Too Weird for Ziggy
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
The renowned rock journalist for Rolling Stone and Mojo takes readers into the outrageous netherworld of pop music in this debut collection of short fiction.
British rock journalist Sylvie Simmons spent decades covering and interviewing music legends from Stevie Nicks to Frank Zappa; from Muddy Waters to Michael Jackson; and from The Clash to Guns n’ Roses, and beyond. Now she takes everything she’s seen, heard, and experienced in the company of these music legends and funnels it all through her vivid imagination.
From heavy metal megalomaniacs to country crooners and a brokenhearted punk-pop singer named Pussy, Simmons conjures a cast of larger-than-life characters that ring all too true. In these eighteen interlocking stories, “Simmons has all the details of record-company politicking, rock-biz noblesse oblige, and backstage ritual down pat” (Kirkus Reviews).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British music journalist Simmons has taken the years she spent interviewing rock's most outrageous personalities and compressed them into this lurid, engrossing collection of stories, gracefully linked like the incestuous world of rock itself. Alternating between first person and omniscient narration, she chronicles the transcendent weirdness of the music world. In one creepy story, "Pussy," a Blondie-esque pop goddess, disappears; years later, she's found in an East Village tenement surrounded by cabinets and sandwich bags stuffed with her own fingernails and excrement. The devastating effects of fame on personal identity are on display in almost every tale, from "Spitting Image," in which a megalomaniac rock star is ravaged by the kidnapping of his life-size look-alike puppet, to "Autograph," about an insolent rocker whose ex-girlfriend gives him a permanent comeuppance. The stories are at their best when Simmons depicts a scenario that doesn't read like a tabloid dream. In "I Kissed Willie Nelson's Nipple," a tough-living country star delivers a soliloquy so rich with hard-won wisdom that it trumps the too bizarre "Allergic to Kansas," in which a sexed-up lead singer mysteriously grows breasts. On these pages, fictional rock stars mingle with real ones, reminding readers, as with those ubiquitous Elvis sightings, that true rockers never die. They're just preparing for a comeback.
