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Posthumous punk >> 1978 is Daniel Jones's last novel by JULIET WATERS
They figure they'll add a cover of "My Generation" to their set list, which so far includes a cover of "Beat on the Brat" and two original tunes, "Fuck you, Fuck Face" and "Dead Nazi Puss." Boy Zero, the lead singer of Cerebral Paisley and the narrator of Daniel Jones's posthumous novel, 1978, has a bit more of a clue. He knew Keith was dead. He's the one with the job which pays the rent. He also wrote the lyrics to "Fuck you, Fuck Face." They go: "Fuck you/My fist in your face/I might be shit/But you aren't going any place/I'm dead/You're Dead/Kill the world, too/I've got nothing to say but/Fuck you." Some people will think that Daniel Jones doesn't have much to say either. 1978 is a violent, bleak, relentlessly nihilistic, claustrophobic novel. Cerebral Paisley make Hard Core Logo look like the Monkees. There's no nostalgia, no hope, little love and, for a Canadian novel, relatively few cultural references. The Beverley tavern is mentioned only once. Apart from a scene where a member of Teenage Head actually gets head from a teenager and an account of Soo spitting at Martha and the Muffins, this is an everypunk story. But it's what Daniel Jones doesn't say that makes 1978 so compelling. There's no attempt to create community or political pretensions out of a movement that grew out of alienation and abuse. When it's funny, it's not from self-parody but from the brutal extremism of punk. With an uncanny innocence of eye, Jones brings the reader into a world of angry, nasty, fucked-up people with no future, living a joyless day to day existence. It's an uncompromising and deceptively disciplined piece of work. A hyper-realist portrayal of punk back in the days when it was still a fresh hell and not a lifestyle. What Jones has to say is pretty simple. At the outset of his novel, he asks the presumably rhetorical question posed by the Dead Boys: "Ain't it fun when you know that you're going to die young?" What follows in this short novel is a pretty straightforward answer: no. Sadly, Jones knew this for a fact. He was already a bit of a cult figure before he committed suicide in 1994, at the age of 35. According to Kevin Connolly, who wrote the introduction to 1978, in Jones' more gregarious days he performed spoken word at punk clubs, was notorious for mooning the Canadian Haiku Society at Harbourfront, stripped on stage at Cameron House and walked home naked and barefoot in the dead of winter. Eventually, his poetry was collected in The Brave Don't Write Poetry. But in the '80s he renounced poetry, turned to fiction and apparently went through a marked personality change, becoming reclusive, intellectual and depressive. Still, he was reasonably prolific, publishing seven books of fiction, including The Job After the One Before, The Dead and The People One Knows. There are few signs that 1978 is an unfinished work: some awkward sentences in a style that's sometimes a little too tight and the occasional lapse into pseudo-naïveté that doesn't work. (Boy Zero may be failing university, but he's not so brain dead that he would really ever think, "It had occurred to me that the lyrics probably needed to be sung at particular places and intervals in the songs, in time with the music.") But in the end, 1978 is a work that deserves to be read and remembered. And it'll probably leave more than a few readers jonesin' for some of Jones' early work. 1978 by Daniel Jones, Rush Hour, pb, 141pp, $15.95
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Toronto, 1978. Kid, Soo and Jacky, members of the punk rock band Cerebral Paisley, have just found out that Keith Moon is dead. He's actually been dead for a couple of months, but they've been out of the loop for a while now, drunk and dealing with relationship problems. (Soo and Kid used to go out until Soo decided she was a dyke and dumped him for Jacky.) Now they're busy getting ready for their first--and what will end up being their last--show.