I will state, once again, that my book was never envisioned as an "anti-Bob" or "anti-Bob's book" affair. That's just what some people want my book to be because they are approaching Husker Du and the Husker Du legacy from a totally different angle. I guess it's a little less-obvious that I don't have a hard-on for Our Band Could Be Your Life, and I regret having portrayed myself in that way, or in a way that was easily taken out of context. Or both.
I'll ask a question I ask all of music journalists be they authors of a book on Springsteen or, in this case, Husker Du: Should the book be read while listening to the music by the band being featured? Is that what Appendix X — a list of Husker Du songs — is for?
No, and no. My appendix was directly influenced by one of the greatest examples of music-based non-fiction, Ian Christe's Sound of the Beast: The Headbanging History of Heavy Metal. Throughout that book, Christe gives the reader many "breathers" or intermissions in the form of pertinent lists, capsuled info, time lines, etc. It's one of several aspects that make that title succeed at what all biographies and cultural profiles should strive for: Encourage active intake re: those unfamiliar with the music. And to answer backwards again: I do not read books while music is playing in the background or foreground. I have to read in relative silence or in a situation that does not invite disturbance.
Was it hard deciding how to structure this book, deciding whether to do it chronologically in the manner you chose or, say, the oral history route used by the recent Replacements book and, of course, Please Kill Me?
No, it was not hard. I will never write an oral history. And this is where our language becomes problematic for me. Oral histories are not "written," they are edited and transcribed. I more-or-less regard oral histories as the reality television of non-fiction. They are not linear narratives, which are written. Oral histories require a lot of work, it's just that the work is much different from what goes into a linear narrative.
And there are oral histories that I admire and love, such as Please Kill Me, the Saturday Night Live oral history, and Legs McNeil's follow-up to Please Kill Me, his expose of the pre-internet porn industry, The Other Hollywood : The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry. These books transcend the trappings of most oral histories and exist as works of art. Otherwise, most oral histories can't avoid this disjointed choppiness that's almost inherent to the form. Source's quotes sometimes automatically feel out of context, vague, cryptic, or flat-out unrelated to the subject at hand, and this is because the form injects the reader's mind with certain expectations.