Good night the pleasure was ours
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Duke University Press
Published:26th Apr '22
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
With Good night the pleasure was ours, David Grubbs melts down and recasts three decades of playing music on tour into a book-length poem, bringing to a close the trilogy that includes Now that the audience is assembled and The Voice in the Headphones. In Good night the pleasure was ours, the world outside the tour filters in with eccentric sparseness. From teenage punk bands to ensembles without fixed membership, and from solo performance to a group augmented by digital avatars, Grubbs presents touring as a series of daily dislocations that provides an education distinctly its own. These musicians’ job is to play that evening’s gig—whether to enthusiastic, hostile, or apathetic audiences—and then to do it again the next day. And yet, over the course of the book’s multidecade arc, Grubbs depicts music making as an irreversible process—one reason for loving it so.
"Guitarist/sound artist David Grubbs's Good night the pleasure was ours is a happily unconventional take on what is now an almost tired genre: the musician's tour diary. . . . Good night is something very different. Most remarkably, the book is composed and laid out more or less as poetry, and not via the cynical trick of simply sprinkling unorthodox line breaks throughout the text. Grubbs's reminiscences . . . are frequently impressionistic, often delivered in koan-like half-thoughts and halting sentence fragments. That is, the way people think a lot of the time, especially when thrown into an unearthly, disorienting experience like touring. . . . Grubbs's stories manage to retain a warm and personal flavour despite the somewhat disembodied style and modernist flow of the text." -- Dave Mandl * The Wire *
"A generous, idiosyncratic book memorably illustrating the bifurcated nature of life on tour. . . . Grubbs excels at melding depictions of ephemeral artistic gratification with wry recollections of the many hours he is spent flying to far-off countries and idling in hotel rooms, bars and vans hurtling down interstate highways." -- Kevin Canfield * New York City Jazz Record *
ISBN: 9781478018179
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 249g
168 pages