Chuck Klosterman is a journalist, rock critic and writer of fiction who I for reasons I’m unclear about have avoided or at the very least never pursued. This, in spite of the fact that I have many friends with great taste who read rock criticism, music biographies and the like incessantly and they all seem to read Klosterman and like him.
About a year and a half ago, my brother in law gave me a copy of Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story as a gift and it sat on my shelf until last week. I was looking for a lighter, funnier book after the last two subjects I read dealt with anti-Semitism and the dark side of using sports as a way out of poverty…so when my eyes alighted on Killing Yourself to Live (I’m assuming he took this title from the Black Sabbath song of the same name) I knew it was going to the top of my short list…which might seem like a strange choice for a lighter book given the subject is the author’s three week road trip visiting the final resting spot of various musicians..that is to say..the place where they died. So off he goes in search of the same intersection where two members of the Allman Brothers died at different times in different accidents, the trip also includes a visit to Graceland, the field where Buddy Holly crashed etc before finally ending up in Seattle to visit the death site of Kurt Cobain.
Throughout his trip his thoughts are concerned with: why death makes celebrity more interesting in many cases, is rock criticism a waste of time as well as the more than occasional excruciating detail from his own troubled dating history. As he spends long hours driving followed by nights in cheap hotels he manages to mix it all together with some really funny observations about popular culture that can only come from someone who has spent far too much time thinking about such things (he spends several pages comparing his ex girl friends to the various members of KISS even including the band mates from 80s and 90s… the ones no one remembers or cares about) and while looking for a particular bridge that Cobain had supposedly but in fact never slept under in Aberdeen (as mentioned in the Nirvana song “Something in the Way” off of their album Nevermind) only to find so many bridges in Aberdeen it prompts him to write that the town would be “a wonderful community for trolls”..a great line.
In the end, I breezed through this book and found that I in fact fall exactly within the demographic that books like this are written for – Mostly guys around my age (although I do know women who like him as he is the essence of the smart, literate, funny, music/pop culture nerd) who see the world through Star Wars references, self aware to an extreme and can appreciate the power of a great rock riff. In short, I am his target audience; I just never could admit it before. It’s like saying you don’t like brussels sprouts but without ever having tried it first. But Chuck Klosterman is a lot more fun than brussels sprouts.
Other Chuck Klosterman books you may enjoy:
Eating the Dinosaur
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
Fargo Rock City: A heavy metal odyssey in rural North Dakota
And a work of Fiction – Downtown Owl