True Love Scars (Freak Scene Dream Trilogy #1)

True Love Scars, by Michael Goldberg
No month stated, 2014  Neumu Press

Generally I stick to older books, so this will be one of the very few recent books I’ve ever reviewed on the blog; it’s the first of a trilogy, and I discovered it after some random Googling. I can’t even remember what I was looking for…probably a rock novel, preferably one set in the ‘60s or ‘70s. Somehow I was taken to a site discussing True Love Scars, first in the Freak Dream Scene trilogy, by Michael Goldberg, former editor at Rolling Stone and founder of early music-review site Addicted To Noise (which I remember even reading way back in the day).

Well, True Love Scars isn’t a “rock novel,” per se, but it is about a kid who wants to be a rock critic, and who thinks about rock music and culture 24/7. It’s also set in 1972, with rampant flashbacks to previous years, with the majority of the tale being an extended flashback to the late ‘60s, when the narrator was in high school. His name is Michael Stein, alias “Writerman,” and when the novel opens he’s just starting his sophomore year of college. He’s been publishing music reviews in the school paper, and runs into “Thee Freakster Bro,” Lord Jim, a paunchy dude sporting a Black Sabbath t-shirt who’s the paper’s other music reviewer.

The two go back to Lord Jim’s dorm room, play some records, and get stoned. Rock mags and posters are everywhere, and all the talk is about the music of the day – Michael’s not so much into Black Sabbath, but the two at least share common ground in that they’re both fans of the Beach Boys’s Pet Sounds. Goldberg, because he was the same age at the time, perfectly captures how rock culture was so important to the heads of the day, however Michael insists that he and his kind be referred to as “freaks,” as the entire social awakening spawned by rock in the ‘60s, in his opinion, spawned the “Freak Scene Dream.” It’s all very cool and vivid, and makes the reader excited to see Michael get further into the rock-reviewing biz; he even mentions a sort of mentor in the field, “the Sausalito Kid,” who J.R. Young style wrote a short story review of Pet Sounds.

But unfortunately, True Love Scars isn’t that novel; apparently, the next novel in the trilogy is. This one’s more concerned with Michael’s sad tale of how he lost his “Visions of Johanna chick,” Sweet Sarah, his high school flame who was his soul mate, one true love, all that jazz, and how he blew it with her. Personally I was much more interested in the college stuff; in fact, after a couple hundred pages of flashback to Michael’s sad-sack high school days, the novel returns to this opening ’72 section, and things pick right back up. But Michael wants us to learn who he is and where he came from, thus we are pulled away from this more-interesting opening sequence and back to 1968, when he was fifteen and living in Marin County.

There was an old episode of Saturday Night Live where Michael J. Fox hosted, and they did a parody of Family Ties and the infamous “flashback” episodes of that series. Only, it was flashback upon flashback. I bring this up because the opening of True Love Scars almost approaches that vibe; even in the opening 1972 portion, Michael is flashing back to random things in the past, making for a bumpy experience for the reader, who just wants some stable narrative ground to stand on. But this does have the bonus of capturing the druggy haze of the time; as anyone knows, dopesmokers are incapable of following a single train of thought, so it would only make sense that their novels follow suit.

But anyway, when our narrator jumps back to tell us his sad tale of losing Sweet Sarah, and we go back to 1968…even here there’s a flashback to another incident, how he met this Bob Dylan-obsessed gal before he met Sweet Sarah. I’ll admit I’ve never been into Dylan’s music, but I appreciate how people of the era were obsessed with him. Back in the ‘90s I got an original pressing of Highway 61 Revisited for a whopping fifty cents at a used bookstore (and it was in fine condition, too, so no idea why it was so cheap – maybe the store owner wasn’t a Dylan fan, either); I played it maybe once and it’s still stored somewhere. Michael – who hates to be called “Mike,” which is what his parents call him – meets this gal while browsing the Dylan section at a local record shop, and this leads to a picnic sort of date. Nothing much happens here, as the gal has a college-age boyfriend, then a few weeks later Michael’s at a meditation center and sees a pretty “teenage Ali McGraw” across from him, and the two share a mystical moment as they look in each other’s eyes.

This is “Sweet Sarah,” as Michael will refer to her, aka his “Visions of Johanna chick,” yet another Dylan reference I didn’t get and had to look up. I should mention that in the novel, especially in this extended flashback section, we are very much in Michael’s head throughout. One of the online reviews I came across for True Love Scars said it was like the novel Lester Bangs never wrote, and that’s very much on the mark…not just for the constant rock references and the literary aspirations, but also for the rampant navel-gazing. In one of those posthumous Bangs anthologies there’s excerpts from some unpublished novel he wrote, can’t recall the title, but it was all about his cough syrup addiction or something. That’s kind of what you get here…while the era is fascinating, Michael’s so wrapped up in himself that nothing else really comes to life. What makes it worse is occasionally he’ll slip in tidbits like “I saw the Stones at Altamont,” or some other now-historic concert, but this stuff is only relayed in a few off-hand sentences…and the reader’s like, can we read about that instead of your teen romance?

But these are just my feelings, for as mentioned I was more interested in the framing sequence, set in 1972, which gets away from the whole teen thing. I’ve never really been into novels about teen protagonists (see also Go Mutants!). It seems to me that Goldberg is attempting a Proust for the Woodstock Generation (sorry, Freak Scene Dream nation), with three long books documenting the era through the lens of an overly-sensitive young man. And also I’ve gotta say, there are a lot of parallels to 00individual’s blog; both he and Michael are around the same age, live in California, and saw a lot of the groups of the day. The only caveat is that 00individual is a little more focused on the music, and a little more fun-loving in his narration; Michael’s a bit too serious, too stuck in his head, and it takes away from a lot of oppportunities; for example, late in the book we learn he’s started a band with this buddy of his who looks like Manson, but other than one or two rehearsals (which are focused more on Michael’s thoughts about a female backup singer, not the actual music being played), we don’t really learn too much about it.

The focus is the relationship with Sweet Sarah, and we know from the ’72 opening that Michael did something to betray her, and it still haunts him. There’s also vague mention of a mental breakdown. The title comes from a moment where Michael and Sarah cut each other’s palms, giving themselves scars to show their true love. But these two have one of the most darkly humorous relationships I’ve read. They’re both just kids, and Sarah’s still a virgin, but Michael manages to get her pregnant…without them even having sex. This leads to Sarah’s “liberal” parents freaking out that they have to get their kid an abortion. Then, shortly after this, the couple decides “what the hell, you’ve already had an abortion,” and start having sex…and Michael gets her pregnant again! And their parents once again have to go Dutch on an abortion…! Somehow their parents don’t forbid them from seeing each other (not to mention they live like 30 miles from each other or something and need to get rides to see each other), and the two stay together, but as time goes on Michael starts to act increasingly irrational from copious dopesmoking and gets a roving eye.

Goldberg introduces an interesting concept here with Michael always seeing a pair of magpies when something bad’s about to go down; he calls them Doom and Gloom. At this point the novel almost seems like it’s set in the early ‘90s instead of the early ‘70s, with Michael like a proto-slacker – there’s even more of an early ‘90s vibe later in the book, where college-age Michael hooks up with a proto-Goth gal. In fact I found myself flashing back on my own late high school/early college days as I read True Love Scars. Michael is around twenty years older than me, as I was in college in ’92, but the characters act and dress like the slackers of that time, with the only difference being the music they’re into. But even that’s a fine line, because I personally was listening to the same sort of stuff as Michael when I was his age, twenty years later – I mean I sure as hell wasn’t listening to Pearl Jam. 

At any rate, the romance with Sweet Sarah sort of fades, Goldberg using the poisoned relationship to demonstrate the sour vibes of the bummer early ‘70s; there’s a part where Michael hangs out with his Manson-lookalike pal on a houseboat, and there are a few girls there, one of them a 14 year-old who tries to play the seductress for Michael, and Sticky Fingers is playing on the stereo. Goldberg well captures the hedonistic vibe of the time, but even here Michael can’t catch a break, as the girl, Samantha, is more into herself than Michael. At this point our hero has spiralled into complete fuckup-ery; he’s been writing bad checks left and right, even attempting to move out into his own place in an abandoned building. Then he writes a bad check to finance a trip to LA with another preteen girl, Mercedes, but realizes when he tries to put the moves on her in a sleazy hotel that she’s just a scared little 14 year-old girl. Then he’s arrested on the plane when they return to San Francisco for all those bounced checks.

This leads to the psycho ward hinted at in the opening sequence, Michael’s there a couple weeks, during which he learns that Sweet Sarah has dropped him. And a crying Michael confronts her to ask why! Jeez dude, maybe it’s because you flew a 14 year-old to Los Angeles to score with her in a sleazy hotel. Luckily after this we get back to the college stuff, in 1972, and immediately the book improves in a major way. After smoking those joints with Lord Jim, Michael ends up running into a pretty brunette with black nails and a skull necklace; her name’s Harper and they go back to his dorm room for sex, the first time either of them’s decided to have sex with someone they just met. Harper with her skull and black nails totally seems of a different era – namely, mine – I mean all she needs is a Nine Inch Nails shirt. She only appears in the novel in the final pages, and succeeds in stealing the entire book; she is much more of a living, breathing character than Sweet Sarah ever was. In fact, Sweet Sarah kind of bored me, and never really seemed to come to life.

Harper and Michael go back to his dorm room, and in his interminable rambling narrative style Michael constantly informs us that Harper’s a liar, untrustworthy, etc. Who cares – she’s hot and her fingernails are painted black. I mean dude, go for it!! Apparently she pretends to be French, to have had sex with tons of guys, etc, but Michael tells us he’ll soon learn that most of this stuff is a lie. Again, who cares; Harper comes off as more interesting than any other character in the book. She confronts Michael throughout, basically taunting him into sex, even going through his collection of skin mags and telling him how she found her dad’s Playboys when she was a little girl and how they excited her. And yet still Michael takes his good old while to get there; when he does, we get the most explicit sex scene of the novel, and it comes off more like a battle of wills between the two.

And like a slap to the face, the novel ends here, just when it’s really picking up. As for Michael aka “Writerman’s” budding career as a rock critic, it still hasn’t even happened. This is of course what drew me to this trilogy in the first place; you all know I love my vintage rock criticism. And the stuff that’s here is cool; Goldberg of course knows his stuff, and peppers the novel with all kinds of arcane rock info…Michael and Lord Jim even discuss the “recent” reissue of Pet Sounds, and Goldberg is so confident his readers know what he’s referring to that he doesn’t even bother mentioning the album it was paired with, in ’72: Carl And the Passions – So Tough. And I have this exact 2LP release, but could never really get into either album, though back in the late ‘90s when Pet Sounds was rediscovered by the hipsters I bought the CD and loved it…until I realized one day that it sounded like Christmas music. I remember once around that time excitedly snatching up a copy of The Beach Boys Love You in a store, and my buddy was like, “Dude, you’re gay.” (This was back when that was an acceptable off-hand putdown among friends; today you’d probably go to jail for it.) These days if I listen to the Beach Boys, it would either be one of the Smile fan recreations (this one is by far the best I’ve heard in 20 years of collecting such mixes) or Surf’s Up, which I think is their best album (“spaced heavies,” as it was referred to in an industry ad upon release).

So yes, Goldberg here writes the rock-world novel Lester Bangs never did, and he definitely captures the setting and the scene, but still I wanted more of it and less of the “Sweet Sarah doomed romance” stuff. Again though, this is me – I’m just not into such stories. Now a character like Harper, I could read about her all day. I do know that the next volumes dig deeper into the ’72 sections, with Michael venturing into the rock critic field, so I’m definitely eager to read the next one, The Flowers Lied.