Too Weird For Ziggy
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First published in the US on Grove/Atlantic’s Black Cat imprint, 2004. The razor-witted fiction debut of one of the world’s best music writers. Hilarious and unforgettable, Too Weird For Ziggy is devastatingly funny, punchy, and as hooky as the best rock’n’roll.
Short stories, 18 of them, sick, sad and funny and set in the world of rock. It was originally called Too Weird For Iggy, then the lawyers stepped in after Iggy’s manager said the title would have to be changed, because it was too weird for Iggy.
Other editions: UK and Russia
Reviews:
“Subversive, out-there, radical, wicked and very, very funny.” Marianne Faithfull
“A damn good writer, honest, truthful and scathing.” Lemmy, Motorhead
“Very cool reading, very rock’n’roll.” Slash
“Brilliant” Tori Amos
“A hot read. Bravo Sylvie!” Sharon Osbourne
”Her book is genius, her mind is genius, but her body is something to drool for.” Nikki Sixx , Motley Crue
“If you thought The Dirt hilarious, this spectacularly gonzo collection of loosely linked short stories suggests a much darker beat at the heart of rock’s lunatic fringes. Simmons has seem more backstage atrocities that you’ve heard drum solos, twisting her tales of drugs, betrayal and raising the dead to show how blurred the music industry’s line between fact and fiction has become” – Q Magazine
“Such gallows humour is worthy of Carl Hiassen’s darkly satirical rock whodunnit Basket Case. However even the maestro of Florida sleaze would struggle to contrive a rock death as grim as the C&W grand dame here, who’s baked alive under her electric blanket and ‘marinated in her own urine’. No wonder Lemmy’s a fan.” – N.M.E.
“Like a Somerset Maugham of the rock world, Simmons tells dry-eyed, ruthlessly perceptive war stories, set in a disconnected, airbrushed celebrity cosmos. With its quick asides on backstage manners and bar etiquette, this insider’s view of the rock business is graphic, extreme and very funny.” – MOJO
“Simmons’ monstrously entertaining, ghoulishly compelling freak show works brilliantly. It comes with plug quotes from Sharon Osbourne, Lemmy, Slash and Marianne Faithfull, which is odd, as such narcissists are the satire’s targets.” –UNCUT magazine
“Strange, funny, very cynically observed and very British, with tales of groupies, stalkers, Karen Carpenter cults and washed up rock stars going mad and hoarding their own shit in the fridge.” – LOADED
“Revered music writer Sylvie Simmons’ fiction debut is a wounding collection of interlinked short stories set in the mad, bad world of rock. The more bizarre the stories, the more believable they are. Because you know Simmons has been there, done that, and bought ‘the new concert T-shirt, still smelling of ink.’” –Classic Rock Magazine (UK)
“She welds the journalistic faculties of gimlet-eyed observation and epigrammatic description to the fiction writer’s gifts of a surreal imagination and a deft touch with credible characterisation. Often simultaneously, she generates both wit and pathos. Macabre enough to induce a lasting frisson.” – The Independent Newspaper (UK)
“Exuberantly iconoclastic and potty-mouthed (“Hung like a horse? The man needed tweezers to jerk off”), rock journalist Simmons, having devoted her working hours to making sense of the rockerati, moves inside their fantasies and paranoias” –The Guardian newspaper(UK)
“She tempts and teases with individual stories that fit into place like a jigsaw puzzle. Take a front seat and enjoy your journey into rock city.” – The Morning Star newspaper (UK)
“A linked collection about ludicrous rock stars and the freak show that surrounds them.” – Entertainment Weekly (US)
“In the music business, fact and fiction tend to intertwine and it’s impossible to determine which is more outlandish. Thankfully, Simmons doesn’t bother to keep them separate. At a certain point, these seemingly real-life cartoons begin to morph and assume, like heavy-rotation melodies stuck in your head, lives of their own. A knowing sendup as arch as it is fond.” – Los Angeles Times
“Hilariously shocking short stories, filled with strange scenes inside the gold mine of rock music.” – San Francisco Chronicle
“Sylvie Simmons has seen more than her fair share of fevered egos, outsized characters and oddballs. She cherry-picks the more vivid moments from her career, changes some names and adds her own twisted imagination to shape a batch of occasionally tall tales that read like Raymond Carver stories populated by an army of MTV glitterati.” – Harp magazine, (US)
”Reading these stories is like taking a trip into a rock’n’roll twilight zone.” – The Independent Bookseller (US)
“Rock journalists are weird. But as a rule, they shouldn’t (or really, couldn’t) be as fucked-up as musicians, or the crazy music fans. Sylvie Simmons has been there, seen it. The respected critic and writer for The Guardian, MOJO, Rolling Stone and Creem has taken her years on the scene (she got started in 1977) and transformed them to fiction in her collection of short stories. Another rule: Books are always cooler than magazines.” – City Paper (US)
“Debut novels to look out for.” – The Observer newspaper (UK)
Too Weird For Ziggy - Review by Charles Shaar Murray, The Independent
Writing the Great Rock 'n' Roll Novel is no easy task. Just ask Salman Rushdie, the most distinguished of many contenders who have, to a greater or lesser degree, ultimately failed to capture the rock environment's unique blend of glamour and squalor.
However, in the challenge of creating a linked cycle of short stories set on Planet Rock - each capable of standing alone but with a recurring cast of musicians, entrepreneurs, roadies and fans - we do indeed have a front-runner.
Sylvie Simmons is a veteran rock journalist with a fondness for country music and heavy metal, and a couple of heavyweight biographies (Serge Gainsbourg and Neil Young) under her belt. She has been working on these stories for the best part of a decade, but their arrival - complete with endorsements from Sharon Osbourne, Marianne Faithfull, Lemmy and Slash - has been well worth the wait.
She welds the journalistic faculties of gimlet-eyed observation and epigrammatic description to the fiction writer's gifts of a surreal imagination and a deft touch with credible characterisation. Often simultaneously, she generates both wit and pathos.
Thus we find the mega-successful British rocker returning home via Heathrow customs, only to find that the official going through his suitcase is the former schoolmate who always resented him. The country singer, whose inspiration for her numerous hit songs has been imagining new deaths for her hated mother, learns that the latter really has died. Then there's the indie-band singer who discovers, mid-tour, that he has suddenly grown breasts; and the MTV-sponsored live resurrection, by a vodun master from New Orleans, of a dead rock legend. And we haven't yet mentioned the mysterious appearance of an image of Karen Carpenter on the wall of a kebab house in Kentish Town, or the obsessive pursuit of a heavy-metal drummer by a seriously disturbed female fan.
Perhaps Simmons's finest creation is Pussy. That is in fact the name of her otherwise male group, but lead singer and band have become interchangeable in the public mind. With her huge head, tiny body and "a pink marshmallow mouth neatly outlined and filled in like a colouring book... like she'd had everything below the neck liposuctioned and injected into her lips," she is a genuinely haunting character. The symptoms and manifestations of the breakdown she undergoes after the death of her boyfriend, the band's guitarist and songwriter, are memorably macabre enough to induce a lasting frisson.
Interview with the Author
by Martin Horsfield
N.M.E.
Writing fiction about rock’n’roll is awkward; always full of thinly veiled stars hiding within improbably named bands. This first effort from Sylvie Simmons has plenty of those (The Nympholeptics anyone?), but her experience as a long-standing rock hack means that these interlinked short stories are forensically detailed and wickedly entertaining. She takes well-worn myths and legends and cranks them up into rampant surrealism. Like when The Nympholeptics’ frontman starts to grow breasts. Such gallows humour is worthy of Carl Hiassen’s darkly satirical rock whodunnit Basket Case, especially Pussy, Simmons’ Courtney-alike whose self-absorption extends to collecting her own toenail clippings (and worse). However even the maestro of Florida sleaze would struggle to contrive a rock death as grim as the C&W grand dame here, who’s baked alive under her electric blanket and “marinated in her own urine”. No wonder Lemmy’s a fan.
Sylvie Simmons talks to NME
NME: do some of these tales start from a nugget of truth?
Sylvie Simmons: “Several. You meet someone, hear something, and then when you’re doing something mindlessly dull, like transcribing interview tapes or interviewing Lou Reed, your mind starts riffing on it.”
Who’d make a good soundtrack for the book?
“The title track would have to be by Iggy Pop. It was called Too Weird For Iggy, then the publishers sent him a copy, asking permission to use ‘his’ name. Apparently it was too weird for him. So they added the ‘Z’. It’s like someone telling you you’ve got to rename your fucking cat! For the whole soundtrack, it’d have to be The Arcade Fire or Yo La Tengo since, like the stories they’re brilliant but change from track to track.
Were they any fictional band names you left out?
“DJ Underfelt: he’s a kinda funky, jazzy, mixmaster. Pre-Op Cop: they’re jokey punk-funk, a bit like the Kaiser Chiefs.”
Who’s your favourite fictional rock band?
“Right now, Kings Of Leon.”