Never the Same Again: A Rock 'n' Roll Gothic by Jesse Sublett
Publication: May 15, 2004
Memoir
$24.00 Hard Cover
320 pages
8-page insert of
black and white photos
ISBN 1-58008-598-9
Distributed by Ten Speed Press
Publicity Contact: Tom Southern
510 559 1600 ext 3096, tom@tenspeed.com
Never The Same Again recounts the extraordinary life of Jesse Sublett, bass player, singer, songwriter, and crime novelist. It's a road trip through a landscape of rock 'n' roll dreams, murder and disease, told with candor and a hardboiled sense of humor.
As a musician, Jesse had what it takes. He quit his day job in the late 70s, and, together with Eddie Muñoz, Jon Dee Graham and Bill Blackmon, created the Skunks--a new wave rock 'n' roll band that was instrumental in establishing Austin, Texas, as the live music capital of the world. In his star-studded memoir you'll find cameo appearances from Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Elvis Costello, Carla Olson, Rolling Stones, Go-Go's and more.
In the late 1990s Jesse was diagnosed with stage IV cancer, with less than 9% chance of survival. "Depending on how you look at it, chemotherapy and radiation is either a great way to start off your new year or a rotten one. I've decided to assume that it's going to save my life, so it's a damn good way to kick off 1998, starting at eight a.m. on the first Monday of the year."
Jesse has come to understand that the cancer that has enrolled his family, his doctors, and his friends in a monumental effort to save him, is somehow connected with his past, with the hardscrabble life he endured growing up in the Texas hill country--LBJ country--and the self-absorbed life of a rock 'n' roll star on the road and on the run.
But no matter how fast he ran as young artist, no matter the booze and pills, no matter the glitter and adoration, no matter the poetry, no matter the magnitude of sexual titillation, Jesse couldn't outrun that awful memory. He couldn't obliterate the day in 1976 when he returned home from an out-of-town gig to find the body of his longtime girlfriend, Dianne Robert's, murdered in their bed. And he couldn't escape the tormenting thought that he could have done more to prevent her death.
Heartbreak spurs song; hardship steels resolve. In Jesse's songwriting you'll notice, no doubt, the influence of the murder and its aftermath. But, in his memoir you will observe a fierce resolve, a determination to bore into the past to examine the interconnectedness of things. Jesse faces down his demons and gains, if not victory over, then, perhaps, détente with memory and the past.