Gary Benchley, Rock Star - Paul Ford

Book Details

Country: USA
Language: English
Genre: Modern Fiction
Publisher: Plume
Publication Date: 2005


Fictional Artist: Schizopolis
Genre: Indie-Prog
Country: USA
Real World Analogue: "Like the Pixies crossed with the Flaming Lips, run through an IDM blender".

Jacket Blurb: 

“Before I moved to New York from Albany, I wrote out a careful, step-by-step plan: 1) Rock out; 2) No more data entry.” Gary Benchley, recent college grad and aspiring rock star, left his dead-end life in Albany to seek his fortune in that hotbed of hipsters—Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Earnestly optimistic and completely confident in his fate, Gary writes of his trials and tribulations securing a roommate, a girlfriend, and even a band—the “world’s most inclusive band”—complete with a gay synth player, a hot chick drummer, and a cool black bassist.

Calling their not- quite-musical sound “indie prog,” they combine the most pretentious music of the 1970s with the most pretentious music of today. But after a dozen shows and even an album, the band begins to fall apart, and Gary finds himself increasingly disillusioned with his rock star fantasies. In Gary’s world, though, the glass is always half full.

Gary Benchley, Rock Star is a hilarious, satirical debut that grew out of Ford’s popular column on TheMorningNews.org.

Review:

Gary Benchley, Rock Star was originally serialised under Benchley's name on the website of an online alternative magazine, www.themorningnews.org. Paul Ford's tale of a wide-eyed, twenty-something aspirant rock star in hipster neighbourhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At the time, it was accepted as genuine, and many readers offered Benchley their advice for how to take his rock band to the next level. This is an amusing enough tale in its own right, and the reader is strongly advised to read Ford's unveiling of his deceit at https://themorningnews.org/article/i-am-gary-benchley.

Expanded and revised in book form, Gary Benchley, Rock Star nevertheless still has a pacey delivery that probably comes from its original format. There are so many pithy lines in such a short space, of a sort that inevitably when you have a strict word count and every line has to be economical. It's a rich world full of genuinely laugh out loud lines such as this one, when, desparate to save his rent money for his band, Gary allows his gay flatmate to fellate him in lieu of payment:

"To be honest, I expected better. Keith had promised that he was an expert at what he was about to do. I had figured it would be awful, but masterful, like Geddy Lee playing bass."

That made me howl, and I love Rush!

Benchley ought to be loathesome. He's egotistical, shallow and ignorant. His habit of refering to himself in the third person using his full name is ridiculous. The way he conducts his relationships is cringeworthy, particularly his encounters with groupies later on in the novel. When he decides his band needs a black bassist to meet the diversity targets he's decided are more essential than talent, he literally goes out onto the street and asks every black man he sees if they play bass, and then gets schooled in race relations, making this reader wince with shame.

And yet, for all this, Gary actually manages to be endearing. His puppy-eyed enthusiam for just wanting to rock, as blinkered and selfish as it is, is catching. He manages to make hipsterdom sound almost attractive (though one suspects 2005 hipsters were slightly less awful than they are now). And, let's face it, if you can't be naively enthusiastic about being in a band at 22, when can you? Gary is hardly alone in being utterly deluded, even if other people, such as his new age-obsessed flatmate Charles appear to get more out of their delusions than Gary does.

One could take issue with the fact that Benchley's Schitzopolis gets a deal with a record and a tour too easily, especially given their incompetance, but this is a necessary compression of events to move things along. By the time the band sets out on the tour, you get a sense that this isn't going to end well, and with it, Ford seems to invite us to laugh at Gary less. A family emergency around the mid-point of the novel injects real pathos into proceedings and things are never quite as laugh out loud amusing from then on.

While the plot comes to a somewhat predicatable - though satisfactory - end, it's very much the characters that give the book its strength. I think it's true to say its a novel of its time - the references to the contemporary US indie scene, blogging, dot coms etc place it very firmly in the mid noughties, and I would guess it's probably lost a little with the passing of the years, but this is a solid read.

I'd go so far as to say it rocked.