A big part of running Psychobabble involves trawling the Internet in search of cool-looking upcoming books to review. One that interested me when I came across its pre-order page on Amazon was Now Is the Time to Invent! Reports from the Indie-Rock Revolution, 1986-2000, and I immediately put in a review-copy request with Verse Chorus Press. That was October 2012. For whatever reason, the book didn’t come out that year or the year after that or the year after that. It just kept getting put off, but my interest never waned, because I could never find much retrospective coverage of eighties/nineties indie-rock. In fact, I often feel like that whole scene was some weird dream that only I dreamt, a dream that left behind fab recordings by nocturnal phantasms such as Throwing Muses, Pavement, The Breeders, and Belle and Sebastian. While there’s never been a shortage of nostalgia for all things fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, the only thing from the nineties anyone seems to remember is Friends, and Friends sucked.
Fortunately, I now have confirmation that eighties and nineties indie-rock actually did exist outside my head because Now Is the Time to Invent! has finally been published. There’s a neat tang of nineties-style irony to its publication date since so many books scheduled for publication this year have been postponed due to the covid-19 pandemic.
So I guess the big question is: was it worth the wait? Firstly, I should note my surprise that the book was not just an overview of the cherished era it covers but an anthology of articles published during that era in a ’zine called Puncture. I’d never read Puncture, never remembered seeing it next to Spin or Maximum Rocknroll in the periodical section of Tower Records 25 years ago. I’d never heard of it. That’s a shame, because reading these articles decades too late, I’m impressed with the quality of writing, feminist pov, imaginativeness, and choice of artists covered. Unlike Spin’s Bob Guccione, Jr., Puncture’s editors Katherine Spielmann and Steve Connell didn’t just cover artists because they were the current big thing; they only covered ones about whom they felt they had something interesting to say or artists they personally loved. They had great taste. Muses. PJ Harvey. Beck. My Bloody Valentine. The Pixies. Kathleen Hannah. The Flaming Lips. Violent Femmes. Puncture was apparently the first major ’zine to cover Guided by Voices and Sleater-Kinney. Terri Sutton’s 1988 article “Women in Rock” finally acknowledged the wealth of women rock musicians a good five years before every other rock mag gobbled up and regurgitated its catchy title phrase if not quite its point.
What really makes Now Is the Time to Invent! worthwhile to those like me who did not read the ’zine in the nineties and aren’t interested in checking it out purely for nostalgia purposes is that since there has not been a ton of new writing about the artists it covers, there is still a lot to learn from its old articles. I knew Kristen Hersh was a Monkees fan, but I didn’t know Mike Nesmith helped fund the Muses’ music video for “Fish”. I learned why brilliant bassist Leslie Langston left the Muses and why Tanya Donnelly’s contributions to The Breeders’ Pod were so sparse and how Kim Deal got away with taking credit for Bob Pollard’s “I Am Decided” on her Amps album and a great deal about Kevin Shields’s work process.
A few of the articles are reminders of the less wonderful trends in the era’s rock writing. Dave Haslom’s “fuck rock stars” attitude when interviewing Greil Marcus is tiresomely dated. So is Colin Morton’s 1994 interview with Polly Jean Harvey that makes it clear he is more impressed with himself than his superiorly talented subject (you know an interview has gone off the rails when most of the questions are three times as long as the responses). But even these articles are important for conveying interesting tidbits about their subjects… the seemingly mysterious Harvey certainly comes off as refreshing down-to-earth in contrast to Morton.
So, yes, it was worth the wait.
A footnote list of bands Steve Connell says he and Katherine Spielmann would have “included in this book if we had more space” names groups such as Yo La Tengo, Helium, Versus, Sloan, Cornershop, and Stereolab. That makes me hope that a second volume of Now Is the Time to Invent! will be published. I just hope it doesn’t take another eight years.
