The Music Never Died: Tales from the Flipside

by Mark Swartz

Sixteen irreverent and inventive stories that riff on rock and rap mythology to envisage alternate paths for music legends who died young.What if Biggie Smalls had survived the assassin’s bullets and reinvented hip-hop with the help of an avant-garde luminary? If Amy Winehouse had shaken off her demons and channeled her inner Barbra Streisand into a new life on a tropical island? If Jeff Buckley had been pulled alive from the Mississippi by a devilish hand and become a pioneer of Southern black metal?With accompanying illustrations by Jeb Loy Nichols, Mark Swartz’s stories imagine what might have happened to these stars and more—including Jimi Hendrix, Gram Parsons, Janis Joplin, Marvin Gaye, Lhasa de Sela, Lil Peep, and Jim Morrison—if their untimely deaths had been averted, or somehow had not been the end of their lives. Booklist praised Mark Swartz’s fiction for its “lithe satirical humor, impressive intellectual dimension, and sly provocation,” and these qualities are on full display in these at once heartfelt and borderline absurd tales.

230 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2024

Reviews

[Meg Lebow · Rating 5 out of 5]

So wonderful and strange

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the prescient futurist, waterless “H2O” (well, set in 2020) and then stumbled onto Swartz’s hilariously crude, irreverent “Summertime Jews” send-up of a Wisconsin summer camp in the 80s — also with a noir-ish bent — and now you have to marvel at Swartz’ “The Music Never Died” fantasyland of the lives of musicians who died too young. Only a writer with such a prodigious imagination could dream up the concept much less pull it off. I know he has a following, but Swartz deserves to get more notice. He’s got range! Now I need to double back to his novel that I missed — “Instant Karma.”

[Joshua Rogin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing journey through what might have been. These stories are intoxicating for music and fiction lovers. This is Swartz' best work yet and if you love mysterious and absurd tales of dead rockers and their adventures in alternative realities then this is for you. I would compare it to Louis Shiner or John Darnielle. Really captivating stuff.

[Doug Stotland · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this music trivia and history rabbit hole, haze, moon roundtrip fever dream read. When I paused to google I enjoyed the read in a different way picking up stories I never knew about music I had always listened to; especially about the demise of the people who made it. When I stayed in the book and read without the history (or sometimes even who the players were) I enjoyed the craft and weirdness of the storytelling and the writing. The characters and their dialogues were odd and wonderful to read just knowing there was some tie to, and rif on, something that happened in real life to people that made something that influenced me in likely some small way. One of the most unique and enjoyable reads I’ve had in a long time.

I’d love to discusss with someone who is a true music dork (like a not dead Lester Bangs). I bet they would enjoy it in a completely different way than a guy who likes music like an average person . Maybe I’ll reread and go deep on the interwebs to pull out all the backstories that I didn’t have the first time I read it.

It’s my 3rd Marc Swartz read. The range across the 3 is wide. It would be hard to tie them together without knowing the same person wrote them.