole thing up. He was living in the US by then (probably New York) but the story was based on his experience clubbing in London in the '60s. I struggled with most of the fiction here (explicitly fiction, that is) but I think that is more about the general inadequacy of novel excerpts, which are rarely satisfying as they are neither stories nor novels. The longest excerpt as such is from the formally nonfiction Rock From the Beginning (under the original Little Richard shout title, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom). There's some shrewd editing here to sharpen the pieces from that book and they are worth looking at even if you already know it. Elsewise, he has a great term for early '70s pop in "Pepsi," along with a great example in the B.J. Thomas "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" interlude in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. "Pepsi" is perfect for the early '70s. Cohn's British origins and age give him a particularly interesting view on "pop" specifically, a somewhat more old-fashioned view of it that transcended music and included fashion and arty movies and sports figures too. And I think no one else could go to New York in the '70s and decide to write about the street drag-racing and stock-car circuit there. There's an interesting long piece here about fashion too, "Today There Are No Gentlemen," which sorts out the clothing styles and how it all worked with the Mods and Rockers, basically Cohn's home turf (fictional or otherwise). Pretty good collection!

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.