The Guest List | Dummy
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The Guest List is a regular book column that surveys the reading habits of our favorite musicians. In this edition, Jimmy Cajoleas talks with Joe Trainor, guitar, bass, and synth player for the critically acclaimed Los Angeles rock band Dummy. The group’s latest album, Free Energy, was released in September on Trouble in Mind Records.
Jimmy Cajoleas: What are you reading right now?
Joe Trainor: I’m reading The Croning by Laird Barron. He’s kind of this current generation’s H. P. Lovecraft. He’s mostly known for his short story collections, but this is his debut novel. I just recently started it. I brought it on tour and failed miserably to read it. I try to read in the green room to shut my brain down a little, to chill. But there was a little more chaos on this tour, so I didn’t get to finish it. I’m really liking the novel so far. The opening part of the book is kind of a weird eldritch retelling of “Rumpelstiltskin.” I was reading it, wondering what the hell this was setting up, because then when it cuts to the beginning of the novel in earnest, it’s about this husband and wife who are going on vacation. She suddenly disappears to go on some deep-sea expedition with someone, and she’s missing for thirty-six hours. The main character is freaking the fuck out. That’s where I’m at so far.
I had just finished his first collection, The Imago Sequence, and the title story in particular was insane. It’s about these three paintings that were made by this hack who no one took seriously. But the paintings were somehow these haunted snapshots of this cosmic being, and if you see all three paintings, you basically lose your mind. It’s about this detective trying to find all three of them. That’s the zone I’ve been in for a while, the eldritch weird fiction zone. During Covid I didn’t really read very much. I don’t know why. My brain broke a little bit and I couldn’t focus. I went from listening to these weird eldritch audio fiction podcasts and that led me to being into actual books again. It’s been really cool to immerse myself into a genre that earlier in my life I didn’t really read much of.
JC: I’ve seen a big turn toward horror and things like that lately. I moderated a panel at the Mississippi Book Festival on horror, and there was a lot of talk of Lovecraft and his legacy, both the good and the awful.
JT: Yeah, he was a monster. He was definitely not a good guy. But his writing still speaks for itself, in a lot of ways.
JC: Are there any books you return to over the years?
JT: As a kid, I wasn’t a voracious reader. In school, the only book I ever liked was Catcher in the Rye, which, you know, as a young, angsty artist, that kind of tracks. But when I was twenty, a friend of mine let me borrow Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. That book started me really becoming a reader. That and David Sedaris’s early memoir-y stuff. Augusten Burroughs too. All the gay guys. I was a closeted gay guy, so I got something out of reading their stories. They hit really close to home. Especially Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors, with the mental illness stuff and the crazy family, really grabbed me. From Neil Gaiman I went into Ray Bradbury, because he was a huge influence on Neil Gaiman, and then kept reading a lot of stuff in that zone.
My favorite things from that reading era are the Ursula K. Le Guin Earthsea Cycle books. I have reread and reread those books a million times. Every time I read them, I get something new out of them. They read so quickly. She’s obviously brilliant in a lot of other ways, and a lot of her most popular books, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, are the ones that everyone talks about. But I just feel like she smokes all the other ones: Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter. The world Le Guin created with those books is so incredible and so vivid. When I’m reading them, I go to these really beautiful places mentally. I think those books are really underrated. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe those books are correctly rated, but in my mind they’re very underrated.
JC: Do you have any other all-time favorite books?
JT: One of my all-time favorite books is The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western by Richard Brautigan.
JC: Great book. Weird book.
JT: Weird, weird book. Supposedly Yorgos Lanthimos has optioned it. And if he made that, I would be so fucking excited. I feel like he would nail it. Richard Brautigan is definitely one of my favorite authors of all time. All my bands have had sprinkles of Brautigan references here and there. Most people don’t pick up on them. An old band I was in released a cassette that was a bunch of loosies and singles and things like that, and it was called The Forgotten Works, after In Watermelon Sugar. Only one person got the reference. I was like, “Yes!” If only one person gets it, I’m happy.
Let’s see, The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian is another book I love. You remember when MTV had a publishing house? They published his book in 1997. Look, there’s a sticker on it that says “censored.” It’s about an anonymous weirdo artist guy trying to survive in New York City in the ’80s and he does all this sketchy shit to get by. I mean, it’s called The Fuck-Up, so you get the idea. He pretends to be gay to work at this gay porn theater and to live in this apartment. He’s this schemer. It’s just brilliant.
I love pretty much all of Arthur Nersesian’s books. He did this series that was a retelling of American history called The Five Books of (Robert) Moses. In the first one, this big terrorist event happens in New York City and everyone there gets shipped to Nevada and they build a fake New York City in the middle of the desert. It’s a very political book about how Democrats and Republicans are basically the same and they’re not doing anything to help anyone but themselves. The first two came out, and ten years went by, and during the pandemic they dropped the other three in one big collection. I’ve gotten through four out of the five books so far. It’s just a lot, you know? But it’s very surreal and psychedelic and alternate-history sci-fi. And Robert Moses, a famous urban planner in New York City, is in this book. Nersesian really hates him. The whole book is kind of, “Fuck this guy.”
At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft. That was obviously a huge one. The first time I read that my mouth was agape. I was just like, “Holy fuck. What?” My taste in books is definitely . . . I’m into indie-released things but I like entertaining stories that aren’t super difficult. I need something to grab me immediately. I still think the writing’s great, but in terms of reading literature, I’m more of a genre guy.
JC: As the great writer Megan Abbott always says, “Literary fiction is a genre.” I went through a phase for about two years where I read almost nothing but old crime novels. I learned so much about voice and plot and movement.
JT: I need propulsion in my stories. A book can be slow but still have forward movement in some way. I feel like the stuff I read is the indie rock equivalent of books. I’m reading the Stereolab of a book. Maybe that’s silly, but that’s the way it is for me.
JC: Do you have any music books you like?
JT: I’m really into books about record labels. I feel less interested in specific musicians. I’m more interested in the scene around a label. Last year I read You’re with Stupid: Kranky, Chicago, and the Reinvention of Indie Music by Bruce Adams. I read a couple of Flying Nun books, Needles and Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981–1988 by Matthew Goody and In Love with These Times: My Life with Flying Nun Records by Roger Shepherd. The Sarah Records book, Popkiss: The Life and Afterlife of Sarah Records by Michael White. Endless Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery by Adam Clair.
All of those books were so inspiring for the Dummy record, in terms of how free those artists were in that world. They weren’t encumbered by trends or whatever. They were doing their own thing in their own lane, not worried at all about the outside world. It was very insular. All those bands were so much on their own thing, and they were so disinterested in the audience and in genre labels. They were making music that was a pure expression of themselves. I feel like for our new record, Free Energy, that’s what we wanted to do. Our first record, Mandatory Enjoyment, did well, relatively speaking. You play a lot of shows, you do a lot of things, certain ideas creep in, in terms of needing to stick to a sound or think about the audience. That naturally happens to an artist. The Kranky Records book in particular helped me to disregard any notions of anything else outside the four of us making the music we wanted. I’ll be forever grateful to be reading that book in the moment I read it. I was feeling pretty uninspired, and that really helped.
Bruce, who wrote the book, and Joel Leoschke, who also ran the label, used the term “indie rock” as a pejorative. I really related to that. I feel like at this point that term means nothing. It’s almost a genre, not a descriptor of independent artists. Major label artists cosplay as indie artists, and they use the aesthetics of indie artists to make it seem like they’re more credible. Even back in the mid-’90s Bruce and Joel were saying that, so I’m sure their heads are exploding now to see how indie music has been exploited by major labels and corporations. Reading about those bands and those guys and the way they operated felt really inspiring to me. Nathan O’Dell from our band also read it and was inspired by it. The book really hit home.
My friend Marianna gave me a gift certificate to Bandcamp for my birthday and I bought this really expensive zine collection from that era that was really sick, Pull Down the Shades: GARAGE Fanzine 1984–86 by Richard Langston. It’s so fucking cool. I liked it a lot because there were interviews with Look Blue Go Purple, and I really wanted to read about them more. Hozac Books put it out, and it’s great. One of my other favorite music books is the My Bloody Valentine 33 1/3 book Loveless by Mike McGonigal. An incredible read, with so much information about the production and making of that record. I love it.
JC: Any other books you’d like to mention?
JT: The Dead Take the A Train by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey is a favorite. I picked it because I liked the cover. It’s a very gay, Lovecraftian magic horror book set in New York City. It’s about this lesbian who is down on her luck and gets hired to do weird things, like clear out monsters and shit. She goes up against this big firm that’s trying to bring about the end of the world. It was really fun, really entertaining, really pulpy. I read it in a day. I couldn’t put it down. It absolutely knocked me out.
Another book I’d like to mention is The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian. I read it when I was twenty-four. This book is insane. It’s a retelling of Noah’s ark where the ark is a present-day hospital for children that begins to float during a worldwide flood. Some of the chapters are told from the perspective of the angels watching over the ark and some are told from the perspective of the staff. Reading the novel feels like it almost didn’t have an editor, in a good way. The way it’s written is so beautiful. This and Adrian’s short story collection A Better Angel are both amazing. The Children’s Hospital took me a while, because it’s over six hundred pages long. I think I read two books while reading this one, and it was so invigorating and satisfying to finish. I slammed it down and said, “Fuck yeah! That ruled!” It’s an old McSweeney’s book, Dave Eggers’s press. I read a bunch of his books as a kid, and I think they hit me at the perfect moment in my life. There was another McSweeney’s book from the time, Bowl of Cherries by Millard Kaufman, that also didn’t seem like it had an editor, in a great way. It was so crazy and beautiful and weird.
Anyway, those two books, The Dead Take the A Train and The Children’s Hospital, are definitely worth mentioning. One highly entertaining, the other soul-crushing. The world is so fucked up and reading is very much an escape for me. Even if the world in a book is all fucked up, the books are still funny and entertaining. I need that.
Jimmy Cajoleas was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in New York.
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