Recommended If You Like: A Novel
By Adam Voith
Little Engines Book
The coolest eight people in the world were in Best Video the other night.
What made them cool was they — and only they, nobody else — were listening to a series of old cassette recordings that might have been lost to time. Even when the recordings were new, few people heard about them.
An Indianapolis teen named Andy Humphrey recorded the cassettes, then sent them to people who made copies and passed them around. He titled the series “The Christian Humper.” Twenty-one of those cassettes were homemade then passed along an underground circuit back in the 1990s. Twenty of the cassettes survived.
The cassettes documented his plunge into the world of Christian rock and metal from within the confines of a fundamentalist Christian upbringing; then his gradual emergence from that world into a budding career as a metal music agent. The cassettes simultaneously document the struggle of bands like Roadside Monument (whose members came across the Humper tapes, then became a subject of them) to navigate then escape from the confines of that same world.
A novelist named Adam Voith collected those 20 surviving cassettes in a new book called Recommended If You Like.
It’s a novel. The cassettes aren’t real. Though many of the bands cited in the novel (like Roadside Monument) were real, as were the tours and festivals documented in the book.
Voith showed up at Hamden’s Best Video as one stop on a 36-city promotional tour. He read from the book to a scattering of listeners who sipped on hot drinks from the video store’s coffee counter while seated in the cozy performance nook wedged between rental racks. He gave away copies of the novel for free. It’s the second title published by an underground imprint he has launched called Little Engine Books after retiring from a music agent career at the age of 52. He wrote to try to make sense of his own Indiana coming-of-age journey as a Christian rocker-turned-secular seeker (though he didn’t produce cassettes); and to undertake a similar search for underground cred and meaning in the AI age.
The real-life band Roadside Monument put out three albums and crisscrossed the country before its “math rock emo” dreams crashed. They got their start on a real Christian rock label from which they then couldn’t break free to achieve broader glory. They did record a song, called “Sperm Ridden Burden,” that features prominently in a scene in Voith’s Recommended novel.
At the end of Tape 12, narrator Andy (the “Humper”) experiences transcendence at a busted gig when Roadside Monument plays an Olympia house concert following an unpleasant incident at a Waffle House. They played third on the bill — by which time the crowd has left. The band plays its heart out anyway, closing with the then-new “Sperm Ridden Burden.” Only Andy and the band’s tour manager, James, hear the song. Which made it even cooler:
By the second song, the band quit looking up from their instruments. Doug and Johnathon sang with their eyes closed and said nothing between the songs. But you know what? Fuck an empty room. Fuck Alicia. Fuck Olympia and fuck its hipster fucks. Fuck Waffle House, fuck Helen, and fuck a flaming Cadillac. Roadside fully ripped it.
Johnathon came to the mic breathing like an animal at the end of a fight, eyes still pressed shut, “We’re Roadside Monument from Seattle. This is our last song.”
James leaned over to me. “Sperm Ridden Burden.”
“Huh?”
“Watch.”
… On the drive home, I told the band I was psyched on the set and it sucked dick no one saw it. I didn’t mention I couldn’t hear Doug’s vocals most of the night, and when I could, there were issues. I did not say when I could make out the harmonies, they were questionable. I don’t know when I’ll make this tape available, and not sure it’s the charitable way for Roadside to hear my critiques. Maybe I’ll puss out and cut this bit, but sour notes aside, the show was a stunner.
“And that last song,” I said. “Goddamn!”
The Humper proceeds to begin Tape 13 by stating: “I’m prepared to go on record and say no song in The History of Christian Rock is more punk than ‘Sperm Ridden Burden’ by Roadside Monument.” Unlike the Christian Humper tapes, the song does exist in real life; you can hear it here.
The device of this novel — making it a set of cassette transcripts — brings Andy’s voice to life in an intimate way. You feel like you’re alone in a room with him in the middle of the night as his soul pours out. The device captures not just the voice but the technology of 1990s underground culture. The passing along of cassettes like samizdat offers a way for young people feeling like outsiders not only to feel cool, but to belong.
Author Voith went through several iterations of the novel before settling on the cassettes. He said the inspiration came from listening to podcasts: passed-along cassettes were the podcasts of the 1990s. But unlike today’s flood of podcasts monetized and corporatized and blending into a whirlpool of indistinguishable pause-upspeak-silent moments, the copied and passed along cassettes were truly DIY. Truly underground. That gave them extra cachet. As with “Sperm Ridden Burden” when heard for the first time in an empty blistering room, they delivered a warm onrush of genuineness in part because of their messiness and imperfection.
Which makes Recommended If You Like a book not just about the 1990s, but about today: Today subcultures are turning to vinyl records and zines and “acoustic” cigarettes and DIY phone-free, in-person gatherings in search of embers of genuine experience and meaning to extract from the dehumanizing nonstop attention-sucking content machine.
A question recurred when I read the novel: When does the roughness and messiness and “amateurishness” of “underground” DIY culture add up to innovative, enduring, even beautiful art that can emerge only from outside the mainstream? And when does it simply confer an unearned cachet on slop?
Another way the story resonates decades later: in the efforts young people make to shock their parents or society at large. The Christian rockers seek to shock by tiptoeing past the edge of acceptable language or dress. In the novel (as in real life, I’d guess) they come across as sweet, sincere seekers following in the footsteps of their religious parents in looking beyond mainstream commercialism in search of truth, values, and community. Reading the novel now, I was struck by how unshocking profanity or nonconforming sexuality or thrash music come across not only in the context of the 1990s, but especially in today when even the president of the United States talks and acts like a potty-mouth playground thug.
“When I think about the world of this book,” author Voith said in a conversation Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program, “there’s something kind of cool and sexy about things that are off limits, these other worlds that are pushing boundaries.”
I would argue that that boundary-pushing hasn’t altogether vanished — although, as he pointed out, it’s harder and harder to find. The song no one else heard at the show no one else saw … the lo-fi seventh-generation re-recorded cassette … the zine/papyral novel/vinyl LP/old-school joint … the counterculture search for meaning and connection is old. How it plays out is new. As is the challenge of distinguishing true outsider art from cheap posing, and how to preserve its grit and originality from conforming once it gains cachet.
Adam Voith captures all that in Recommended, and offers a fun ride along the way. He’s also continuing that search with his new books-for-free publishing house. “What I’m doing with Little Engines is a grasping for that do-it-yourself ’90s mentality of: Underground is cool, small is better, imperfect is perfect,” he said. Unlike Roadside Monument, Voith is not giving up on racing around the country playing near-empty rooms: He’s about to embark on another 36-stop round of intimate Best Video-style readings.
Click on the below video to watch the full conversation with author Adam Voith. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to download the WNHH FM app.
