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Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale
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Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale Hardcover - 2006

by Jen Trynin


Summary

"With plenty to say and ample musical gifts with which to say it, Boston newcomer Jennifer Trynin is poised to join the upper ranks of GenX alternative rock queendom . . . One of the year's best debuts. A revelation."-BILLBOARD

It was 1994-post-Liz Phair, mid-Courtney Love, just shy of Alanis Morissette. After seven years of slogging it out in the Boston music scene, Jen Trynin took a hard look at herself and gave "making it" one last shot.

It worked. Suddenly Trynin became the spark that set off one of the most heated bidding wars of the year. Major labels vied for her, to the tune of multiple millions of dollars in deals. Lawyers, managers, and booking agents clamored for her attention. Billboard put her on the cover. Everyone knew she was the Next Big Thing. But then she wasn't.

In a series of dizzying, hilarious, heartbreaking snapshots, Trynin captures what it's like to be catapulted to the edge of rock stardom, only to plummet back down to earth. Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be is the story of a girl who got what she wished for-and lived happily ever after anyway.

From the publisher

"With plenty to say and ample musical gifts with which to say it, Boston newcomer Jennifer Trynin is poised to join the upper ranks of GenX alternative rock queendom . . . One of the year's best debuts. A revelation."-BILLBOARD It was 1994-post-Liz Phair, mid-Courtney Love, just shy of Alanis Morissette. After seven years of slogging it out in the Boston music scene, Jen Trynin took a hard look at herself and gave "making it" one last shot. It worked. Suddenly Trynin became the spark that set off one of the most heated bidding wars of the year. Major labels vied for her, to the tune of multiple millions of dollars in deals. Lawyers, managers, and booking agents clamored for her attention. Billboard put her on the cover. Everyone knew she was the Next Big Thing. But then she wasn't. In a series of dizzying, hilarious, heartbreaking snapshots, Trynin captures what it's like to be catapulted to the edge of rock stardom, only to plummet back down to earth. Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be is the story of a girl who got what she wished for-and lived happily ever after anyway.

Details

  • Title Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale
  • Author Jen Trynin
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition First Edition
  • Pages 354
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Houghton Mifflin, Orlando, Florida, U.S.A.
  • Date 2006
  • ISBN 9780151011483 / 0151011486
  • Weight 1.34 lbs (0.61 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.18 x 6.68 x 1.23 in (23.32 x 16.97 x 3.12 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Rock musicians, Women rock musicians
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2005015240
  • Dewey Decimal Code B

Excerpt

1994. November 1. 4 p.m.
 
     “91 South! There! On the left!” Buck is turned around in the front passenger seat. “You’re clear! Go!”
 
     Robby swerves left, to much horn-honking and raising of fists from other drivers. “Yikes,” he says. “Touchy.”
 
     “Oh yeah?” says Buck, rolling his window down, sticking his hand out and giving someone the finger. “How about this?” he says, sticking out his other hand, giving the double finger.
 
     The sun is low in the sky and flashing across the highway. We’re on our first band trip to New York and I’m feeling slightly delirious and very pinch-me. We’re playing at Brownie’s, the kind of skanky rock dive I’ve been dying to play. In my previous life, the mere mention of Brownie’s caused me deep pangs of inferiority and what-about-me.
 
     “You know that guy,” someone might say. “Freddy? From Brownie’s?”
 
     “Sure,” I’d say, “the booking guy,” hoping I wouldn’t have to admit that I’d been calling Freddy from Brownie’s for over two years to exactly zero avail.
 
     Until a few weeks ago, when he’d finally called me back.
 
     “Yeah, this is Freddy from Brownie’s,” he said when I answered. “I’m looking for Jennifer Trynin?”
 
     “This is Jen,” I said, my heart pounding up a storm.
 
     “Oh, hey. Well, like, I got your 45 with the big boots on it and—that’s yours, right? This is you, right?”
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     “Yeah,” I said. How in the world did Freddy from Brownie’s get ahold of my 45?
 
     “Well, I think it’s really good. Where you from?”
 
     “Boston,” I said.
 
     “What’re they puttin’ in the water up there anyway? A lot of great bands comin’ outta Boston. How come I never heard of you?”
 
     Shit shit shit. I didn’t want to admit that until very recently, few people cared about my music one way or the other. So I began coughing, fake choking-coughing—which unfortunately dislodged something in my lungs that really did catch in my throat, causing a real coughing fit.
 
     “Hey, you okay?” asked Freddy. “Want me to hang on? Maybe get yourself some water?”
 
     “No, no, I’m okay,” I wheezed, pounding myself on the chest. “Just getting over a cold.”

   “Sounds like a bitch,” he said. “Anyway, you want a gig?”
 
“You alive back there?” asks Buck.
 
     “What?”
 
     “I said do you like the Clash?”
 
     “I guess,” I say.
 
     “You guess?” says Buck, turning around, leaning over the back of his seat and hitting me on the head with a magazine. He smiles. “Go back to sleep, rock star.”
 
     I smile, closing my eyes, the sunlight catching in my lashes, and for once I’m not dreaming. This is the way I’d always imagined it would be. Me and my bandmates goofing around in the van, roaming the highways. I have the feeling I used to get driving down to the Jersey shore with my family when I was maybe six. I’d pile blankets into the back-back of the station wagon and make a fort where I could be alone, but not really alone. I remember wanting never to get there, wanting always to stay just like we were in that car, together and forgiving, because there was nowhere else to go.
 
I’m walking toward Brownie’s big black door, which is covered with band stickers and graffiti and chewing gum—when someone bursts through from the other side.
 
     “Hallefuckinluiah!” yells this short guy with long black hair who’s sucking on a lollipop. His fingers are dirty. “You’re Jennifer, right?” He has a black leather jacket and a long nose with two silver studs.
 
     “Are you Freddy?”
 
     “Ready Freddy and willing,” he says. He’s clacking the lollipop around in his mouth a mile a minute. “Hey, you didn’t tell me this was gonna be a fuckin’ showcase. You got some pretty big dudes calling. You gonna be a rock star or something?” Freddy yanks the lollipop from his mouth with his dirty fingers and whips it toward the street, hitting the side of our van where it shatters and falls to the ground.
 
     “Hey man, that’s our van,” I say, not giving in to my fear of people like Freddy. I don’t know what kind of life they really lead but I always picture it damp and poorly lit, filled with knives and heroin.
 
     “Oh,” he says. “Sorry ’bout that, partner. Listen, I’ll go get some crew guys to help with your gear,” and he disappears inside again. This is the first time anyone from a club has ever offered to help me do anything. I feel like I’ve been let in on some kind of secret handshake. For a moment, I imagine never having to carry my equipment again, but after a while, when no help materializes, I start dragging my amp across the sidewalk and life rubberbands back to normal.
 
     Inside, Brownie’s is no frills, just a big rectangular room with a bar along one wall and a stage at the end. Freddy counts through a ream of brown paper tickets and hands me twenty-four. “Good for domestic beers or a buck off mixed drinks,” he says. “I’m giving you guys extra cuz I’m stoked you’re playing here tonight.”
 
     “You are?” I say.
 
     “Yeah,” he says. “You know, it’s good for the club when this kinda shit goes down.”
 
     “What kinda shit?”
 
     “You know, sharkfest,” says Freddy. “Mark my fuckin’ words.”
 
     “Awesome,” says Robby.
 
     “Words marked,” says Buck, putting his arm around me, squeezing me tight, then pushing me away. “Stop hugging me all the time,” he says.
 
     I rip the tickets into eights and hand Buck and Robby theirs.
 
     “Whoa,” says Robby. “Can I sell some of these?”
 
     “You trying to get us drunk, little lady?” says Buck. “Planning on taking advantage of us after the show?”
 
     “Do I have to wait that long?” I say, smiling at my guys. They seem to be glowing, as if the highway sun is still shining on them, as if they’re the best friends I’ve ever had and we’ll be like this forever.
 
H
 
1968, age four: I begin taking piano from the old lady down the street. She calls me “Jenny my dear” and smells like an attic.
 
Eight: My cousin is married to the guitar player Robben Ford. He’s on tour with Joni Mitchell, which is how I end up backstage in a brightly lit room with lots of tables and mirrors and people smoking.
 
     “This is Joni Mitchell,” says Robben.
 
     “It’s so nice to meet you,” says Joni Mitchell. Her hand is pale and cool and her eyes shine right through me.
 
     I listen to the cassette my mom buys me of Joni Mitchell’s Blue on my brother’s little black tape recorder, but the songs I love most make me so sad I don’t listen to it very much.
 
Nine: My father leaves. I peek at my mom from behind a chair. She’s lying on the chaise on the patio, gazing out across the lawn, smoking a cigarette, flicking the ashes on the ground at the end of her long, beautiful arm.
 
Eleven: My parents enroll me and my brother in a snooty private school located in the middle of a tough neighborhood, where black kids skid by on undersized bikes and whip rocks at us.
 
     I quit piano, get a guitar, and start writing songs. I pretend I’m a real singer, like Joni Mitchell—beautiful, fearless, sauntering through strange cities, tossing love affairs over my shoulder like salt.

Thirteen: When I’m not wondering who in the world I’m going to tag along after once my brother Tim leaves for college, I’m writing songs. I’m allowed to play a song I write for Tim at his high school graduation and get a standing ovation, deepening my next-Joni-Mitchell conviction—until it begins dawning on me that I’m not the greatest singer in the world. So I focus on my songs, hoping that the beauty of the music will camouflage my subpar singing.
 
Fourteen: Tim leaves. I become a hippie. I stop eating meat or watching TV or going to movies or even listening to the radio. Not like I was listening to the radio much anyway, because the songs I love most still make me sad, and all the other songs just make me feel creepy. I can’t help but picture the people I imagine playing the music, a bunch of scraggly guys in a dirty basement in some seedy town. So I read books, take pictures, write songs. Or I duck into the woods and drink beer. Kiss boys.
 
In college, I major in creative writing and smoke pot. I play my songs at coffeehouses or in the occasional dorm room if a guitar is being passed around and I want some guy to notice me. In the summers, I sing in restaurants by the seashore when I’m not waiting tables. I throw in a few originals, but mostly I play covers. Janis Joplin’s a cappella “Mercedes Benz (Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me A . . .)” always brings down the house.
 
     Junior year, Tim visits me and we stumble into a party where a band with the skinniest guys in the world is playing loud and angry and fast—the epitome of the kind of music that has always creeped me out. Everyone’s thrashing around, slamming into each other, or they’re just standing, staring, especially girls with skinny arms and dirty hair and long thin hands jammed into their back pockets. The singer’s ­guitar is hung to his knees, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips with the ashes fluttering down like snow and sticking to the back of his hand. Later, at some bar, I ask Tim what he thought of the band. He tells me they look like a bunch of greasy-ass losers who can’t get laid.
 
     Senior year, I’m in my first real rock band. Just before we graduate, we play a party where the cops shut us down. I’ve never had so much fun in my whole life.
 
After graduation, I land in Boston, where I begin freelancing at a monthly parenting publication and waitressing at Doyle’s, a beer and burger joint down the street.
 
     On November 1, in a post-Halloween sugar daze, I decide to make a record.
 
     I have no idea how to do this.
 
     I end up slipping a homemade cassette of some of my songs into the pocket of a cousin-of-a-cousin at a family funeral. I think this guy owns a recording studio and I’m just looking for a break on price, but it turns out he has his own little jazz label in New York called Pathfinder Records. My cousin’s cousin tells me that, while my music isn’t jazz, it does have “a certain something, reminds me a little of Joni Mitchell.”
 
     I record a five-song EP for Pathfinder called Trespassing down in New York with a bunch of coolcat musicians. At Pathfinder’s urging, I assemble a “touring band” that includes a born-again Christian bass player I get from an ad.
 
     Trespassing receives a smattering of good reviews and I even hear one of my songs on a college station’s “New Coffeehouse Hour.” But just as my band begins practicing in each other’s apartments at low volume, Pathfinder folds, bankrupted by an ill-advised attempt to relaunch an early-80s star who was single-handedly responsible for that period’s OOH ooh OOH! phase.
 
     I curl up on my futon couch, eating pizza and watching reruns, with the wind whistling through the cracks in my windows.
 
     I manage to book a few shows here and there, mostly in suburban clubs on Sunday through Wednesday nights as the first of three or four bands featuring chick singers with acoustic guitars. The cops never come close to shutting us down.
 
     I keep writing new songs.
 
     Every now and then I see Trespassing in a music store somewhere.

Copyright © 2006 by Jen Trynin
 
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
 
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
 

Media reviews

"Trynin's terse,hilarious, you-are-there prose is as strong as her songwriting was, and this will remain an excellent primer for any rockers considering signing with a major label...for however many months said labels continue to exist."

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