Tag / books

by Linnea Arold Michel

Book Review

Down with the System: A Memoir (Of Sorts)

by Serj Tankian

Hachette Books, 2024

ISBN: 978-0-306-83192-8   hardcover   $30.00

I remember clearly the first time I heard System Of A Down. In 2019, not too long after my hiatus from music ended (read that story here), I was driving along a country road on my way home from my office with the radio cranked up loud on SiriusXM’s Octane rock music channel. The DJ was talking about System. I wasn’t paying attention—I’d never heard of them.

“Disorder! Disorder! Disor-or-or-der!” the vocalist screams.

What the hell is this?

The song was “Toxicity”, and boy, did it grab me—fortunately, I was still able to find my way home despite being enthralled by the song. I also heard “Chop Suey” and, my favorite, “Aerials”, over the years, but the band’s been quiet since System’s last two albums, Mesmerize and Hypnotize, were released back in 2005. I confess System dropped off my radar until this spring, when my daughter sent me a link to an NPR.org story about Serj Tankian’s memoir. Book in hand, I dove into System’s discography on Spotify, listening to songs and albums as Tankian discussed them in his book.

Serj Tankian’s book, Down with the System: A Memoir (Of Sorts), is a great read. Do you have questions like: What do System’s crazy lyrics mean and where does their amazing  sound  come from?  What  makes  Serj Tankian tick? What does the name, System Of A Down, mean? Why isn’t the band touring and recording new music? And what does Armenia have to do with it all? Down with the System has some answers for you.

Tankian begins his story at its roots—his family’s life in Armenia, and their struggle and suffering at the time of the Genocide (dated at 1915-1917). They fled to Beirut,  Lebanon,  where  Tankian was born (1967), only to be uprooted once again by the Lebanese Civil War that began in 1975. “If you want to understand anything about me, my life, or even System Of A Down, you need to understand the Armenian Genocide,” writes Tankian. And to help with that, he gives a good dose of the essential history.

Immigration to America had an immense impact on Tankian. In so many immigrant families, children effectively live in two worlds—the school world of American culture and language, and the “old world” of their parents whose limited English and unfamiliarity with American ways can put them at risk of unfair and potentially costly situations. 

Tankian’s family was no different. They faced the legal ramifications of a business decision his father made, and, during his high school and college years, it fell to Tankian to help his parents deal with the lawyers and the courts.Then, after college, he took a job in his uncle’s jewelry business. 

During that time, messing around with a keyboard was initially a stress reliever, but it evolved into to a hard-core romance with music. Seizing opportunities to make music, Tankian fell into a band that led to one of those innocuous-seeming, but ultimately life-changing meetings (think John Lennon’s first meeting with Paul McCartney): Tankian met Daron Malakian, an Armenian-American kid who “ate, drank and slept music.” When that first band faded away, Tankian and Malakian, their chemistry undeniable, started another band, Soil, a seminal effort that paved the way for System.

Tankian took all that legal and business experience gleaned while helping his family and created a successful software business to support his music. It gave him a steady income and eventually provided space to allow System to grow  musically while developing a crucial fan base. Ultimately, when music demanded more of his time than the business allowed, he sacrificed the business to focus full-time on music.

“[T]he only thing in my life that felt like it was  mine  was music,” Tankian writes. Life in Beirut with “bombs raining down” and his family’s experiences taught him that “[S]afety and financial security is a mirage. It can be taken away just like that … Music or art … felt more meaningful … Art … just is. … The way it makes me feel—or the way it makes someone else feel—is the whole fucking point.”

System’s music is “loud, heavy, political, artsy, and weird,” and the band’s tour with Slayer ahead of their first album release was “like going to rock ‘n’ roll boot camp” and a“real trial by fire.” But the lesson Tankian took was not what you might expect. “If there was one valuable lesson … it was this: don’t be neutral—it’s boring. … To me, that’s really the mandate for any kind of art. Don’t make neutral art and don’t make neutral music—that’s for elevators and malls. At the very least, make people feel something.”

Social and political commentary is integral to System’s identity. All of the band’s members are Armenian-Americans, and Tankian was first, and remains, an activist. “I made a promise to my grandfather that I’d keep telling [the] story [of his grandfather’s experience during the Genocide]… I also connected his struggle to a wider fight against injustice and inequality not just for Armenians but for everyone and everything. … You could say that activism has always been in my blood …”

Whether art should marry activism is subtext throughout  Tankian’s  memoir. While reading it, I was reminded of Picasso’s magnificent, horrific  painting,  Guernica, painted as an argument against war. Art can force us to look at truths we may prefer to avoid; we cannot look away. Tankian and System Of A Down draw us in with often insane lyrics and music that runs the gamut from folk melody to discordant noise. But when the last note fades, we’re left feeling—and thinking. 

Tankian’s fascinating book reveals him as a complex, inner-directed artist with an entrepreneurial enthusiasm and curiosity that animates his life beyond System. Some will follow the threads of Tankian’s  understatedly competitive relationship with Daron Malakian through the book, looking for reasons for the band’s silence. But creative alliances have their ups and downs (again, think Lennon and McCartney). That Tankian writes of System in the present tense throughout the book bodes well for the band’s future, though it will probably continue to be complicated. 

I highly recommend Down with the System. 

by Linnea Arold Michel

Book Review

Bodies: Life and Death in Music

By Ian Winwood

London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 2022

ISBN: (e-book) 978-0-571-36420-6

We’ve all seen the headlines about rock musicians dying unexpectedly. All too often we learn in the follow-up that he or she died of causes related to substance abuse and/or mental health issues. Why does this happen again and again? In Bodies: Life and Death in Music, Ian Winwood attacks this question.

Winwood writes, “This is a book about. . . music, musicians, the industry, mental health, addiction, derangement, corrosive masculinity, monomania, overdoses, suicide and a hectare of early graves. . . . But in writing this story, I’ve come to regard artists as victims and survivors of circumstance. In pursuit of a living wage, musicians are required to work themselves into the ground.” At its base, he posits, music is a “proper job” that does not pay a proper wage.

Bodies serves up an indictment of the parasitic relationship between the music industry and those who would make a career in it and the substance abuse that fuels it. In this engrossing yet disturbing read, Winwood strives, he says, “to join the dots. . . . There is something systemically broken in the world of music. It’s making people ill.”

A British music journalist whose career has included more than twenty years writing for Kerrang! and major UK newspapers, Winwood has interviewed members of Metallica, Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, Foo Fighters, and the Smashing Pumpkins, plus many more whose names are yet to—or may never—become household words. He has lived a rock-star lifestyle, giving him keen insight into how rock stars and wannabes survive. . . or not. Winwood has watched musicians fly to the heights, but he has also seen them crash and burn. And he has been to the depths himself as well.

The book opens with Winwood’s 2003, world-exclusive interview with Metallica following a six-year break during which the band had issued no new music. It’s “my job to discover exactly what has been furring the arteries of one of the most popular bands on the planet,” Winwood says, and the burning question, of course, is why the silence? What went wrong? What went wrong was alcohol.

Metallica was one of the first bands Winwood saw live, at age 15, following their release of Master of Puppets. To support his music habit, Winwood worked two jobs, including one in a bookshop, where he discovered Kerrang! When, later, his mother asked him what he might do with his life after school, he replied, “I want to write for Kerrang!” With his mom’s “I don’t see why not” response, he determined to make it happen, attending a university journalism program and then hand-delivering his first-ever article to Kerrang! and other outlets in hope of getting a writing job. A job offer resulted, though not from Kerrang!

But the call does eventually come and within the week, Winwood is on his way. Life with Kerrang! is full speed ahead. Move fast, write fast, live fast. Turn in a story, head off to the next one. Jetting around the globe, following bands and musicians, Winwood has visited nearly every city you can name. During his career, Winwood has been at the rail, in the pit, and with the musicians backstage and offstage, talking with them about their lives and the music industry. Indeed, his frenetic pace matches that of the bands he interviews, and like the musicians he hangs with, his coping mechanism becomes alcohol and cocaine.

The narrative is woven with anecdotes from Winwood’s many interviews, as well as his own experiences on the road for Kerrang! Throughout, his close relationship with his father anchors him. Ultimately, Winwood believes, the circumstances surrounding his father’s untimely and unexpected death precipitate his own plunge deep into the maelstrom.

“I’m comfortable asking awkward questions; if required I will do so repeatedly,” Winwood writes. Interviewing Layne Staley, vocalist with Alice in Chains, at the time the band was promoting their album Dirt, Winwood was warned not to ask questions about drugs, but he did so anyway. Staley, Winwood says, was “the first obviously damaged person I’d ever met.” Interviewing Ozzy Osbourne in 2011, Ozzy tells Winwood that he could still get drugs anywhere in the world in under 15 minutes. On the other hand, there’s Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister: “Lemmy is an anomaly. He was the one who was in control.” Eschewing heroin, Lemmy’s tolerance for alcohol made him “the kind of drinker who never seemed to get drunk.” In the end, Winwood says, ”I think it was the cigarettes” that got Lemmy shortly after his 70th birthday.

Not long after his father’s death, Winwood is on his way to California to interview Green Day and finds himself stuck in Las Vegas due to a flight glitch. The ubiquitous flow of alcohol and his pursuit of cocaine land him on the wrong side of his appointment for his Green Day interview. For many journalists this would be a career-ending disaster. But through the good graces of the band’s press agent, catastrophe is averted. The band’s label spends a pile of money to fix schedules and rearrange flights, and Winwood finally arrives to his interview, where he’s immediately handed a drink. “It would be wrong to say that all [was]forgiven. . . . I was never really in trouble in the first place. No one ever is,” he writes. A month later, Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day’s frontman, checks himself into rehab after his own Las Vegas debacle. This stuff is simply normal in the supernormal world of music.

Careening out of control, even his editors at a magazine where chaos is routine, begin to express concerns over Winwood’s increasing lapses. The dream job begins to slip away. When a nightmare hospital stay turns out to be real, leaving Winwood with no memory of anything that transpired, he begins to awaken to the direness of his situation.

Through Winwood’s unique lens, Bodies disentangles the whys and hows of this “normal.” For this book, Winwood plumbs the archive of his interviews with countless musicians over the years. Patterns begin to emerge. The lack of accountability in the music industry, the shifting responsibility, and the casting of musicians as mere commodities that can be cast aside if they don’t produce, the relentless show-must-go-on ethic, and of course, the industry’s focus on its bottom line, as opposed to the musicians’, whose cut of the profits is ever smaller—these combine to create an environment where artists are driven to take advantage of whatever is available to keep go-go-going in their own pursuit of success.

At the time he was writing Bodies, Winwood had recently interviewed Dave Grohl, former Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters founder. Winwood writes that, in founding Foo Fighters, “Grohl worked hard to ensure that his and his group’s happiness and security would no longer be put at risk by the wild vagaries of an overwhelming and unpredictable industry.” But even that “wasn’t quite enough to prevent drummer Taylor Hawkins from taking a near fatal overdose” in 2001. With painful irony, around the time Bodies was going to press this past spring, Foo Fighters were on tour in Colombia when Taylor Hawkins died, with toxicology reports indicating a variety of drugs in his system.

Winwood doesn’t offer a fool-proof solution, and indeed, Bodies raises many questions for musicians and bands, the industry, and fans to consider. For example, do labels bear responsibility for artists’ mental health, and if so, what tools can labels use to support artists? What part do fans play? If a band pulls the plug on a tour for mental health reasons, will fans continue to support the band, hold on to rescheduled tickets, buy merch? If pay structures for musicians change, are fans willing to pay the higher ticket prices that will almost surely result? Will the industry itself evolve sufficiently to reduce mental jeopardy for artists? And what about independent musicians?

Winwood’s book is an engrossing, can’t-put-it-down read. It pulls you in; it’s captivating, for it has the highs, the lows, and even a few happy endings where bands—Chumbawumba of “Tubthumping” fame and Biffy Clyro, for example, as well as Winwood himself—have been able to save themselves and preserve their sanity and, at the same time, their art.

If you care about bands and musicians, Bodies is a must-read.

Thanks to James Kennedy (@JamesKennedyUK), independent musician, founder of the band Kyshera, and author of Noise Damage, for putting me on to Bodies via his podcast interview with Ian Winwood; find the James Kennedy Podcast wherever you get your podcasts or visit Spotify.

by Linnea Arold Michel

Books: Not Just Another Rock Bio

Noise Damage: My Life as a Rock ‘n’ Roll Underdog by James Kennedy, Lightning Books Ltd., 2020

Noise Damage is a great read. It’s written in a breezy, honest style that makes you feel like you’re sitting in a pub with Kennedy as he regales you with his story. But it also feels like you’re peering into a hidden world. If you’ve ever been crushed in the pit at a rock concert and wondered what it’s like to be up there, to get on the bus every day and do it again and again, if you’ve wondered how they got there and why —Noise Damage will tell you.

Noise Damage is the story of a guy from backwater Wales who just wants to be a rock star. But the book is also a memoir, a soul-searching telling of what it means to claim your real calling. In Kennedy’s case, that calling is making music.

Born in 1980, Kennedy grew up in a working-class family in south Wales. Leaving Cardiff not long after Kennedy was born, the family moved first to a gritty, urban area, and then to a village “in the middle of bloody nowhere.” On his ninth birthday, Kennedy’s dad gave him a little Spanish guitar (that he later learned his father had “nicked from somewhere’) and showed him a few things on it. “I played that damn riff over and over (and over),” Kennedy writes, “maybe a thousand times, and the fact that I could actually do something with this thing made me feel like I’d just discovered a buried superpower.” After a few “lessons” from a one-legged, Hendrix-worshipping local guy called Sid, Kennedy knew he could only be a guitarist.

But the path to rock glory would not be easy. The road took a serious turn a year later when doctors found tumors in both Kennedy’s ears. Surgeries left him with only sixty percent of his hearing and ferocious tinnitus.

Kennedy was a “frustrating paradox”, struggling through school despite being a voracious reader well-versed in literature, history, and politics; he celebrated the end of high school by setting fire to his uniform and books. But high school was a means to an end: getting into college to study music.

Through sheer will power, Kennedy made it to college, where he encountered music theory for the first time—and snagged an opportunity to work in a real music studio.

Once Kennedy found his way around the studio, he seized a further opportunity—to make an album, “the album, that threw all of the things I loved into one giant, ambitious, uncommercial, multi-genre melting pot of seething, unpredictable musical indulgence [with] an angry dose of politics and … filthy noise and pounding drums.” This was Made in China, his first CD (later remade as Kyshera’s 2nd album in 2012).

With his no-holds-barred approach and absolute belief that he could do whatever he set his mind to, coupled with the digital technology that was changing the music industry, Kennedy made the entire album himself, writing and singing every song (despite having never written or sung a song), playing every instrument—digitally or otherwise—recording, engineering. It took two years of putting in every spare moment, often working through the night, until it was done. Then Kennedy even handled his own promotion, mailing CDs to all the music magazines.

This is where Kennedy’s story really takes off. Awash with rave reviews, every interviewer and industry big-wig wanted to know: “When are you next performing in London?” Kennedy had to get a band together. After plastering most of Wales with recruitment flyers (no social media, no internet back in the day), his band, Kyshera, began to take shape.

Kyshera’s run was a roller coaster ride. From crazed, screaming drummers and the exhilaration of the band’s first gig to the hard reality of the music industry’s crash and burn; from their first festival—before a crowd of bikers, where frontman Kennedy managed to fall and slash his face open in the middle of the set, spraying blood everywhere—to endless weekends playing covers to make money just to put gas in the bus to get to the next gig. A trip to Toronto for a major festival proved to be the gig from hell with a full-throttle adrenaline rush, sufficient to lure them back a second time—all against a backdrop of trying to hold on to the day job and have a personal life.

Peppered with British-isms, you might wish you had a Duolingo app for British slang. And if the “bad” words were left out, Noise Damage would be a much shorter read—I warned you it’s honest writing! And don’t read this book to get an understanding of the music industry or how to break into it; Noise Damage is not that.

Noise Damage is about coming of age, about truly embracing one’s calling no matter what it costs. And these days, when kids are forced to decide their direction early on, Noise Damage stands as a truthful telling of what it means to pursue your dream in a real world that can be brutal, unkind, and downright mean. Noise Damage is also an expression of irrepressible spirit, persistence despite significant odds against success, and the saving grace that is music.

Next time you get to a concert early to claim your spot at the rail, and you’re confronted with a band—the opener—that’s not the one you came to see, give them a listen anyway. As Kennedy says at the end of Noise Damage: “P.S. Please support artists. It’s harder than it looks.”

I first came across James Kennedy’s music through a tweet from July 2020, promoting the first single from his most recent album, Make Anger Great Again, “The Power”.

For something completely different, try Kennedy’s latest release, “Insomnia”.

You can also find on Spotify the audio book of Noise Damage, read by James Kennedy.

James Kennedy is also on SoundCloud & Bandcamp.

by Linnea Arold Michel

“When I compose a first draft I just let everything I feel and think spill out raw and chaotically on the page. I let it be a mess. I trust my instincts. I just let my ideas and feelings flow until I run out of words. It’s fine for an early draft to be a disaster area. I don’t censor myself. When I have this raw copy, I can then decide if this idea is worth putting more effort into.”

–Charles Johnson, The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling

by Linnea Arold Michel

“Often, creativity is blocked by our falling in with other people’s plans for us. We want to set aside time for our creative work, but we feel we should do something else instead. As blocked creatives, we focus not on our responsibilities to ourselves, but on our responsibilities to others. We tend to think such behavior makes us good people. It doesn’t. It makes us frustrated people.”

–Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity