The Judee Sill documentary wrecked me
But yeah, I can find you a book like Lessons in Chemistry
Last Saturday night, I ventured to my favorite local movie theater to see Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill. As a music person, I will usually watch any music documentary regardless of how I feel about the artist or if I’ve even heard of them. I’d seen the Judee Sill doc promoted for months on social media, as it was co-directed by Portland filmmaker Brian Lindstrom, and friends were speaking quite highly of its beauty.
Friends were totally right! I walked out of that theater a wreck. I have been listening to Judee Sill’s songs on repeat all week.
At the store, two women discussed how much they loved American Dirt in front of me. How real it was. They had asked me to pick some novels for them. My favorite part of the job! I’m very knowledgeable about novels because I write them myself and I read a fair number of them. They had composed a very neatly handwritten list of books they had enjoyed recently, and it was all the big titles. Lessons and everything Towles has written. Octopus book. The moneymakers. The books that live in the front of the store, which, if the bookstore were a city, the front of the store is the rich neighborhood. So I gathered some novels I thought they’d like, including Towles’s new one, which is short stories but too bad, Celeste Ng’s new one in paperback, The Personal Librarian.
The main thesis of Lost Angel is that Judee Sill was incredibly talented. Insanely prolific. She had this sad backstory, which included an abusive childhood, crimes, reform school, drugs, all the shit, and then one day, she was talking to God and decided she was going to be a great songwriter, and she did the damn work and wrote amazing, beautiful songs. Young David Geffen, before becoming a billionaire with the tightest facelift you’ve ever seen (he’s interviewed in the film), caught her at a club in Los Angeles and signed her to his label, Asylum, with whom she made two albums. Those two albums were critically acclaimed but sold like crap. She was denied a third record deal, got back into drugs, faded out of the scene, and died at age 35 in 1979.
Fifty years later, she has become something of a cult favorite. Her third album was released. And we can all get together and ask out into the heavens, WHY DIDN’T JUDEE SILL SELL A LOT OF RECORDS? even though we do know why.
I can’t be mad at these customers. They are readers, and that they only read the front of the store isn’t entirely their fault. That’s Big Five marketing doing its job, in which our store fully participates. They want the same songs over and over again. Same shape, same bridge, same.
And, as a bookseller who knows the current fiction market pretty well, it would then be my job to introduce novels that maybe aren’t selling at the level of Octopus or Lessons but still fit into that mold. What I love to read doesn’t really fit into any mold. But it really is easier to just hand readers popular books, so that they come back for more of the same and we stay in business.
O, capitalism.
Judee Sill’s music sounds kind of like Joni Mitchell, which makes sense as they were peers coming up at the same time. But man, Judee goes baroque. She has complex arrangements. She’s not just a girl with a guitar. She’s extra. There’s a lot going on there. Her music is, as the kids say, next level. She takes people places they might not understand or want to go.
And it’s alluded to in the documentary, so let’s call it: Joni was conventionally attractive and Judee wasn’t. Judee looked like a mousy librarian and Joni didn’t.
They say that “middle of the road” music listeners in the 1970s weren’t prepared for Judee’s music. It was orchestral, spiritual, longing, and complicated. They wanted something easier to digest. I certainly wouldn’t call Joni Mitchell “middle of the road,” but a lot of people wanted her music. A lot more than they wanted Judee’s music.
When Judee Sill died, there was no obituary, and a lot of her friends didn’t know she had died.
I guess I feel some personal responsibility towards finding and promoting the Judee Sill of the Fiction Shelf because part of me believes/knows/fears that I am among the Judees of the bookstore. My novel, now eight years old and deep in the backlist, mostly forgotten except for that time Patton Oswalt’s daughter gave him a copy for Father’s Day (!!!) and posted a photo of it (thank you, sir!), sold just-okay in its first year, even though it is beloved by forty-something dads in band t-shirts. They find me at the bookstore and tell me they love my book, these dads. A coworker recently bought it for her own dad, and afterwards I was like, oh crap, her dad and I are probably the same-ish age.
In the last month, I’ve started a new novel to offer to middle aged band dads, middle aged band moms, ‘90s indie music fans of all generations, and all fellow inhabitants of my wheelhouse. An older, more romantic, less steeped in tragedy Every Anxious Wave. We’ll see where I go with this, but being a bookseller has influenced my writing. More on that in another post.
The thing is, people love the familiar. It’s ingrained in us. The people that chose Joni’s albums over Judee’s were just being themselves. Same at the bookstore. And you can’t change that. Or you can try, but it feels like sorrow would await at the other end of that errand.
Currently reading: Dear Edna Sloane by Amy Shearn
This Saturday (4/27) is INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE DAY! Be sure to spend some time and some dollars at your local indie shop! There will be special mugs and onesies for the occasion, as well as the chance to win a boatload of free audiobooks from libro.fm. (Note: a boatload is twelve. Twelve audiobooks.)
