THESE IMPORTANT YEARS, OR, BELA KOE-KROMPECHER'S "LOVE, DEATH, AND PHOTOSYNTHESIS"

I read a lot of music books, and it's very rare to find one that tweaks established formulas. That's why it was so refreshing to stumble across Bela Koe-Krompecher's "Love, Death, and Photosynthesis," a time-jumping addiction and recovery memoir, an elegy to lost friends, and a love letter to the '90s Columbus, Ohio indie/punk scene. Opening in 1988 and ranging from the early '70s to 2018, the book is a series of short vignettes adding up to a remarkably heartfelt memoir of loss, loneliness, music, and ultimately acceptance and recovery.

Koe-Krompecher's loving, yet fraught relationships with Jenny Mae Leffel, his high school girlfriend-turned best friend and Jerry Wick of the band Gaunt comprise the emotional center of the book. Both are gifted musicians with self-destructive streaks and substance problems, as well as contagious senses of humor and fun that keep him hooked.

Koe-Krompecher humanizes his two friends rather than turning them into cautionary tales. And in a scene and age where drinking and outrageousness is celebrated, it can be difficult to recognize mental illness or alcoholism, especially when you're sharing drinks and adventures. Even so, Koe-Krompecher deftly describes the heartbreak, anger, and confusion of dealing with a loved one's undiagnosed mental illness and death.

Through it all, there is music. Koe-Krompecher has a gift for describing those long, aimless days haunting used record stores or working half-heartedly at your minimum-wage job until that three-minute song or five-band bill later that night makes it all worthwhile. And if the music you're so dedicated to doesn't register on the larger world's radar, well, that's not really the point, is it?

"Nobody got famous, nobody ever really made a dent in any product counting mechanism like Billboard magazine or the clanging of cash registers, but we cherished one another as if our lives depended on it, night in and night out. We discovered that success wasn't the prize, the prize was the friendship, and the making of art for fuck's sake. That is what an Ohioan does - not always stylish, but always sincere."

Plus, he describes a band having "squalid sounds would frighten the paint off a witch's house," a phrase I really wish I had come up with.

Koe-Krompecher is as honest documenting his own drinking problem as he is with his friends, and manages to strike a nice balance between sensationalising and recounting. You'll feel for everyone in "Love, Death, and Photosynthesis," applauding their succcesses, hoping they are able to break their cycles, even if you know some of them won't. 

Get it?

Sex/Drugs/Bad Behavior
7/10. Koe-Krompecher ably straddles the line between recounting and glamorizing, but certain sentences will bring the reader back to boozy days as a twenty-something, like "Groggy and wobbly, I asked if she wanted to go back to my house to listen to records, the indie version of asking if one wanted to partake in intercourse."

Opens in Media res?
Yes? The opening is Bela and Jenny clowning at a drive-through. I had no idea what to expect, other than the fact that the Cleveland punk/indie scene featured prominently. With the opening story, I wasn't sure if I was reading fiction or non-fiction or who these people were. Smarter readers might not encounter that problem.

Could We Hang?
If you lived in a college town you've hung with these people, or people like them, or perhaps were one of them. Jeez, the sentence "We were full of self-doubt, which was hidden under a barrage of vocal opinions on music, art, lifestyle, politics, and just about anything else we were confronted with" describes a large chunk of my twenties. As does "The room was stacked with records and vintage clothes, shelves of vinyl guarded me, as they had since the third grade."

You Might Remember Me From, or, My Totally Biased View of the Author's Best Stuff:
Man, there's a ton of music in this thing so it's hard to do my usual snotty record store clerk recommendation. Gaunt had some great songs - if I were to pick two, it'd be "Jim Motherfucker" and "Pop Song," a tune not dissimilar to what Radon was doing in Gainesville at the time. New Bomb Turks I'd go with "Destroy Oh Boy," especially the opener "Born Toulouse-Lautrec." I tried listening to some Jenny Mae Leffel songs, but they felt too raw after reading the book - like I was going through her diaries or something.

Percentage of Music in the Bio
Let's say 80 percent. Music is a constant throughout "Love, Death, and Photosynthesis. If people aren't creating it, they're listening to it, deriving meaning from it in the way that is so crystalized in your twenties. "Music was an escape for us, a way to close out the world and tie our emotions to something tangible yet ethereal, a passage to our inner selves that still managed to encapsulate the whole world."

Buy, Borrow from the Library, or Pass
I'm gonna break my tightwad streak and say buy it.