No Names
By Greg Hewett
Coffee House Press
A poet writing prose about music? Greg Hewett knew he was taking on a challenge.
After a career publishing five volumes of poetry and teaching English, Hewett set to work on his first published novel — centered on a punk band.
Hewett needed to make his readers hear the sounds and lyrics of the band’s song in order to capture the intensity of the music that fatally fused the lives of a band’s two teenaged founders, then set a lonely teenager on a quest of discovery 15 years later. They needed to hear it on the page. Hewett had to write lyrics, not poems, that sound like they flew in tandem with guitar and bass and drum from spinning vinyl or the ear-splitting feedback-filled sound system in a sweaty packed rage-filled club.
You can read (and in your mind listen to) the results in No Names, Hewett’s newly published novel. Shifting back and forth from 1978 and 1993, among different narrators, the story tracks the relationship between two “lower working-class” kids, Mike and Pete, who funnel their intense love and trauma-processing into a punk band called … No Names. They dream and thrash and brawl and fuck and narcotize their way to a tour in Europe and near fame before their venture meets a tragic collapse. The story follows how Isaac, a lost teen from the same left-behind unnamed Upper Midwest town, discovers the band’s one forgotten record a half-generation later and sets off in search of spiritual, musical, and sexual connection. Hewett, despite not having published a novel before (he wrote an unpublished one under Toni Morrison’s mentorship 30 years ago), uses the shifts in perspective and vivid scenes to roll out the story and keep us glued to the page.
But can we hear the songs whose power would make the story believable?
At first Hewett, who’s 67, planned not to try to craft lyrics for the story, he said during an interview Thursday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
Then he realized he needed to — even though writing lyrics is different from writing poetry.
“I owe it to the boys” in the band, he remembered thinking.
Unlike poetry, which is meant to be read aloud or read on the page, lyrics usually lose their power when separated from the music with which they were born to coexist. Punk lyrics in general need to explode, and be intelligible (or nearly so) when screamed, to register.
“I had to block out my poet self entirely,” Hewett said. His poetry “tends to be more meditative, much more based, oftentimes, in origins and etymologies of words” with lyrical quality to it … “so I needed to erase that.”
And with a carefully crafted poem rewritten over time, he decided, “Don’t overthink this.” He channeled the Ramones, he said.
He came up with this:
You thought you could alter me with your religion.
Goddamn your God, I'm making no concession,
Goddamn your God, I'm my own religion.
I sacrifice at the altar of my own confession,
I get sacrificed at the altar of violation.
Violence is my religion.
I was an altar boy, now I'm altered, I'm an altared boy.
When I read that, I did feel as though I were reading a poem, or at least the kind of lyrics we’d study back in the day on the jacket of a Talking Heads album rather than the Ramones. The “altered-altered” wordplay didn’t seem quite punk.
But it did fit with the punks in this story. Particuarly Pete, who riffs on Shakespeare and recites Shelley and “badass” Byron and invokes Latin etymology as naturally as he shreds the guitar or dives into choppy sea waters. (Now I’m hoping that a real-life band records the song.)
Pete continually challenges Mike to suss out how they will make a mark, find meaning, wrestle with the Big Questions of existence at the urgent pace uniquely felt at their age. So again while it didn’t sound particularly punk, I still was convinced I was hearing Pete’s voice in reading Hewett-penned lyrics, again with poetic wordplay, to the No Names song “Polluted”:
Doesn't matter that we never met,
doesn't matter that only two percent
of the universe is visible matter.
What's the matter?
The universe is all made up.
Doesn't matter the universe is all made up
of invisble matter, doesn't matter,
doesn't matter that we never met,
'cause in some other time and space we met
down by a river, down by a river we met
under a river of stars, a river of stars ...
Meanwhile, Hewett seeks to convey the spark, the intuitive improvisation and path-following, that fuel the pair’s music-making.
He has Mike narrate the pair’s early songwriting and recording on a portable cassette player: “Sometimes it seems like we have the same tune in our heads and it comes out at the same time. With only a few notes from one of us, the other picks up on the pattern and offers a couple chords and it goes from there.”
One night Mike and Pete break into the school pool to plug in their amps. With the potential danger of electrocution lurking in the background, they start strumming, flowing into a jam on Jimi Hendrix’s “May This Be Love.” They lose themselves in a shared reverie, changing tempos in sync without needing a signal, Mike “breaking into a rage” that guns his voice to a place he’d never been before.
Ultimately, I heard more “music” in the scenes of sexual discovery between Mike and Pete, between Isaac and Mike, and with Daniel, a classical pianist who befriends them all. Hewett’s poetic background brings a lyrical touch to the prose when it most needs it; we can feel and hear two bodies and souls colliding and connecting and transcending. Still, there’s enough music in all its forms to keep this story moving, and believable, as Hewett guides us between eras and characters to uncover the truth in this compelling story — and arrive at the shores of a belief in the possibility of redemption and return from exile.
Click on the video below to listen to the full conversation with Greg Hewett about his novel No Names on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven,” as he spoke from Ireland, where he is teaching a summer creative session for 15 students he’d brought abroad from Carleton College. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”
