Sonata For Jukebox: An Autobiography of My ears

by Geoffrey O'Brien

Dazzling and original, Sonata for Jukebox is a brilliant foray into how pop music has woven itself into our lives since the dawn of the recording age. Geoffrey O'Brien delves into twentieth-century pop music as we experience it: a phenomenon that is at once public and private, personal yet popular. O'Brien's book is more than a history of pop music, although fragments of that history find their way into its pages. And it reaches far beyond a memoir, although it is an entertaining biography of the author's ears and his family's exceptional affinity, with pop music--his father was a leading New York DJ and his grandfather led a dance band in Philadelphia. Ultimately, it is an exploration of what we as listeners hear, what we think we hear, and how we connect that experience with the rest of our lives. The dizzying array of musical references plays like a sound-track as O'Brien explores how our lives are lived in the presence--and in the memory of the presence--of music.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Memoir

328 pages, Paperback

First published March 25, 2004

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

One star knocked off for being borderline incomprehensible at times.

It turns out that Geoffrey O'Brien is the smarter brother I never had, and when he cranks up his typewriter after a few light ales and brandies some rather crazed things begin to happen. In this example he's on about the Beach Boys - hold on to your hat - :

The ripples of that tropical surf might be the last dawdling vibrations of some Gnostic manifestation. A molecular poetry, modular and self-sustaining, had been allowed to escape, like the light on an ancient star, from that Void whose centrality we found curiously reassuring. Was there a difference between lushness and nothingness? Didn't the most austere mystical vision of the heart and creation merge at the very crux where 'is' met 'is-not' with a hand-tinted postcard from Maui printed in 1905?

I like a man who takes his Beach Boys seriously but when they seem to have been merged with Wittgenstein at the genetic level, like in The Fly, it's BEACHGENSTEIN - run! - then I might just call for the check and kind of sneak out of the bar and leave old Geoffrey still demonstrating how "Sally Go Round the Roses" foreshadows Chernobyll and how you can't get a cigarette paper between the weltenschauung of Smokey Robinson and Stephen Hawking and how David Byrne on the evidence of "Once in a Lifetime" alone is clearly a follower of Jacques Derrida ("And you may ask yourself how did I get here? is this my beautiful house?").

But I do like the way this guy writes about music. Except that he often wastes his time on the wrong sort of stuff. You know, stuff I'm not that interested in. So I have a plan. Using my considerable resources, I will have Geoffrey O'Brien kidnapped and put in a plain but comfortable room many miles from civilisation. He will be well looked after. He will have writing materials and a cd player. I will then begin issuing to him, cd by cd, my entire record collection. He will buy his freedom by writing ten pages of his outrageous prose on each of my selections. The task will be daunting, it may take a couple of years, there will be tears and tantrums, some heartache and a few chuckles too before we finish. And at the end of it all we will have a three thousand page manuscript that only I will ever want to read. But sometimes you have to suffer for your art, don't you think? I know that Geoffrey will at first be resentful but eventually he will see that this will be his greatest, most essential work. Keep checking the news for "Mysterious Disappearance of Hifalutin Music Writer". You read it here first.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always admired the books by Geoffrey O'Brien, and his ability to riff with or against literature. His book of music writings, "Sonata for Jukebook" is very much in his fashion. Which means it is not a straight-ahead history of recorded music, but more of a memoir and how music fits or fit in his life and narrative. The chapter on The Beach Boys I can relate to, in fact, I suspect that we are both around the same age, and therefore his music tastes are similar to mine. Or at the very least, songs that somehow creep into his consciousness. This is clearly a book on music by a poet. If you want history, then go somewhere else. But if you want to read an author and how music has made a huge presence in his life, then this is the perfect read for you. I love it.

[Peter Cherches · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everybody, well almost everybody, listens to music and loves some kind of music, be it what's hot at the moment or the sounds of one's childhood. Then there are "music people." Not necessarily musicians, but people for whom music is more than a soundtrack to life, it's inextricably intertwined with their lives. I'm one of those people, and Geoffrey O'Brien's book is by one of us for the rest of us. In lyrical prose O'Brien captures both the nostalgia for and the urgency of the music of/in his life. The author is a bit older than me, eight years, but we lived through the same musical times, at least starting in 1964, when Beatlemania turned an eight-year-old me into a music person. Rather than an uninterrupted through-narrative, the book contains a number of individual pieces using varying narrative strategies, some more effective than others. A blurb on the back cover makes an apt allusion to Proust, but for me the book's tour de force is the opening section, ostensibly a rumination on Burt Bacharach; its meanderings, along with its erudition, and that "how did he get there from here?" wonderment, suggests that this is, perhaps, how Montaigne might have written had he grown up with Top-40 radio.

[Nicholas George · Rating 2 out of 5]

This had an intriguing premise for a pop music lover like myself, but I was very disappointed.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of essays by the poet/cultural memoirist O'Brien was published back in 2004, with several of the pieces in it being culled from previous magazine writings. So, it's as dated as can be, since he was publishing just at the point when the CDs he believed to be ascendant forever were about to be pushed aside by digital and streaming and vinyl.

The central metaphor of the book, which comes up repeatedly in different ways, is that the availability of so much music of every style and era was like a cosmic jukebox wherein listeners have so many options as to make no option a choice. Wonder what he thought of first the iPod, and then Spotify. He could have been aware of Napster, which had fallen apart before the book was printed, but he sure doesn't mention it.

He does write beautiful personal memoirs, telling the story of his father, a disc jockey from the late 30s to the beginning of the 70s, and his relationship to music trends; the ways in which O'Brien himself discovered music at an early age, and how he fit his tastes in with the disparate tastes of his brothers and parents; the breath-taking tales of O'Brien's teenage years, when he had his first girlfriend and spent much of his time drinking or smoking pot while listening to music, only to eventually have said girlfriend (with several guys in between, and several bouts of mental illness rehabilitation) be with a heroin addicted young singer/songwriter in O'Brien's older brother's band who wrote a song about her after she killed herself - that song was "Fire and Rain"; of the ways music brings people together and the ways he saw it keeping people apart; of the music of Burt Bacharach and The Beach Boys.

It's an engrossing book even if there are places where I think he goes a bit overboard complaining about the ways music had become a commodity by the 90s. He does drop the names of a wide array of musical artists and songs from multiple genres, which makes me wonder how much sense the book would make to people who don't recognize them.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really loved it. A lyrical interweaving of family history, cultural history, and memoir through the filter of sound, most particularly American popular music, across several decades. O'Brien is consistently insightful and original, with new things to say even when traversing thoroughly covered ground (Harry Smith, the Beatles, the allure of early rock n roll), but this book is at its best when at its most personal and most geographically specific (e.g., the saga of his grandfather’s never-recorded east Pennsylvania dance band). Full of imagination, intelligence, and empathy.

[Michael Powell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow. Had read a short piece by this author and was really looking forward to this book. The dust jacket photo regrettably was the highlight. I kept thinking that somehow someone was going to pop up and tell me that this was a joke and my 50+ year habit of reading every word on every page could be safely jettisoned. Full disclosure: I read this book while under a terrible case of "flu" ...

[Kelly Sedinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, this book is dense and brilliant. There are parts of it that I'm not sure I understood--no, let's just go ahead and admit that I straight up didn't understand parts of this book. But a lot of it--a deeply introspective look at life through the lens of the popular music of the day--is incredibly erudite and moving and stimulating. I will return to this book.

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Each listener's personal history can be stitched together from recollections of first encounters, recollections that in due course become private legends.... It's the peculiar faculty of music to make each such first meeting, in retrospect, a snapshot of what the world was at that moment. Sound is the most absorbent medium of all, soaking up histories and philosophical systems and physical surroundings and encoding them in something so slight as a single vocal quaver or icy harpsichord interjection. The listener wants not merely to hear the beloved record again but to hear it always for the first time." (p. 14)

[Eddy Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the more autobiographical essays in this collection can be read as companion pieces to his wonderful short stories in "Dreamtime". It's a very personal, idiosyncratic collection, so if you're looking for a cohesive philosophy of music or some sort of survey of the development of popular recorded music you'll likely be disappointed, but these essays reveal O'Brien to be an acute and sensitive observer of the place music holds in our mental world.

[Jehnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Closely skimmed.
This is all over the place. There are long meandering somewhat uninteresting holes that he traverses down. But then there are fascinating lines about the role and meaning of music. I got what I wanted out of it, but I wouldn't hold this book up as the best example of music memoir. There are better.

[A.M. Canja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very entertaining, smartly written book about music and culture. I kept reading this book from time to time as an inspiration.