Overview

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.

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9781478015543

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Reviews

""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) ""With dizzying impressionism, Good night the pleasure was ours is an enthralling portrayal of the delicate balance between performer, audience, and sound. "" - Sadie Dupuis (Spin)

David Grubbs, dazzlingly protean, turns musical-time into poetry-time by streaming condensed, sonorous phrases through his own magical verse-machine, Dantean in its three-pronged approach to paradise. Grubbs takes the entire experience of music-making-listening, practicing, improvising, recording, performing, touring, reconsidering, remembering-and gives these complexities a porous and filigreed poetic form, transforming an evanescent panoply of acoustic events into a bravura verbal monument, as if Cage and Mallarme had found a way to build a singing cathedral together. -- Wayne Koestenbaum, author of * The Cheerful Scapegoat * Full of vivid material, beautiful language, and wise observations, Good night the pleasure was ours captures the embodied practice of music-making and living as a musician in a mode that has never been written quite this way before. It opens up possibilities for me as a music writer and I imagine for anyone else seriously engaged with creative nonfiction, poetry, and the arts in general. It will set off creative ripple effects. -- Carl Wilson, music critic * Slate *

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 * With dizzying impressionism, Good night the pleasure was ours is an enthralling portrayal of the delicate balance between performer, audience, and sound. -- Sadie Dupuis * Spin *

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 *

David Grubbs, dazzlingly protean, turns musical-time into poetry-time by streaming condensed, sonorous phrases through his own magical verse-machine, Dantean in its three-pronged approach to paradise. Grubbs takes the entire experience of music-making-listening, practicing, improvising, recording, performing, touring, reconsidering, remembering-and gives these complexities a porous and filigreed poetic form, transforming an evanescent panoply of acoustic events into a bravura verbal monument, as if Cage and Mallarme had found a way to build a singing cathedral together. -- Wayne Koestenbaum, author of * The Cheerful Scapegoat * Full of vivid material, beautiful language, and wise observations, Good night the pleasure was ours captures the embodied practice of music-making and living as a musician in a mode that has never been written quite this way before. It opens up possibilities for me as a music writer and I imagine for anyone else seriously engaged with creative nonfiction, poetry, and the arts in general. It will set off creative ripple effects. -- Carl Wilson, music critic, * Slate *

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 *

Author Information

David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. As a musician, Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more than two hundred commercially released recordings.

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