8 Books About the Transformative Power of Live Music

The best nights of my misspent youth were spent at rock and roll shows. I’d been addicted to the radio since early in my childhood, and as soon as I had a learner’s permit and a job that gave me permission to drive after hours, I went to every concert I could get to, even when that meant driving hell for leather through four states to get back home before my parents noticed how long I—and my mother’s car—had been gone. Usually I went alone; my taste ran in the opposite direction of most of my friends, who were busy swooning over boy bands and pop starlets who had started out as Mouseketeers. But I never felt a stronger sense of belonging than when I was surrounded by strangers who loved the same music I did, even when I stuck out like a sore thumb, too young and too female to be at the gigs I was going to. I craved it like a drug, that feeling of being swept up in a collective sonic transport where, for an hour or two, all my excruciating self-awareness and teenage angst dissolved.  

I never kicked the habit, and instead only went deeper down the rabbit hole as I grew older, finding ways to get as close to the action as I could, whether it was as a rock writer, an unofficial roadie, or just a die-hard fan. (I once booked so many different gig tickets in one week that my bank assumed it was fraud and canceled my credit card, forcing me to call and explain that yes, I had intentionally purchased concert tickets for seven straight nights in a row.) Sadly, none of the talent I worshipped rubbed off on me, and my own attempts at music-making fell woefully short. I had a knack for a different kind of composition, but even as I carved out my identity as a writer of fiction, I kept coming back to live performance. My first novel, If We Were Villains, drew on another artistic obsession of mine, the works of Shakespeare, which captivated me with their lush musicality. But I’d never read a novel about the Shakespearean actors that captured that world as I knew it, so I decided to write it myself. 

My next novel, Hot Wax, sprang from a similar place. While there are countless biopics and books about music out there, not many captured the transcendental experience of a truly pulse-pounding live show that kept me coming back seven nights a week. The ones that did stuck with me, like the best of those concerts, long after I finished them. The power of performance is tough to capture in prose, but these eight books showcase how triumphant and transformative live music can be. 

Strangers I’ve Known by Claudia Durastanti

Durastanti’s semi-autobiographical novel follows the daughter of two deaf parents as she navigates a chaotic upbringing divided between a small town in Southern Italy and New York City. Her early life is defined by her parents’ shared disability, the unique sonic landscape she and her brother—who are both hearing—occupy. Her mother loves to watch live concerts on TV, moved by the performances she cannot hear, prompted to ask the young Claudia, “What is music like?” 

Their extended Italian family is inherently musical. Claudia’s grandfather and his friends try to share the experience with her mother by dancing tarantellas and stomping on the floor, “hoping the vibrations would sail up her calves, ripple in her hips, crash against her ribs.” Claudia’s mother eventually sours on music,  while Claudia herself becomes a devotee, moving to London as a young adult in a doomed effort to join the fading punk scene. She too is disappointed, realizing she has arrived too late and moved there for the wrong reasons. But music still has enormous influence and becomes a defining feature of her identity outside of a family where there was little room for her. 

Right Place, Right Time: The Life of a Rock & Roll Photographer by Bob Gruen

Gruen’s claims to fame are many. He befriended John Lennon when that was tremendously difficult to do, had a rare window into the fraught home life of Ike and Tina Turner, and toured Japan with KISS—to name just a few. His biography doubles as history of rock and roll in the twentieth century, as he grows up and grows into his considerable talent alongside many of the stars he documented. What made Gruen a great photographer was his “performance IQ”: because he loved live music, he had an impeccable instinct for when and how to snap a photograph that might capture the spark of the performer in the flesh. It’s impossible not to get caught up in his excitement when he’s seeing David Johannsen and the Dolls for the first time, or to feel his trepidation on the bus with the Sex Pistols when he wakes up from a nap to learn Sid Vicious nearly slit his throat to steal his boots. Gruen got closer to the action than anybody else ever did, and it’s a thrill to go along for the ride.

Night Moves by Jessica Hopper

This slim volume is difficult to define—is it memoir or autofiction or lyrical snapshots of a certain place in time? It’s all of those things and more, an intimate history of Jess Hopper’s transformation from Midwestern punk to respected rock critic. Hopper and her friends careen around Chicago on their bikes, speaking a strange pidgin English of slang and song lyrics as they bounce like pinballs from gig to gig, club to club, misadventure to misadventure. If you didn’t have a youth like hers, it makes you wish you had, because no matter how grim and grimy it gets—stealing cigarettes and getting high on Theraflu and dancing in bars where the scene looks like “Chuck Klosterman’s birthday party, staged at a Sandals resort”—every page crackles with life. Night Moves reads like my own teenage diary, if I had ever kept one, the passage of time marked less by the calendar than by album releases and DJ sets and early Hold Steady gigs and mixtapes swapped with friends. Music—not just heard but seen and felt—is the defining feature of Hopper’s unusual memoir; she’s uniquely qualified to do it justice.

Apathy for the Devil: A Seventies Memoir by Nick Kent

Nick Kent, like Bob Gruen and Jess Hopper, got up close and personal with the best and worst of the music business. He started writing for NME in the early 1970s when he was barely a legal adult, and before he was thirty had toured with some of the biggest acts in rock. At the end of ’72 he observes, with characteristic dry wit, that “Just eighteen months earlier, I’d been a gangly, girlish figure in a school blazer… Flash forward to just three weeks ago though, and I’d suddenly gotten all brash and extrovert, dressed up like a glam-rock Christmas tree and snorting cocaine with Led Zeppelin at 3 o’clock in the morning in some four-star hotel.” 

Kent’s transformation at the mercy of live music is extreme; he finds and then loses himself in catastrophic fashion, succumbing to a crippling heroin addiction in the company of pre-Pretenders Chrissie Hynde and getting beaten half to death with a bicycle chain by his former bandmate after a brief stint as a member of the Sex Pistols. It’s a minor miracle he survived the bloodbath of the hard rock heyday, but that makes him one of the best raconteurs to tell the tall tales of that era. 

Total Chaos: The Story of the Stooges / As Told by Iggy Pop by Jeff Gold

Total Chaos is just that: total chaos. It’s one part interview, one part memoir, one part scrapbook, and one part museum exhibit. The Stooges’ legendary live shows are documented not only through Iggy’s colorful firsthand accounts, but with photographs and gig posters and newspaper articles and other artifacts from the Godfather of Punk’s coming of age as an artist. What I love most about this book, though, is how Iggy’s performance continues through the interviews; he’s liable to break into song in response to Gold’s questions, offering the reader a rare glimpse inside the demented mind of one of the greatest frontmen of all time. 

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

Like Durastanti’s autofiction, Vonnegut’s first novel is a meditation on what happens when human beings lose access to live music. Eerily prescient, especially as generative AI threatens the lifeblood of artists and the survival of manmade art, Player Piano follows a star engineer at the Ilium Works, a tech company which has nearly succeeded in replacing all human labor with machines and human intelligence with supercomputing. Dr. Paul Proteus, the story’s reluctant protagonist, begins to question everything after encountering the titular player piano in a bar that caters to the “unskilled” laborers who live on the wrong side of the river. The instrument’s uncanny imitation of human performance—which “stop[s] abruptly, with the air of having delivered exactly five cents worth of joy”—sends Proteus spiraling into an identity crisis which makes him rethink everything he’s ever worked for and question the wisdom of handing the very things that make us human over to machines. 

Kittentits by Holly Wilson

This is a coming-of-age novel like no other. The ten-year-old narrator, Molly, lives in a Quaker commune in the wake of a fiery tragedy until the arrival of dirt-biking ex-con Jeanie turns her whole world upside-down. Molly’s infatuation with Jeanie is inseparable from Jeanie’s heavy metal anti-heroism, and soon she takes off for Chicago to prove she, too, is a badass and—quite literally—raise the dead.

I Dare You To Find the Joke in Pat Benatar’s Music

Embracing melodrama allows me to write directly into the emotional truth

Mar 2 – Drew Buxton

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But the headbanging soundtrack to Molly’s metamorphosis is just one musical element in this raunchy, rollicking carnival ride of a novel; music becomes a secondary language for many of the characters, who fall back on sung verse, spoken lyrics, and even tap dance when more pedestrian forms of self-expression fail them. Wilson’s prose is no different, moving to a weird, wild music entirely its own. 

Gone to the Wolves by John Wray

John Wray’s sixth novel hits as hard and fast as the howling guitars the book’s resident pop-culture preacher, Leslie Z, waxes poetic about from the very first pages. Stranded in the socio-cultural wasteland of the Florida Gulf Coast in the ’80s, Leslie is Kip Norvald’s unlikely gateway drug to the world of “bangers.” His first experience seeing a band called Death live is instantaneously life-changing. “I can feel it in my teeth, man,” he says, before they even make their way into the building. Cast out by every community he’s ever tried to be a part of, Kip finds an unlikely chosen family with the Black bisexual glamazon Leslie Z and the mysterious Kira Carson, a girl “with an actual death wish.” Wray’s outcasts and outsiders find themselves and each other in the tarry mosh pits of death and doom which fueled the furor of the Satanic Panic. Wray writes with an insider’s intimate insight, and brings every concert scene, like Frankenstein’s monster, wondrously and horribly to life.

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