The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (24 page)

Fig. 13: The wrong type of Silver Surfer.

(© SueC/Shutterstock)

As Norrin Radd rediscovered in every issue of
The Silver Surfer
, you can't go home again. Reading these comics as an adult was an act of nostalgia. They were overwrought to the point of kitsch. And yet, and yet . . . there was still something
magical about them. The kinetic artwork had lost none of its impact and the stories were ambitious to a fault. Across forty hand-inked, incident-filled pages, plus ads, they dealt with topics such as the arms race, the black power struggle, the fundamentals of metaphysics and the descent of man. On several occasions, the Surfer is pitched against Satan himself (e.g. issue #9, October 1969,
TO STEAL THE SURFER'S SOUL!
), although for reasons of religious sensitivity and copyright-infringement, Satan goes by the name Mephisto, Monarch of Evil. It was a pop-art
Paradise Lost
.
³

Perhaps because I could still relate to the character of a troubled loner with special powers, I was able to forgive
The Silver Surfer
a lot. He could be mawkish and gauche, and clumsily did the Surfer himself express, but this was how I'd felt as a child and occasionally still felt as an adult. Whatever their flaws, I had found the comics at the right moment in life and they had stayed with me, in the same way
Absolute Beginners
had. Perhaps if I had encountered Dean Moriarty – another restless wanderer with grammar issues – at an impressionable age I could have been more forgiving of
On the Road
. But that moment was long gone and, with no choice but to read
On the Road
as a grown-up, with a grown-up's fears and preoccupations, Kerouac was not selling the kind of trip I could use. I needed a new beat, not the old ones.

There were relatively few books on the List left for me to read, but the answer I was looking for, the answer to life, the universe and everything, still seemed remote and unknowable. I was not even sure what the question was. I had to believe that the next book might tell me but, with the best will in the world, it looked rather improbable.

Book #42 on the List of Betterment was Julian Cope's
Krautrocksampler
, a highly personal monograph by the former singer of new-wave group The Teardrop Explodes on the subject of German progressive rock in the late 1960s and early 1970s, bands like Tangerine Dream, NEU!, and Amon Düül II.
⁴
It was the sort of cosmic music I imagined the Silver Surfer might hear as he flew between planets or listened to alone in his bedroom after another row with Galactus. Like the Surfer, Julian Cope was a hero of mine from way back; his music had been the soundtrack to my own rites of passage and still featured occasionally on my commute or around the house; at a young age, Alex had learned to bang his bowl on the kitchen table in time to ‘World Shut Your Mouth'. I had no expectation that
Krautrocksampler
would be a great book in the way that
Don Quixote
or
Anna Karenina
were great books; and the impulse to read it now was, like the impulse to read
The Essential Silver Surfer, Vol. 1
, backward-looking and self-indulgent. But so what? I had earned the right to a little rock'n'roll fun.

But there was a hitch. I had owned
Krautrocksampler
ever since its publication in 1995. Now that the time had come to read it, however, the book seemed to have vanished into thin air. I could not find it anywhere. It was not with the row of music biographies on the sitting-room bookshelves, nor the stack of Cope LPs in my office, nor in our bedroom with the first editions of Cope's other books,
Head-On, Repossessed
and
The Modern Antiquarian
, nor lurking at the bottom of one of the still-unpacked cardboard boxes in the loft or orange crates at the storage unit up the road. Oh well, I thought with pleasure, I'll have to buy another one.

Krautrocksampler
, however, was out of print and no longer available in the shops. The cheapest secondhand copy I could find via the Internet was priced at almost £100.
Scheiße!
I liked buying books but I wasn't mentally ill. Frustrated, I
decided to move ahead to the next titles on the List, which were
Beowulf, The Portrait of a Lady
and
The Handmaid's Tale
, until the safe place in which I had carefully stashed my copy of
Krautrocksampler
revealed itself.

But the book's sudden inaccessibility nagged at me like a neurosis. I needed to read it now, I decided, not after
Beowulf
or
The Portrait of a Lady
or
The Handmaid's Tale
, but right now, otherwise the project would not be following its proper course – perhaps I was mentally ill. I looked up
Krautrocksampler
in the British Library's online database. If I took a day's holiday, theoretically it should be possible to read the nation's copy from cover to cover at a desk in the St Pancras reading rooms. The prospect of this actually rather thrilled me, in a viscerally geeky sort of way. I had certainly had worse holidays.

Scanning down the Google page of search results for
Krautrocksampler
, however, my eye latched onto something else. It was a link to the blog of a Julian Cope fanatic whose owner had posted the whole of
Krautrocksampler
as a PDF file, cover scans and all. I clicked and downloaded the PDF to my hard drive immediately, where it has lived illegally ever since. It is open on my desktop right now as I sit typing these words and listening to Faust. Bloggers, please forgive me. It seems I owe you an apology.
⁵

Rock star, Gnostic, field researcher, peace warrior, astral traveller, cartoon character: if Julian Cope did not exist, Marvel comics would have to invent him – the Wandering Julian. As a matter of fact, The Teardrop Explodes had taken their name from a panel in a
Daredevil
comic. After The Teardrops' split, Cope ingested mythological quantities of LSD and recorded three sublime solo albums:
World Shut Your Mouth, Fried
and
Saint Julian
. Throughout this period he always had, and understood the importance of, Great Hair. In December 1989, he experienced a series of ‘powerful and extremely positive' Visions, the effects of which were to prove life-changing. Cope declared himself as a mystic and a shaman – the ‘Arch-drude'. He has pursued this idiosyncratic path ever since, following the Muse wherever She leads – mapping the megalithic sites of Britain and Europe, issuing collections of vocal mantras, ‘meditational grooves' and ‘ambient metal' via his Head Heritage website, delivering three-hour lectures at the British Museum in full Odin-inspired face paint, engaging in direct political and ecological protest across the British Isles and, whenever and wherever possible, staying in Travelodges – the UK's answer to a Motel 6 or Days Inn. Latterly, for reasons of both artistic and follicular expediency, the Great Hair has been surmounted by a Great Hat: ‘Actually, it's 1955 Luftwaffe; it's not Nazi,' he told Jon Savage. 'I put the braids on ‘cos I thought it made it look heavier. I thought, I've got to be really careful here, because I'm not a Nazi.'
⁶

Cope approaches everything he does with, in Savage's phrase, ‘a curious kind of ludicrous rigour'. It was in the late 1980s, around the time he received his Visions, that Cope happened to read
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov. ‘
[It] devoured me and immersed me
,' he later wrote. ‘
It was startlingly individual and like nothing else, yet its language spoke across the ages and called out to me as a Universal of Experience. It lay inside me forever and I knew that the rock'n'roll which I was forever seeking out also did precisely that
.' Well, exactly. He continued to expand his mind by reading Gurdjieff and Jung, Lester Bangs and John Sinclair; and books in turn shaped the music Cope was now making. 1992's Krautrock-leaning
Jehovahkill
LP came with a subtitle –
That'll Be the Deicide
– and a booklet that featured a title page, poetry, photographs of stone circles, diagrams and quotes from writers as diverse as William Blake, George Bernard Shaw and Philip K. Dick.

But the fire sparked by
The Master and Margarita
fanned out beyond music. ‘
1989 had seen a change come over me which was utterly consuming and coupling me with the cosmos
,' Cope remembered ten years later. ‘
I had never been a writer or keeper of neat notebooks, yet I now needed to write continuously
.' This compulsion found its outlet in the four extraordinary books Cope published over the next decade: two volumes of gonzo autobiography,
Head-On
and
Repossessed
, his bestselling gazetteer of Britain's stone circles and burial mounds,
The Modern Antiquarian
, and, somewhere in the middle,
Krautrocksampler: One Head's Guide to the Great Kosmische Musik – 1968 Onwards
.

Krautrocksampler
is many things – a memoir, a history module, a fan letter, an exegesis, a checklist of records – but to me, reading it off a laptop in the third millennium, it was a revelation. It seemed to me that what Cope was attempting in the book was almost superheroic. Utilising the tools and language the 37-year-old author had at his disposal – a passion for the music, a willingness to dig down and research, his raging infatuation with Bangs and Sinclair, his mission as a self-proclaimed ‘Shamanic Rock'n'Rolling Inner-Space Cadet', plus a devotional belief in the transformative power of all of the above – he had taken the awe he felt as a teenager ‘
lying in a caravan in Tamworth in Staffordshire
' listening to John Peel spin ‘Hallogallo' by NEU! and transubstantiated it into a sacred text of his own devising, a work of righteous, riotous propaganda, which was intended to speak to Modern Man, right here and right now. And as Cope would say, it fucking Achieved!!!
Krautrocksampler
was not
Beowulf
or
The Handmaid's Tale
or
The Portrait of a Lady
but it would not be denied. It was unquestionably a Great Book.

‘
I was a teenage Krautrocker
,' Cope stated in his introduction. ‘
I wrote this short history because of the way I feel about the music, that its supreme Magic & Power has lain Unrecognised for too long
.' I had thought reading
Krautrocksampler
to be a backward-looking and self-indulgent act; actually it was neither. As I scrolled through the PDF, I realised that Cope had indeed fucking Achieved!!! Out of his past, Cope had alchemised something Powerful and NEU! and never, ever Düül.

I finished
Krautrocksampler
in a little under three hours. Then I read it again, this time to the accompaniment of
Monster Movie
by Can,
Affenstunde
by Popol Vuh, and Walter Wegmüller's double LP
Tarot
: in Cope's persuasively unscientific analysis, ‘THE SOUND OF THE COSMOS!!!' Why, I asked myself, was this incredible book unavailable to buy? Surely there was a readership for it? I subsequently learned that Cope himself had taken it out of print. Obeying the law of unintended consequences, what he had initiated as a spontaneous act of fandom had inadvertently brought about a Krautrock revival, which had in turn led to criticism from ‘Kosmische Musik' buffs that
Krautrocksampler
was not merely incomplete and unreliable but also offensive in its use of the term ‘Krautrock'. In a statement posted on his website, Cope responded thus: ‘
I don't feel like really updating the book much – it's a period piece written at a time when no fucker was interested and now all these neo-Krautheads are at me saying it's out of date. Fuck them! . . . Krautrock is about enlightenment, not complete-ism for some bourgeois record-collector to get purist about
.'
⁷

Now
Krautrocksampler
passed from hand to hand on the Internet, from Head to Head, like
samizdat
or those bootleg editions of
The Master and Margarita
fifty years earlier. Perhaps Cope preferred it that way. Decoupled from the commercial realm, tantalisingly unavailable yet absolutely free, the book could renew its mission of enlightenment. Abandoned, it drifted through cyberspace, a monolith beaming an evolutionary message to any ape capable of receiving it.

That ape was me.

It was about now that I experienced a life-changing Vision of my own.
Krautrocksampler
was not the best book in the List of Betterment – that book was still to come – but it proved to be the most inspiring over the long haul. The book you are reading now would not exist without it.

As I said earlier, turning out reviews for the blog had been fundamentally unsatisfying. After all, a series of blog posts was unlikely to become more than the sum of its parts, just as a set of
Silver Surfer
comics doesn't add up to a real book simply because you print it as one. I felt, though, that the cumulative effect of all this dangerous reading was
propelling me towards something ominous and inevitable and unmistakably like a new book of my own. The writer in me was stirring again, pushing the editor aside.