A novel by Dr. Adam Gussow
Reviewed by Frank Matheis
The first thing they teach you in Writing 101 is to “write what you know.” Adam Gussow knows!
In his first novel Busker’s Holiday, Gussow’s fictionalized travel memoir of a pair of carefree young men spending a wild summer busking in Europe, the author takes us on a journey not just to the old countries, but deep into the lore of the blues and the life of modern day itinerant musicians – even if it is only for a summer sabbatical from real life. In this story of a short musical adventure, Gussow takes you on an unforgettable trip filled with colorful characters, raging hormones, sexual tension, young men’s Sturm und Drang, music, and more music.
How do you make a novel virtually sing a soundtrack? The roots & blues world, well familiar with Gussow, will know each song lyric that he carefully placed into the novel and the comfort of familiarity will trigger the juke box in their minds as they read this captivating tale of a trip every musicians would want to take. Neophytes to the blues and the life of musicians will find it all the more intriguing, as Gussow manages to weave a fun tale spun by one of the most interesting characters on the music scene.
A guy like Adam Gussow can only be found in America. In many ways, to us Europeans, Gussow still represents what we see as the best aspects of America. A place of unlimited opportunity and freedom of thought and emancipation from academic rigidity, where college professors can simultaneously be blues musicians, where street buskers in Harlem can become respectable academics and where even the wildest lads can get a doctorate from Princeton, and later teach at Vassar and Ol’ Miss. Indeed, Gussow is often referred to as “the professor of the blues.” He is a highly accomplished harmonica player and recording artist, a teacher both in academia and musical instruction, and an associate professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. He has published three previous books on the blues, including Mister Satan’s Apprentice (1998), an award-winning memoir about his years as a Harlem street musician. This is actually his second story about busking, and as said, Gussow knows the life.
As a European who was himself a busker in the streets, alleys and market squares in Europe in the 1970s, this reviewer was fascinated by the vividly accurate and realistic settings, drenched in rich descriptions of scene and place. Considering that Gussow’s real life Euro-busking experience was 30 years ago, his recollection details of place and time, and, most importantly, the feelings of the experience that he manages to convey, are simply remarkable. Everything fits.
This autobiographical coming-of-age tale, set in the late 1980s, is the story of McKay Chernoff, a Columbia University grad student and PhD candidate, and, of course a blues harmonica player. Young McKay has the propensity for overly romanticized, hyper-intellectualized flaunting of high-browed literature and philosophy, typical of young university students finding their place in life. Decades later we can laugh at ourselves, our own youthful snobbery and philosophical positions. Which twenty-something wasn’t in some way like Gussow’s protagonists? He well captures the soul of young lads through times of volatile but brash self-discovery. After a disastrous romantic breakup, McKay goes to Paris and, like thousands before and after, drifts through Europe for a time as a street performer.
In that short summer he hooks up with Billy Lee Grant, a young American roots & blues guitar player and “world famous bluesician and great-great-great grandnephew of Ulysses.” The two caballeros experience their adventure, and expectedly, it’s filled with the universal standard desires of young men’s indulgences most everywhere: sex, intoxication, romance, music, and, well more of it as soon as possible.
They float through Europe in a time period that Europeans usually deride as “very short” but Americans, used to long distances in a short time, would consider “long”. They hop from place to place and see the world, experience the old country cultures and along the way, find both catharsis and, using the cliché, “find themselves.”
Readers will have an incisive look into the life of street buskers, as Gussow’s portrayals are realistic down to the minutia, with rich and colorful scenes of people and milieu. The existentialist experience of these twenty-something lads, far away from home, in a romantic, and occasionally romanticized setting, is elevated by Gussow’s brilliant and unencumbered language. It’s plain fun. The novel is set in Europe, but in equal parts in Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee in a juxtaposition of Americana and Americanism. Gussow thrives in rich descriptions of the very essence of American pop-culture that has so mesmerized youths worldwide since the emergence of rock-and-roll as a universal language. They throw in Robert Johnson, Kerouac, Dylan, Dante, Hemingway, Tom Waits, Bertrand Russell, and, well just about every philosopher, writer and musician any self-respecting lad in the late 20th Century would want to toss out to make himself sound relevant, if not important, in a college town coffee house. Indeed, Gussow brings into this relatively short novel a synopsis of the intellectual meanderings of your average college intellectual as a sort of a vignette, a mini-history of the 20th century. The characters discuss it all, the opinionated, informed, well-read minds of young intellectuals are laid bare, and it’s beautiful, or at least revelatory. Through their rants, discourse and braggadocio we explore music and life, the muses and, whether we admit it or not, we see a small slice of ourselves at that age.
Along the way, Gussow comes up with poetic nuances, fun stuff worthy of memorializing on a t-shirt: “The Beaubourg looms like the glittery silicon innards of an Earth- devouring mainframe coiled by ribbed lucite Anacondas.” Musicians will love, and non-musicians will be awed by descriptions like “You’re skiing down a slope where every blue-note is a mogul and you’re working your edges hard, shooting for the sweet spot between major and minor where the world suddenly flies open and the truest thing you know rises to meet you.”
What more can you say after that?
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Frank Matheis is an award winning European-American radio producer and music journalist living in the Hudson Valley of New York. He is a contributing writer to Living Blues and the publisher of thecountryblues.com. Himself a street musician for a period of time as a student in Europe in the 1970s, he published an article Busk or bust! Hitting the streets of Europe. in Sing Out! 2002