In Jonathan Franzen's latest novel, Freedom, there is a character named Richard Katz who forms a band while attending Macalester College and eventually makes his way to rock-stardom. I was chatting with my sister (Macalester, class of '99) about whether Katz might be based on a real person. Her best guess was Bob Mould, leader of the great St. Paul punk band Hüsker Dü in the '80s who actually was a Macalester student. She even remembers some lore surrounding his trials there—apparently Mac students were very proud to honor the place where Mould had attempted suicide.
Mould's age (b. 1960) and the timing of his college years would be a pretty good match for Katz. So would his musical style. Katz's band is called the Traumatics and they play loud and sloppy yet literate and subversive punk songs. Eventually Katz returns to his native New York to go solo and trades his punk rock nihilism for alt-country solipsism, always with an ironic attitude and razor wit. Mould was in fact born in New York and moved back for a time after the Hüskers broke up broke up in the late '80s. As a solo artist, Mould has gone acoustic at times, but never very alt-country as far as I know.
Katz's becomes semi-famous later in the novel due to his legendary punk rock integrity—his band never reached "main stream" status, he worked a construction job instead of selling out with his music—and to the Traumatics' influence on a younger generation of bands. The clincher might be when Franzen reveals that Katz was a major influence on Jeff Tweedy and Michael Stipe, as I think Hüsker Dü was pretty big for both of them in real life.
Still, it's certainly not a perfect match—for starters, Mould is gay and Katz is decidedly straight.
Here are some of Katz's classic lyrics from a Traumatics song called "TCBY":
They can buy you
They can butcher you
Tritely, cutely branded yogurt
The cat barfed yesterday
Techno cream, beige yellow
Treat created by yes-men
They can bully you
They can bury you
Trampled choked benighted youth
Taught consumerism by yahoos
This can't be the country's best
This can't be the country's best
What was the name of the punk band that Melissa's dad was in in The Corrections? The Spazmatics? Apparently there's a real band with that name so maybe not. It was something -ics though. Weird that this would be Franzen's go-to formulation for 80s punk band names. They all sound patterned after the Plasmatics, who are quite marginal really.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the lyrics quoted here sound like something that would be in a Negativland song.
P.S. Hi Simon!
Impressive background research you did here, Sim! Definitely confirms the Mould theory. Where I think Franzen's creative license comes in is the alt-country transition. To me, that seems like an amalgam of Mould and Gary Louris, another Twin Cities native, with a similar not-quite-famous trajectory. In terms of looks, I'm curious how others picture Katz? I think of him as a cross between Louris and Kramer myself...
ReplyDeletehttp://elvisbride.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DISAACSON-jewfro-RESIZE21.jpg
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think, Anna?
That link is pretty close -- though a little more wild-eyed/coked out like Kramer!
ReplyDeleteThe "-matics" ending on a band name sounds like cutting edge technology from the 1950s: "Try the revolutionary SPOON-O-MATIC!"
ReplyDeleteJudging from that picture maybe Ira Kaplan is another ingredient? Although really it looks more like Raoul Hernandez, music editor of the Austin Chronicle, whose 'fro is of a different provenance altogether.
ReplyDeleteI think Jeff Tweedy is involved... but, whoever Richard Katz is, he's real - www.facebook.com/thetraumatics
ReplyDeleteNice! But not quite loud enough ;)
ReplyDeleteThe Plasmatics Guitar Player is about 6' 4" and his name is Richard Stotz
ReplyDeleteWhat about Hüsker Dü's Grant Hart?
ReplyDeleteOld thread, but according to Bob Mould's Wikipedia page, "After Hüsker Dü broke up in 1988, Mould sequestered himself in a remote farmhouse in Pine City, Minnesota,[11] quit drinking and drugs, and wrote the songs that would make up his first solo album."
ReplyDeleteNameless Lake?
My name is Richard Katz; and that's the ONLY reason I ever obtained a copy of Freedom; I didn't care for The Corrections very much. So I'm reading along in this book, and not enjoying it a whole lot, when all of a sudden there's an entire chapter that is totally familiar. It's about a girl getting dateraped by some preppy, and her dad is a lawyer and he totally fails her -- won't go to bat for her. Hence, bad dad story; hence, I'm outta there.
ReplyDeleteLet me add as i walk out, though, that the character of Richard Katz as I leafed through the novel has pretty much my personality, no doubt about that; and I have a son who is a rock star, no doubt about that; and that's not a bad way to create a believable character to stick in a novel, in a non sequitur kind of way. I must have known this guy somewhere, enough for him to pick up on a few mannerisms and beliefs. Just the other day I called up my son just to tell him about the Richard Katz in a Franzen novel, just in case he had never heard of it; and sure enough, he'd never heard of it.
Richard katz = dick pussy. The character is so decidely straight that husker du is out as a reference point. One Katz line about his purpose being to stick his penis in as many females as possible is lifted from Franzen friend DFW. I think richard hell could function as a r.katz template.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteInteresting to detect the "real" person with the fictional character of a realist novel. I've never heard a Husker Du song, but I have read that Green Day and Smashing Pumpkins both formed as the result of classified ads looking for members to create a Husker Du-sounding band. In summation, Du or Du knot, there is not Katz. Besides, I thought it was a book about birds, based on the cover, and the only freedom Tweety (Bird, not Jeff) ever felt was freedom from Sylvester's assault.
ReplyDelete