by Stuart Mitchner // photography by Benoit Cortet

“Her life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll” is the message Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground were singing in the spring of 1970 about a five-year-old girl named Jenny. The same message rang true to filmmaker Wim Wenders, who says his life was saved by rock when he was growing up in the shadows of post-war Germany because it “led him to film-making” and helped him “to think of fantasy or creativity as having something to do with joy.”

So, if “something to do with joy,” together with the interplay of unique musical personalities, group chemistry with a potent beat, and game-changing quantities of imagination can save lives, at least figuratively, what happens when you bring extraordinary music together with extraordinary poetry, as when an acclaimed poet who grew up loving rock writes lyrics rich with variety and wit and texture expressly for a group of talented musicians to get their minds and hearts around? What happens then?

What happens is Paul Muldoon, Wayside Shrines, and a life-saving album called The Word On the Street.

Fishing for a Name

In October 2010, at Labyrinth Books in Princeton, guitarist and singer-songwriter Chris Harford heard Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon read an eleven-part poem called “Wayside Shrines.”

At the time of the reading, Harford, Muldoon, and ex-Rackett bassist and composer Nigel Smith were writing songs together, matching Muldoon’s lyrics to music, and feeling the first rush of excitement in knowing that the dream  of the group they were forming was coming true.

“We were fishing for a name,” Harford recalls. “That’s when it hit me. It wasn’t until that moment. The meaning came later. That title stuck out right away.”

Seeing the poem in print cinched it. The primary image is of a makeshift shrine marking the scene of a car crash in which a young woman dies (“the sudden failure of a brake drum” extending a prom queen’s “lease on Elysium”). The shrine consists of “piles of rock” and resembles a “makeshift mobile” formed of handwritten notes, “a cache of snapshots in a fogged-up globe.” Now that he knew what the poem was about, Harford’s original intuition was validated. “The name was the title!” he says. “His poem, his band. It made sense. Paul Muldoon and Wayside Shrines.”

Meanwhile Muldoon himself needed some convincing (“It’s still a bit of a mouthful”), but he came round. It was in the nature of the group dynamic that they would take his title and make it their own, since a similar transaction was effected every time he gave them a lyric to build into a full-fledged song. “When people ask me what I do for a living,” Muldoon says with a smile, referring to “the makeshift mobile” from the poem’s crash scene shrine, “I tell them I’m in the construction business.”

The CEO also happens to be a bit of a poetical magpie snatching cliches, slogans, place-names, and catch phrases from the word waste of Wawa-Jiffy Lube-Pathmark America and feeding them to his musicians to make into magical musical song shrines, no two alike, each with its own devotional glow.

And if Muldoon’s brood of musicians don’t always follow the lead of the lyric, so much the better, like when the current of feeling in the music runs counter to the message with exhilarating results in “I Dont Love You Any More” and “Over You.” Muldoon imagines “going against the lyric” as “a great adventure because I’m never entirely sure where the musicians are likely to end up. In a strange way, the lyrics are written to be indestructible, so that anything can be done to them.”

Sounding the Shrines

The beauty of it is that through a melodious sequence of serendipitous happenings and connections, the New Yorker poetry editor from County Armagh’s sassy, learnedly street-smart fables have attracted a world of talent from North London and Potters Bar, Herts. (bassist and scholar biographer of Andrew Marvell Nigel Smith), New Zealand (singer and TV field producer Ila Couch), Australia (violinist biologist Tim Chaston), Kyoto, Japan (ethnomusicologist pianist Noriko Manabe), Princeton (musical life force Chris Harford), Central Jersey (drummer Ray Kubian), all stirred and served and blended at the upstate New York studio of Radiohead and Morphine producer Paul Kolderie, who had “a kind of a tingly sixth sense thing” when he heard the Wayside demo—“I just knew it was going to be good!”

Listeners who come to love The Word On the Street may well begin falling when they hear Ila Couch sing the title song, for she lives with Muldoon’s lyrics as if they were inscribed in her emotional DNA. The title also plays on the way Muldoon plucks words from the street and earth and air of the culture and remakes them into something rich and strange.

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by Leslie Mitchner// photography by Andrew Wilkinson

Any farmer can tell you that sometimes you need to leave the land lying fallow before you plant again. In the long half block of 11 Witherspoon Street, pedestrians walked past the shuttered space where Lahiere’s had been rooted for over 90 years and wondered what crop would follow. Even after Princetonians learned that a new restaurant was coming, the suspense built while we waited for  something to sprout. For months we had tantalizing hints, even if no one was quite sure how to pronounce the new place’s name (Ag-RI-ko-la, Latin for “farmer”). We waited through a stormy fall, a cold winter, and into spring for the land to bear fruit.

WHO WORKS THE LAND

On Agricola’s website, the venture’s partners are described as “a farmer, a risk taker, and a tasty food maker.” The farmer is Steve Tomlinson, who manages the 112-acre property on the Great Road in Skillman. There, in carefully designed plots, over 120 vegetable varieties are being harvested for the restaurant’s menu. Tomlinson’s personal commitment to sustainability and respect for the environment, along with the rest of his credentials, made him the perfect choice to oversee this key ingredient of an ambitious enterprise. A graduate of Pratt Institute, he worked with the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude on the Gates Project in Central Park. Then, after completing a course on Permaculture Design, he moved on to organic farming. As he puts it, the experience showed him that “a strong idea can bring a community together.” Agricola calls itself a “community eatery” and he is one key to its success—farm to table within four miles.

The risk taker and owner is Jim Nawn, the managing member and founder of Fenwick Hospitality Group, the parent company for the restaurant. His path to what he is doing now is also unusual. He has an MBA from Boston College, was with a major pharmaceutical company for many years while living abroad, then moved into the hospitality business that started Panera Bread bakery-cafés, after which he plunged into a culinary arts program, and finally took the leap of faith in buying the farm on the Great Road where he lives with his family. A hands-on proprietor, he is very much involved with charting the restaurant’s course.

The tasty food maker is Josh Thomsen but as a partner in the business he is clearly more than that. A New Jersey native, he was named a “Rising Star Chef” by StarChefs and has not only worked with Thomas Keller at the French Laundry in Napa Valley, one of the best restaurants in the country, but also served as Chef de Cuisine at Tao, which was the highest grossing restaurant in the United States. He seems relaxed, enthusiastic, and at home in his new role as Executive Chef at Agricola. Although he uses what the farm can supply as much as possible, he explains that he is not a rigid adherent to locavore philosophy. If the best ingredients (particularly meat and fish) are raised elsewhere, that is what the restaurant will serve. In other words, farm to table has been around for a long time now but the phrase does not exclusively define what is being done here. He calls Agricola’s cuisine “rustic American” and insists that the only way the restaurant will serve the community and thrive is by “being different.”

Lahiere’s was noteworthy for its superb wine cellar. Those famed bottles did not come with the property. The General Manager, Ryan Thackaberry, who moved to Princeton from San Francisco, has been building a new wine cellar. Like Thomsen, who says he was “into food” from a tender young age, Thackaberry, was raised in the business. His bio says that he grew up in his family’s restaurant in Newport, Rhode Island and that he was bussing tables as soon as he was old enough to work. Like all the others on the team, he fairly beams when showing people around the place.

THE SPACE

The design of the Great Road Farm is beautiful, but the fresh design of the restaurant is spectacular. It would have been easy to take the rustic theme and to produce a Disneyfied homey barnyard decor—that would have been kitsch. Aptly named Seed Design, the firm that Jim Nawn hired, along with Mucca (which did much of the branding) was far more sophisticated than that. This is rustic with a hip industrial twist. Very little of the old restaurant is left, the neon sign on the outside façade being the most important salvaged piece.

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by Linda Arntzenius// photography by Lawrence Tarantino

It’s no bigger than the average ranch house, but there is nothing average about the home of architects Lawrence and Sharon Tarantino on the Millstone River just miles downstream from Princeton’s Lake Carnegie. From the street, nothing prepares you for what is revealed once you pass through the unprepossessing and narrow hallway the glorious heart of the house, the living room. Frank Lloyd Wright gives new meaning to the phrase. This is a home designed for living.

Twenty-five years ago, Lawrence and Sharon Tarantino were living in a carriage house on Cleveland Lane and working out of a studio on Witherspoon Street, when they bought their first home a Frank Lloyd Wright house they’d been eyeing for years. It’s the sole Wright house in central New Jersey; one of only four in the entire state, and 270 in the nation.

“We’d passed it often and one day we met the owner. He wasn’t very friendly at first but when he learned that we were architects and could give him advice, he was more forthcoming.” The house had been neglected: rented out to students from time to time; the roof was leaking, furniture original to the house and integral to its design had been removed or lost to flooding; firewood was piled so high under the stairs there was no hint of a floating staircase. But the masonry, mahogany, and concrete were fine and there were some of the original fixtures. Several years passed before the owner was interested in selling.

When the Tarantino’s eventually acquired the home of their dreams in 1988, they knew what they had to do. A remarkable house had found remarkable champions.

First, they lined up buckets under the leaks, for which Frank Lloyd Wright’s flat roofs have become notorious. Then they set to work removing layers of paint from the interior woodwork to reveal the rich brown Philippines Mahogany that would be rare, if not impossible, to come by today. Referring to the master architect’s original designs, they researched details like the exact color of red pigment used on the concrete flooring, they rebuilt the kitchen and rebuilt and restored the furnishings with 1950s era fabrics.

It took almost a decade to bring the house back and the Taratinos received a restoration award from the American Institute of Architects for their effort. “It truly has been a labor of love,” says Lawrence, gazing around the large central living room and beyond at an expanse of natural scenery.

THE BACHMAN WILSON HOUSE

The house is known as the Bachman Wilson House, for the couple who commissioned it: Gloria Bachman and her husband Abraham Wilson, a chemist for the New Jersey-based company Cyanamid. Gloria’s brother Marvin Bachman was one of Wright’s apprentices and the couple had become enthusiastic about Wright’s architectural philosophy. In 1951, Marvin Bachman was killed in an automobile accident while working for the architect in Tennessee. The couple’s new home was intended to pay tribute to his memory. As was usual, Wright asked for the couple’s wish list and a plan of the site, a 125 foot by 650 foot lot along the Millstone River, about 12 miles downstream from Princeton.

The house was completed in 1955 for $30,000, which is a modest $250,000 in today’s value. After parting from her husband, Gloria lived there with her daughter until 1968.

So constructed that no neighboring building intrudes onto the changing panorama of seasons that are seen from the southeast facing living room, the feeling is one of harmony with Nature (with a capital N as Wright would have it). Living in it is easy. The house works. There’s passive solar heat gain in winter and shade in summer. The Tarantinos have lived here longer than anyone else.

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by Ilene Dube

Summer 2013 could be one of the best ever at the Shore, thanks to massive rebuilding efforts.

In the middle of February, the storm-ravaged Shore started to beckon. Winter has always been our favorite time at the beach. Without the crowds, you can see the bones – the Victorian architecture, the pocket parks with gazebos and waterways, the crumbling old arcade buildings and amusement parks that hark back to bygone eras.

Ever since the Lenni Lenape fished and farmed here, the 127 miles from Sandy Hook to Cape May has experienced good times and bad. Many businesses were just recovering from the recession when Sandy hit last fall, washing portions of the beach onto roadways. We watched on TV as Belmar’s boardwalk was destroyed, along with Perth Amboy’s marina and waterfront. Spring Lake, which already rebuilt its boardwalk after Hurricane Irene, would have to rebuild again. Much of the Casino Pier in Seaside Heights and nearby Funtown Pier in Seaside Park collapsed into the ocean. Cars from carnival rides were catapulted miles down the beach by the storm, and approximately two-dozen oceanfront houses in Mantoloking were destroyed. Long Beach Island was among the hardest hit communities.

The Jet Star roller coaster plunged off an amusement pier, becoming the iconic image of Superstorm Sandy as the recovery effort got underway. As Bruce Springsteen joined forces, his lyrics seemed more fitting than ever: “Everything dies baby that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies some day comes back.”

SPIRIT OF RENEWAL

In March, walking along the beaches of Asbury Park, Belmar and Ocean Grove, we expected to see houses with dumpsters and piles of debris out front, but much of the cleanup had already been accomplished.

We walked along the boardwalk at Asbury Park, where architectural relics have been in ruins since before Sandy came to town. The carousel moved out of its ornate Victorian house in 1990 (it’s now in Myrtle Beach), and the tall brick building next to it – a former steam power plant – is being eyed by developers. “They want to turn it into a restaurant or retail or a combination of the two,” says Asbury Park Press Editorial Page Editor Randy Bergmann. “The redevelopment plans in Asbury Park have failed twice — first in the 1980s, and again in the last four or five years, both due to economic downturns.”

Many of the dilapidated buildings were abandoned long ago. The decline began with the riots in Asbury Park in 1970, then amusement areas slowly deteriorated, and the Palace Amusements complex was closed in 1988. Despite attempts to save it, it was demolished in 2004.

“Some good things have happened on the beachfront, and if the economy ever fully bounces back, it should be totally transformed,” continues Bergmann. “The property is too valuable for it to lay fallow.”

by Ellen Gilbert // photography by Andrew Wilkinson

“A lady suffers from a headache, the female physician is called in, and prescribes a new bonnet…prescriptions will be made up of new dresses…boxes at the opera…a party now and then, increased allowances for housekeeping, trips out of town, and the thousand and one other little whims which ladies are constantly ‘dying’ to be indulged in.” — New York Times, October 9, 1854

While disdainful predictions greeted the mere idea of training women as physicians in 1854, women doctors today are a mainstay of the profession.  Thanks to changes in legislation (and public perception), significant numbers of women began to be trained as doctors during the first half of the twentieth century.

More recently, the publication, fifty years ago, of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, “the book that pulled the trigger on history,” according to Future Schock author Alvin Toffler, is believed by many to have been a catalyst for  the second wave of feminism in this country.

Statistics suggest that women doctors (and lawyers, among other professions) still earn less than their male counterparts, and the push-pull dynamic of careers versus family life is more topical than ever (see “The Call of the Child: Why Anne-Marie Slaughter Came Home,”  Princeton Magazine, October 2012 ). Four area women who are doctors recently commented on the joys and challenges in their lives.

“Reach for the stars, but have a realistic expectation on the outcome,” 33-year old Shira Goldberg tells young women who aspire to be doctors. “You can successfully advance your career and have a family life at the same time, but you need to employ the art of compromise. It is at times difficult to be the ‘super mom’ and the ‘super doc,’ but it is feasible.”

For Goldberg, family life includes a husband and two young children under the age of five. Professionally, she is affiliated with St. Peter’s Hospital in New Brunswick, where she specializes in geriatric medicine. “Geriatrics and Palliative Care has a different focus than most other primary care specialties,” Goldberg notes “We focus on quality of life rather than quantity. With every patient encounter, my ultimate goal is to maintain function for as long as it is feasible.”

Goldberg and her colleagues in geriatrics also often find themselves customizing a patient’s treatment plan to incorporate the values and preferences of the patient and the family. “As a geriatrician, I deal with chronic health management,” Goldberg says.

Patricia N. Whitley-Williams has been practicing pediatric medicine for thirty years.  Today, she wears several hats as Professor and Chair, Department of Pediatrics and Chief of the  Division of Allergy, Immunology and Infectious Diseases at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and as Physician-in-Chief of The Bristol-Myers Squibb Children’s Hospital at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. While she reports that she was always “fascinated with microbes” and their “potential to destroy large species,” she also talks about the nurturing aspect of her work. “I chose the field of pediatrics because I believe that a child who is nurtured from an early age (or even prenatally) has the best chance of achieving a meaningful life and career and achieving or surpassing their goals,” she observes.  “Pediatricians play an important role in not only directly providing health care but also leading the way in disease prevention and advocacy for children and their families.”

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by Anne Levin

Every town has its monuments. All over America there are buildings, parks, and streets  named to honor citizens who are most often deceased, and were most likely wealthy and generous during their lifetimes. Princeton follows this pattern in many respects.

Consider Lake Carnegie, Palmer Square, the D&R Greenway’s Johnson Education Center, the Sands Library, and Marquand Park, a few of the sites that bear the names of especially prosperous citizens. But not every influential resident remembered by a downtown square or rural meadow is honored for having deep pockets. Some, like Albert Hinds, are commemorated for their community service.

There are names in the “household” category, such as Woodrow Wilson (the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University), and Albert Einstein (a bust in front of the former Borough Hall, the organization Einstein’s Alley, and the street known as Einstein Drive). Others are less familiar. If you have ever wondered about the personalities behind the names of sites in and around town, read on.

Edward T. Cone

A concert series at the Institute for Advanced Study and a grove at the D&R Greenway bear the name of this esteemed music scholar, pianist, and composer, who was a member of the Princeton University faculty from 1946 to 1985. An alumnus of the university, Cone died in 2004 at the age of 87.  He spent his entire professional career at Princeton, from which he graduated in 1939.

Cone’s Musical Form and Musical Performance and The Composer’s Voice are regarded by many as two of the twentieth century’s most influential books on Western music. His many compositions include a symphony and works for piano, voice, chorus, and chamber ensembles. The Princeton Symphony Orchestra commissioned his work, Elegy, in 1954. Cone was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947.

In addition to establishing the Edward T. Cone Foundation, Cone left a substantial portion of his estate to Princeton University. He had strong ties as well to the Institute of Advanced Study, which established the concert series in his name in 2007.

Albert Hinds

One of the liveliest spots in Princeton is Hinds Plaza outside the Princeton Public Library. The square is named for Albert Hinds, who lived to the age of 104 and was known as one of the town’s most devoted public servants. Hinds was born at home in 1902, at the corner of Witherspoon and Quarry Streets in the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood. An African-American, he went to Quarry Street and Witherspoon Elementary schools, both of which were segregated. He graduated from Princeton High School, where he was a star end on the football team.

Hinds’s jobs during his youth give a vivid picture of life in small-town Princeton. He helped pave Nassau Street when it was converted from a dirt road, around 1919. He worked at a livery stable, drove a horse-drawn carriage to Princeton Junction to pick up passengers on the “owl” train, delivered milk, worked in a butcher shop, laid bricks, and took care of the furnace at the Princeton Public Library when it was located in Bainbridge House, now home to the Historical Society of Princeton.

Hinds moved to New Orleans for a time, and he graduated from Talladega Unviersity. After coming home to Princeton, he taught at the YMCA, worked in Trenton at a USO program, and then served on the Princeton Borough Zoning Board. His walking tours and lectures about the Witherspoon neighborhood were well known to locals and visitors. At the Princeton Senior Resource Center, he was a regular at bridge every Tuesday. He died in 2006.

George and Estelle Sands

It is no accident that the graves of George and Estelle Sands at Princeton Cemetery face the Princeton Public Library. The couple were major contributors when the library was rebuilt on its old footprint at the corner of Witherspoon and Wiggins streets. In fact, the main building is known as the Sands Library.

George Hilton Sands was 82 when he died in 2007, preceding his wife by two years. The two met when George was at Princeton University for an officer’s training program during World War II. He graduated from Rider College with an accounting degree and opened his own office in Princeton. But he soon discovered that real estate was his passion, and founded Hilton Realty Company, a real estate investment firm.

The couple established the George H. and Estelle M. Sands Foundation, which was a significant contributor not only to the library, but also to the Medical Center at Princeton, the Arts Council of Princeton, and several other local and out-of-town organizations.

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by Linda Arntzenius

First there was George L. Trenner. Then came his son Nelson R. Trenner. Then his son, Richard. Now Richard’s 15-year old son, Winslow Radcliffe-Trenner, is continuing the family tradition of photography.

A veteran of the Spanish American War and World War I, George L. Trenner left behind albums of vintage prints from the 1890s. He was a Londoner by birth and he arrived in New York City at the age of 20, sometime around 1894. Richard can still recall the atmosphere of his grandfather’s darkroom: his view camera and the collection of heavy glass plates dating back to the turn of the 20th century. “When I was a boy, I often saw my grandfather get off the train from the city with a camera suspended from his neck on a leather strap,” he says.

Richard’s father, Nelson R. Trenner, was also a serious amateur, as is evidenced by albums of Kodachrome images from the time of Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. Born in 1905, Nelson moved to Princeton in the early 1930s to study and, in time, to do research and teach at the University. In 1932, while studying chemistry in Berlin, he bought his first Leica from the German company that made hand-held photography feasible. “My father used one of the Leicas he had bought as a graduate student constantly to photograph family and places, until his death in Princeton in 1994,” says Richard.

It was a Pentax single lens reflex, however, that Nelson Trenner gave to his son Richard when he was a keen 12 year-old. Since then, Richard has become increasingly involved in photography, winning a number of awards and selling pieces to private collectors. Also a graduate of Princeton, as well as Rutgers, Richard Trenner’s first solo show, sponsored by the Arts Council of Princeton at the Princeton Public Library in 2009 was followed by a second at the Chapin School Gallery in 2010.

Richard’s son Winslow Radcliffe-Trenner is the latest Trenner photographer. Ten of his works together with 25 by his father and several images produced by the two earlier generations of Trenners comprise the exhibition Where the Land and Water Meet at Gallery 14 in Hopewell through June 2. This is Radcliffe-Trenner’s first exhibition.

“Photography matters a great deal to me,” says Richard, who is gratified and a little relieved by the ongoing family tradition. “I was keen that one of my two sons likes photography but it’s not something you can force. I’m glad that Win has caught the bug.”

A writer by profession, Richard says that his approach to writing and photography is similar. “The camera is a way to explore the world, it sharpens perception and trains the eye to be more attentive, more critical and analytical and helps develop a sense of beauty, color, and composition. Just as I think more coherently when  trying to put words on a page, I find photography offers a similar mental focus; in thinking about the world visually, you see details and aspects that you might not otherwise notice.”

by Stuart Mitchner

Most of the songs and performers described in Adam Brent Houghtaling’s This Will End in Tears: A Miseribilist Guide to Music (It Books $16.99) have no place in the soundtrack of my life. Nor does Leonard Cohen’s anguished “Hallelujah,” which is the subject of Alan Light’s The Holy or the Broken (Atria $25). On the list of Miseribilist’s 100 Saddest Songs, the only ones I feel viscerally close to are Bob Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet,” number 23, and Portishead’s “Sour Times,” number 95. Songwriters like my personal favorite Ray Davies, cover all the bases, high and low and in between, and never stop rocking. When Davies and the Kinks accentuate the negative, as in “Dead End Street” and “Shangri-La” and innumerable others, you don’t hang your head, nor do you smile and nod in tortured fellowship, you sing along feeling good.

The books by Light and Houghtaling are reasonably interesting contributions to the literature of rock. Alexander Theroux’s Grammar of Rock: Art and Artlessness in 20th Century Pop Lyrics (Fantagraphics $28.99), is a phenomenon that belongs to no genre, least of all the one suggested by its title. To appreciate what Theroux is really up to here, you have to understand at the outset that when it comes to the sixties, he’s a stranger in a strange land who finds the music and the era it defined and energized essentially debased, destructive, and corrupting. While I would much rather spend time celebrating the manifold pleasures of this mistitled book, it would be irresponsible to pass over without comment the author’s Quixotic carping at the anything-goes premise of the most inventive and daring rock lyrics, which leads him to attack, without reference to the power and glory of the music, wonders like “Born to Run,” “I am the Walrus,” “All Along the Watch Tower” and “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

After feebly tilting at the windmill of John Lennon’s I-dare-you-to-make-sense-of-this lyric for “I am the Walrus” (asking us “Doesn’t a lyric inherently demand some comprehensibility, exact some cohesion?”), again without reference to the power of the music, Theroux offers a long list of songs that fit “the fashion and fecundity of genius” — a list that includes “My Mammy,” “Makin’ Whoopee,” “How Are You Going to Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree”). No need to ask yourself “Is he serious?” This is clearly music he knows and loves. Who doesn’t love the great old songs at least up to a point? The only example of “fecund genius” he offers, however, is from Irving Berlin’s “Oh How That German Could Love”: I just couldn’t stop her/For dinner and supper/Some kisses and hugs was the food./When she wasn’t nice, it was more better twice,/When she’s bad she was better than good.” Again, you may wonder “Is this all a perverse joke?” No, I believe he truly admires these lines he calls “Matchless,” in spite of errors of tense, sense, and grammar more extreme than any number of comparatively petty monsters of misuse he’s been shaking his lance at. A few pages later he hits rock bottom when he pairs Bruce Springsteen and Rush Limbaugh, a piece of needless nastiness that fortunately happens toward the end of this unique book that deserves a wider and more sophisticated audience than the one its title will attract.

I’ve read, admired, and written at length about Theroux’s immense, relentlessly, brilliantly expansive works, Darconville’s Cat (1981) and Laura Warholic (2007), both of which are apparently driven by the same demons that now and then goad him over the top or through the bottom in Grammar of Rock. One way or another, this is a work of art in the form an encylopedic autobiographical adventure on the subject of the subtitle, 20th century pop lyrics, and readers should prepare to be offended, appalled, outraged, impressed, and amazed, as well as enlightened and entertained. Readers should also be in sound health, mind and body, and able to laugh out loud without undue damage to heart, lungs, or other internal organs.

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