Fred Nicolaus, author of the just-released album Golden Suits on the Yep Roc label, will be playing with his group at the Hotel Utah Saloon in San Francisco on Sunday evening Oct. 6. Save the date and stay tuned for further details.
Meanwhile Nicolaus has come out with a new music video that documents one of the most original and unusual, not to say weird, projects by a recent popular musician. No, he doesn’t smash guitars or cut the heads off chickens in his pants — that’s so yesterday. No. What he does is, he goes to every remaining bookstore in Manhattan — 27 of them — and buys up all copies of The Stories of John Cheever. It’s all documented in the video, here:
Now, this book was published in 1978, and Cheever died four years later, the year, coincidentally (?) when Nicolaus was born. What is it about Cheever, you may well ask, that fascinates this 30-year old so much that he named his album and his band after a line from a Cheever story?
There’s a new interview with Nicolaus published yesterday in therumpus.net, here, that begins to explain it.
Fred Nicolaus: I was on vacation with my family in a small beach town in California, and I bought his collection of short stories to read on the plane back to New York, I think because I remembered liking “The Swimmer” in high school. On the flight, I read the first story (“Goodbye, My Brother”) and I got to the final line: “I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.” I was completely overwhelmed by it. It was partially the language — how he was able to blend formal, sometimes stiff prose with almost surreal imagery and make it work.Also, the world Cheever wrote about was compelling. I’m from California, so the whole “cocktail hour with the Farquarsons in a 100-year-old summer house on the Cape” thing was very exotic to me. Over time, I kept coming back to it for different reasons — the way he would write about marriage, his tortured sense of morality. I feel like that book is an endlessly renewable resource for me.
So there you are. Naked women walking out of the sea to cocktail hour with the Farquarsons. What’s not to like? And Cheever’s themes — tortured marriages, dual personalities, moral dilemmas — haven’t gone away. It helps to know that Nicolaus is himself a short story writer (as yet unpublished in the bigs) and honors Cheever as the 20th century master of this medium that he was.
These days we have baseball players with college degrees, so why not pop musicians who read Cheever? Nicolaus deserves credit for appearing to be what he really is: a white college graduate who loves to read and who walks creatively on the musical path broken by the Beatles. Although Nicolaus was born in rough and tough Oakland CA, he’s resisted the temptation to pose as a street hood or as a labor agitator, or to assume some other fake musical identity, and he’s not ripping off the riffs of another culture. He is not afraid to be what he is, to work with what he knows and loves, and this core authenticity comes through in this debut album. I predict that he will find a wide and loyal audience and that Golden Suits will be the beginning of a long and successful career.
[Full disclosure: I’m his Dad.]
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