I generally don’t like reading novels about music. Even worse if they're about rock bands. Something about it always strikes me as false. Excepting The Commitments, which wooed us with Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding done in Irish accents, most books written about bands die in the process of the reader reading them. You mention the guitarist strumming a G chord, and it takes longer on the page to register what that sound would be like, than it would to hear. Or you just wonder why he's strumming something as boring as a G chord to begin with. There’s a disconnect. Lyrics, too, always seem wrong on the page without their musical context. It’s like reading bad, awkwardly written sex.

For these reasons, I rarely read books about rock bands, and so it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to be enjoying Jonathan Lethem’s new book, You Don’t Love Me Yet. Which is mostly about a rock band. But I am. So far. I’m about a quarter of the way into this tiny novel, and while a few of the music scenes have that awkwardly written sex feel to them, and lyrics and song titles seem to be weighted to the page (and part of me wonders how much of this is Lethem poking fun of rock bands), Lethem’s characters are more about installation art and zoo animals than G chords. Which makes it more quirky, less awkward, and, thus, pretty readable.

It doesn’t hurt that part of my past feels a tie to Lucinda, Lethem’s protagonist. She’s a bassist, the musician who obsesses over other musicians, boys with hair dangling in their faces, and thinks that her band is all there is. Sounds like someone I once was.

I picked up the bass when I was 15, and taught myself how to play along to “I Am The Resurrection,” “Just Like Heaven,” and “Summertime Rolls.” (I got a guitar several years later and similarly worked out the chords to “Stutter.”) During high school, I played in two or three bands that rehearsed in basements and broke up in living rooms, but never played a single song for anyone but ourselves. In college, I broke out of my cocoon and joined a circus-rock band. I keep saying that if that circus-rock band were still around today, they’d be taking the world by storm. We were good back then. Scary good. So scary we once played beneath a screen showing Nosferatu and people were more scared of us than of Max Schreck. We could have scored a Dario Argento soundtrack; we listed both Pixies and Edith Piaf as our influences. We had two accordionists. We wrote songs called “Billy Bob’s Backwoods Rodeo” (on which I played drums) and a doom-laden waltz about being bit by a spider. A song about marionettes, a song inspired by Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

We were good, and I loved playing the role of the rock star. These were the days when I cut my own hair: short in the back, long in the front, a la Justine Frischmann (more recently, and somewhat ironically, she and I both have attempted to look like Anna Karina). For a while, the front strands were bleached, and I invested in an arsenal of barrettes to assist in keeping them off my face. For gigs I smeared my eyes with kohl like Kim Gordon, and dressed in a mixture of britpop androgyny (all black, straight lines) and riot grrl throwback (blue slip, combat boots). I remember a faux leopard skin scarf and maroon vinyl shorts were both somehow implemented in my on stage wardrobe at one point. Yikes. But you get the idea. I think I often took my outfits more seriously than I did the music.

Which is a shame. Because we were scary good.

You Don’t Love Me Yet is dredging up all these memories for me. making me reanalyze that short-lived love affair with playing rock music. Lethem himself calls You Don’t Love Me Yet “a profoundly unimportant book.” The thing is, I was a profoundly unimportant musician. Bits and pieces of Lethem’s story remind me of that time, underlining how much fun it was to be in a band, hauling equipment, counting off songs on stage, making the songs come together, and at the same time how truly silly it was for me to ever dream of being a rock star, when I really was just profoundly unimportant. Just a posturing bassist in a rock band. (My bandmates are exempt from this sweeping statement; they took it very seriously, and are the main reason the bands I was in were any good. Most of them are still making amazing music to this day, and some have made careers of it.)

All of this band talk got me thinking of the songs I listened to that made me want to be a musician in the first place (Wolves Lower, Teen Age Riot, Graffiti by Throwing Muses, anything by Bangles). Then I remembered songs the various bands I was in would cover during rehearsals (Sheela-Na-Gig, Summer Babe) and at gigs (Caribou). And the songs I always wanted to cover (Strange Little Girl, I Am The Cancer, Candy) but never got the chance to.

And, well, here they are. For the someone I once was.

(or click here: I’ll see you at band practice.)