Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again too few to mention. Words to live by, whether you come to that sentiment via Frank Sinatra (whose birthplace of Hoboken, New Jersey, has been my home for decades) or Sid Vicious or even Paul Anka (if you have never heard the recording of him berating his band, put down this book immediately—after paying for it, of course—and seek it out). But I do have one regret I’d like to share with you.
Time was I proofread books for a cheapo paperback publisher. Most of my assignments were sexy postapocalyptic survivalist dramas and sexy Old West cowboys and Indians dramas, but on one occasion I was given a compendium of rock ’n’ roll trivia to correct. This book was riddled with mistakes to a laughable degree, and my regret is that I didn’t xerox the thing in its original form, because all these years later the only example of its slapdashitude I can recall is a reference to Maria Muldaur’s 1974 hit record “Midnight at the Oasis” as “Meet Me at the Oasis.” Which I concede doesn’t seem that funny, but I’m a stickler for accuracy.
As such, and keeping in mind the Pythagorean theorem (“Once a proofreader, always a proofreader”), it was with no small amount of foreboding that I picked up Jon Glaser’s My Dead Dad Was in ZZ Top. In this age of Wikipedia and Internet rumors repeated until they are mistaken for fact, I suspected yet another contribution to the noise that’s making truth so paradoxically difficult to discern amidst the overload of information. A section devoted to names that my group allegedly considered before deciding on Yo La Tengo was not a good sign. I have no memory of any of these names.
And yet…and here’s where Glaser has separated himself from your print-the-legend rabble. Through an awe-inspiring amount of research, he has found documentation to back up even the most outrageous of the claims within. In the case of Yo La Tengo, he has somehow located a piece of paper in which those rejected names appear, and I cannot claim that it is not my handwriting, because it most unmistakably is. One must thereby conclude that all of the other stories in this book, no matter how dubious, are, as the subtitle promises, “100% Real.”
By now, I hope you’ve enjoyed that Paul Anka tirade and have once again picked up My Dead Dad Was In ZZ Top. I invite you to sit down in a comfortable chair and “Meet Me at the Oasis”—the oasis of Knowledge!