Joe Carducci gives us some truth

Tomorrow at 7 p.m., Arthur Magazine and Redoubt Press present Joe Carducci reading from selected works, including his new book, "Enter Naomi," at Book Soup in West Hollywood. Carducci (pictured at left) also guests on KXLU radio's "Stray Pop" program tonight at 11; stream it here.

Why should you care? Here's why:

In 1991, Joe Carducci published a massive, brilliant, stupid, exhaustive, exhausting book called "Rock and the Pop Narcotic," which set out a theory of what mattered in rock music that inspired many and infuriated more. Since he was office manager/utility infielder at SST, one of the key labels defining American punk, Carducci had more right than most to spout on about the importance of bands like Husker Du and Black Flag.

I hated that book: Carducci came off as a macho libertarian in love with some romantic idea of the working class, who thought male bonding was the key ingredient in music-making, that establishment rock critics were namby-pamby liberals and that anything aimed at the marketplace (i.e., at girls) was hopelessly corrupt. Worst of all were rock bands with pop pretensions. I was a girl who liked U2 and loved reading rock criticism. Carducci and I were not bound to get along.

Now that I'm less defensive about strong thinkers whose viewpoints contradict my own, I can see the value in Carducci's impassioned embrace of the miraculous transformations that happen when a few sweaty dudes -- and, Carducci acknowledges, possibly a woman or two -- make loud music together. I dip into "Rock and the Pop Narcotic" (which he revised in 1995, and published in a third edition on Redoubt Press in 2005) when I need a shot of provocative thinking or a great description of garage rock.

What brought me back to Carducci, though, was an online tribute he wrote in 2005 (still accessible here) about a woman who never made music, though she loved punk and played a role in its glory days.

Naomi Peterson (pictured above) served as house photographer for SST when Henry Rollins still had long hair and touring the continental U.S. in a van was the ultimate goal for many noisy dreamers. Peterson lived in the thick of L.A. punk (though Carducci, ever the contrarian, insists, "We never considered our bands punk") during the 1980s. She died alone in a Maryland hotel room in 2003. Alcohol abuse was the physical cause; existential drift seemed to be the fatal catalyst.

In that online reminiscence, the seedbed for the book "Enter Naomi," Carducci tries to comprehend Peterson, a woman who never quite figured out how to move from the margins into the center of her own story. Doing so, he confronts his beloved SST scene, a typical bohemian milieu where marginal living was an enveloping reality many coped with by turning their edge-walking into an ideal.

The yin to "Narcotic's" amped-up yang, "Enter Naomi" is much more than a long obituary, even more than a memoir: It's a meditation on the reasons people choose a bohemian life, on the costs of that choice, and on its ultimate value. It's also a beautiful account of life in Los Angeles, which Carducci, who now lives in Wyoming, calls "my haunted city."

And crucially, "Enter Naomi" is Carducci's reckoning with the feminine, not as a force to be mistrusted or reviled but as a position that real women like Peterson must inhabit. It's inspiring to read this champion of the flannel-flying male musical proletariat as he faces down what those boys' noble and craven pursuits did to the women who cared about them. Here's a passage:

"Involvement in that era's music cost you something. The Los Angeles scene was more organic and total. Results were better and the costs more. It better served male interests which are obvious and lasting, than female's which are immutable and clocked in. But young women were there paying that price. (Think of the L.A. girl bands: Runaways, Go-Go's, Castration Squad, Sexsick, the Disposals, the Superheroines, Raszebrae... and the bands with two or more girls in them: Germs, Bags, Redd Kross, To Damascus... not to mention Exene, Diane Chai, Kira, et. al.) Judging by behavior and art today it seems to me that men are regressing (boys in fact rarely reach manhood), while women are still evolving under the pressures of new responsibilities and opportunities."

There's plenty to argue with in "Enter Naomi," but it's pretty clear that Carducci himself has changed enough to deserve (by his own standards) to call himself a man. He's willing to listen, willing to be moved and to reconsider his judgments. For that reason and many more, "Enter Naomi" is a must-read.

-- Ann Powers

Photos courtesy of slippersport.blogspot.com