I never really write here about my other life, by which I mean the one that puts food on the table and the table there in the first place. The only thing I’ve ever made money from is writing, though the type of writing has shifted several times during the years. As a young person I was a newspaper reporter and film critic, then wrote reference books, then worked for magazines while I published short-story collections and novels, then left the magazine and started writing mainstream non-fiction. It’s the last of these that mattered the most this week, because the non-fiction that I write has tended to take the form of collaborations with famous people, particularly in the music world, and two of them died just days apart—first Sly Stone, whose memoir I co-wrote back in 2023, and then Brian Wilson, whose memoir I wrote back in 2016.
Oddly — and somewhat uncomfortably — lots of people wanted to talk to me in the wake of these deaths, not just friends sending condolences, but media outlets. I’m always reluctant to step into the spotlight for these kinds of projects. They’re very much serve-at-the-pleasure-of-the-president kinds of things. I’m there to collect memories and shape them into books, to interview so that as little as possible gets left behind, to subtly pressure the corners of interpretations to make sure that no one is standing pat on stories that have been told a thousand times before.
I don’t want to point out to all the writing and interviews I have done this week about Sly and Brian. This space is fenced. But I’ll open the gate for this piece I wrote for Pitchfork.
I’ll also say that I have been thinking about Sly and Brian, of course. These two men were similar in some important ways, especially by the time they worked on their books. Both had been ravaged by some combination of substances, mental health, and physical frailty. Both had gentled. Both had an explicit and repeatedly articulated interest not in settling scores but in taking accountability for their complex and at times bewildering choices, and also in protecting others. And both made work that drew on and advanced youth culture — California youth culture, specifically — to excavate human thoughts emotions that other artists never approached. But they were also important opposites, mirror images with different racial backgrounds and expectations, different ways of seizing and redeploying American music, different temperaments, different intelligences. They were beacons. Follow one or both.
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HE LOOKED SO MUCH LIKE BOTH OF THEM
Ollie’s mother had come from a place where you could always start over, and she told him about how that process worked. You could pack a suitcase, catch a train, change your name, make a call when you arrived at your destination that would result in the old house being burned to the ground. Only those who could read ashes would have even the slightest line on your current location, and people like that, already in touch with a higher energy, knew better than to try to follow. Not in the suitcase: guilt, regret, even simple memory. “It is possible, of course, that I have another family somewhere,” his mother said. His father had been born in Queens and raised with two brothers and a sister in a smallish apartment where freedom was felt solely in the form of the subway that would take him into Manhattan on weekends. “Which was enough,” he said. Ollie loved both of his parents equally, but in the privacy of his bedroom, surrounded by examples of how he had been indulged — toys both soft and hard, posters and pennants on the wall, storybooks packed tightly on a small shelf — he was already packing a suitcase. [©2025 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]