Richard Price Kicks Ass
October 12th, 2008
Richard Price Signs my book at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville. Photo by Kathy Crow
One of my favorite authors, Richard Price, was in town this weekend to read from his latest novel Lush Life and answer questions from the audience. Lush Life is a fantastic novel, and to hear him read from it, New York accent and all, was truly special. I became a fan of Price’s many years ago when I first read Clockers. What made the book particularly interesting for me was that it took place in a ficticious New Jersey town called Dempsey, that was clearly based on my hometown of Jersey City. Anybody growing up there would have fingered the projects in the book to be based on Curries Woods near the border of Jersey City and Bayonne. I’ve never really confirmed any of these theories, though, until yesterday. Someone at the reading asked about Dempsey, and Price said it was based on a combination of several cities, including Jersey City and Newark. He also told a story about how a copy of one of his books practically saved his life while doing research in the projects in Jersey City. He didn’t said which projects, though. At least not yet.
I figured since we were in Nashville — and really, what are the odds that someone who grew in Jersey City would be at his reading — I figured I would tell him of my roots when I got my book signed. So that’s me in the picture trying my best to make a personal connection with Richard Price in the two seconds it takes him to sign my book. That of course never works, but I did tell him it was honor to meet him and that I grew up in Jersey City, in the Heights section. He said he gets confused sometimes and asked me if the Heights is where St. Peter’s College is (my college! wow, Richard Price has heard of my college). I told him that St. Peter’s is really closer to the Journal Square area, and then explained where the Heights are in relation to Hoboken. Why I didn’t say, “no, but that’s where I went to college” is a mystery. Like I said, these “personal connections on book-signing lines” attempts never work. He then said he mostly hung out in the Curries Woods and Greenville areas. Bam! Confirmation! Now, that wasn’t what I was going for, of course. I was hoping he’d say something like “Really? Jersey City? What the fuck is somebody from Jersey City doing in Nashville,” and then we’d have some kind of Northeast New Jersey/New York City bonding moment. Maybe even grab some coffee and shoot the shit awhile. But I’m a goofball, as anyone who’s ever read my account of meeting Springsteen knows. That kind of thing doesn’t happen.
I did have my theories confirmed, and that was cool. And I got my book signed. Richard Price kicks ass. If you haven’t read him, especially Lush Life and Clockers, you’re truly missing out on reading one of the greatest working writers today. He’s one of the masters of dialogue.
As opposed to, say, me.




It’s interesting to note what people hear when they listen to music. I always notice the lyrics first, and as a songwriter, tend to focus on the song structure. My friend Jonathan, however, an accomplished guitarist, engineer and producer, hears sounds (or at least he used too…we’ve been talking Dylan lyrics quite a bit lately). My wife Kathy, a singer, hears harmonies. If she’s singing along to a song, she’s likely singing the third or the fifth or some other harmony. I’ll always sing the melody or the lead. Meanwhile, I’m sure there are other people who don’t hear music in any of these ways, but instead take the whole song in emotionally.
I’ve had a beat-up, 25-year-old copy of William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow in my library for almost 15 years. I’m not certain where I got it, but I’m pretty sure it was from a street vendor in Greenwich Village, where I often picked up paperback books for fifty cents or a dollar. I was drawn to the title. Shortly after discovering it, I wrote a song called “Everything Turns to Pink” (performed frequently with the Joe Pagetta Band and recorded for our 1995 six-song demo) that started with the lines “So long/See you tomorrow/Farewell/I’ll see you again.” The weird thing was that I never actually read the book, until recently.