Set of the day

Who wants to drink great wine and listen to Led Zeppelin? Show of hands please. If you have a soul, you just put your hands up. I've talked about pairing music and booze before in this column and it's something I think about on a regular basis, as they are two of my favorite things in life. more

Who wants to drink great wine and listen to Led Zeppelin?

Show of hands please.

If you have a soul, you just put your hands up.

I've talked about pairing music and booze before in this column and it's something I think about on a regular basis, as they are two of my favorite things in life. It's what I do, it's who I am and the two go together like nerds and Lost theorizing. Hey wait, that's me too.

A few months ago I was at dinner in LA with Joe Bastianich and Mario Batali and it turned into (as they always do) a late night Amaro session. It was a Friday night and I realized that the best Zeppelin cover band in the world, Six Foot Nurse was playing at Molly Malone's. I rousted a bunch of the crew out of their liquid-herb induced haze with promises of "I swear if you close your eyes IT IS Led Zeppelin." Now I'm going to have to ask you, the reader to take me at my word on this and if you ever have the chance to see the Nurse, take it.

We made it to Molly's in time to catch the last twenty minutes of the set and if memory serves, three seconds into The Ocean Joe turned around to me with huge eyes and said "Holy shit."

The rest of the evening was just piling on more wood to the already raging fire and before Joe left he said to me, "We have to do something with these guys, have to bring them to NYC and do something."

Joe being the man of his word that he is called me the next day and asked me if I thought the band would be interested in coming to NYC to do a show where he would pair wines with specific Zeppelin songs. He didn't have any other details other than the most important one, which was, let's do this.

Of course the band was excited about the opportunity to go to NYC and we worked it out where I would play a few songs with them as well. I was nervous about this because as strange as it may sound, other then "Rock N Roll," I didn't know any Zeppelin songs on guitar. Or, I didn't know any Zeppelin songs on guitar correctly. I've never sat around and learned Zeppelin. Crazy right? Well Nalle Colt (guitar player for The Nurse as well as Pearl) knows it all note for note so on one hand I knew that if I learned something wrong he could show me the right way to play it and on the other hand I was stressed because he knows it all note for note and I didn't want to come in to rehearsal like an idiot.

I woodshedded and learned "The Ocean," "Rock N Roll," "The Rover," "Whole Lotta Love" and "Heartbreaker." At rehearsal I learned "Good Times Bad Times" and then day of show learned "Tangerine" and "Since I've Been Loving You." After rehearsal I felt really good about where I was at with the songs and after Nalle showed me a couple of little Page-isms, I was ready to rock. The band sounded sick with the rhythm guitar.

We had a pre-show meeting at the Spotted Pig the night before, where we ate and drank for five hours and discussed how the show would run for fifteen minutes. That's pretty much how the whole week in NY went. Pearl and I would make one plan, like, "Let's stay in and be mellow tonight because we're super hungover" and that would turn into Joe texting me and saying, "Come into Del Posto for dinner. Please let me feed you. Pasta will heal your soul." How do you say no to that? So we go for dinner and that turns into Pearl and I and the Nurse guys in the private room at Del Posto drinking all night with Joe, Mario, Jay McInerney and NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson. Weird, random and totally in context with my life. Jay and Jimmie were both really cool and Jay had some great Michael J. Fox stories (but those are for the book my friends, sorry). Jimmie said he'd take me out on the track and I plan on taking him up on it.

Anyway, I digress.

Show time at the City Winery, a killer new venue from the people that started the Knitting Factory. Live music, food and a wine program where you can make your own wine with help from an expert and with grapes flown in from the worlds best regions.

The show was oversold. Four hundred and change packed around tables. Six glasses in front of each person with a place mat explaining what each wine was and why it was paired with the accompanying song.

The show was being hosted by Joe and his buddies Mike Edison (ex-editor of High Times and Screw magazines) and David Lynch (a wine expert, not the Blue Velvet guy). If anyone can make the unlikely coupling of fine wine and rock music work, it would be these three eclectic mofo's. They all took turns on the mic explaining as best they could to the crowd how this evening came to be and even had the band kick into short five to ten second bits of songs to whet their appetites. I could tell the evening was going to be a success. Besides the obvious fact that the place was sold out, as soon as the band played the first five-second tease, the place went nuts. These people were starving for rock!! Lot's of mid to late 30's white whiteys that have the cash to drink well and would never go out to a rock show. They didn't even know they wanted this night and we gave it to them.

After Mike Edison described Zeppelin as like "the moment right before penetration" they introduced the first wine, Henriot Blanc de Blanc Champagne that was paired with "Immigrant Song." Try and think about the acidity of Champagne and then think of Plant wailing and Page's biting riff and it makes sense. Or it doesn't and it doesn't matter because you're drinking killer booze and getting your ass kicked by the Nurse. I can't remember all of the pairings as I was getting ready to play (I was to get up for the last pairing, Bordeaux and "Whole Lotta Love") and then I would stay up and we would play all the rest of the songs. There was a Chablis with "Misty Mountain Hop" which worked as the edgier notes of the Chablis (compared to the Champagne) matched Page's deliberate phrasing in Hop. Kashmir was paired with a Barolo and the wine, like the song both took their time to unfold their epic bodies.

By the time the six glasses of wine were finished the crowd was well oiled and when we kicked into "The Ocean," spontaneous dancing broke out all over the room. Amazingly, as buzzed as I was I didn't fuck up once. The energy got better and better with each song and "Rock N Roll" closed it out in true bombastic Zeppelin style. The reaction to the band was so overwhelming you would think these people really saw Led Zeppelin. Maybe it was all the great wine? We came back and encored with "Since I've Been Loving You" and said goodnight. After the show we "helped" Joe finish off some triple magnums of fine Bastianich vino.

It was an insanely decadent week. Being fed by Joe and Mario everyday is amazing and brutal at the same time. I swear I gained 190 pounds. I've been on tuna with oil and vinegar since.

Cheers,

Scott

PS The new Anthrax album, Worship Music, is currently being mixed by Dave Fortman.

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Scott Ian is SuicideGirls' monthly Food Coma columnist. Click HERE for more of his musing on sustenance and libations. He plays guitar for revolutionary metal band Anthrax and also for Pearl.

Megan Abbott made her name as a novelist with a series of crime novels set in the mid-Twentieth century. In books like “Die a Little,” “The Song Is You,” “Queenpin” and “Bury Me Deep” Abbott put her female protagonists through hell and back. They were innocents who found that they were... more

Megan Abbott made her name as a novelist with a series of crime novels set in the mid-Twentieth century. In books like “Die a Little,” “The Song Is You,” “Queenpin” and “Bury Me Deep” Abbott put her female protagonists through hell and back. They were innocents who found that they were darker and more complicated than they imagined, pushed to their limits and out of their comfort zones which often led to blackmail, murder, self-delusion and more. Last year saw the publication of “The End of Everything,” a book set in the 1980’s and featuring a thirteen year old protagonist whose best friend goes missing. The result is a brutal story that spares no one in the town.

Her new novel is “Dare Me,” a novel about a cheerleading squad who gets a new coach and upends the team and the girls’ social dynamics. Sex, drinking, betrayal, kicking another cheerleader in the stomach to purge, broken bones and ruined lives. This is not a warm and fuzzy book, but it is a great read. It’s also one of those books that’s very difficult to talk about without giving anything away, but when we reached Abbott over e-mail, we tried our best.


ALEX DUEBEN: Where did the idea for Dare Me come from?

MEGAN ABBOTT: In my last book, The End of Everything, one of the characters was a high school field hockey star. I started watching girls play and was struck by their ferocity on the field. Their aggression but also the kind of wild abandon they brought to it. That led me to cheerleading, the most dangerous sport for girls. Watching squads compete, I was fascinated by the girls’ willingness not only push themselves but to take tremendous, terrifying risks. I started thinking about it as this terrain to explore female friendship, rivalries, power, ambition. Adolescent girls feel things so powerfully and when the stakes are raised, as they are in this kind of sport, the possibilities for trouble are pretty immense.

AD: Why cheerleaders as opposed to another kind of sport?

MA: In part, the all-American-ness of it appealed. Cheerleaders are so iconic in our culture. They’re spectacles. But it’s an icon filled with contradictions: girl-next-door and sex object, an image of purity and one of titillation.

AD: Cheerleaders are also emblematic of an idea of femininity because they’re not seen as and can’t be seen as athletic in the way that women playing other sports do. Field hockey and softball players can sweat or are clearly working but cheerleaders can’t look like they’re putting in any effort.

MA: That’s a great distinction. They need to look perfect and the sparkled, smiling mask is both part of the spectacle and part of the pleasure but also becomes a way of concealing the strain, the effort, the will required.

AD: What do you think of the comparison that’s been made in calling Dare Me, “a Fight Club among girls”–flattering? accurate? puzzling?

MA: Oh, I’m flattered. Fight Club was so incisive about this crisis in masculinity—a perilous path to recover one’s manhood in a time of beset masculinity. And cheerleading to me says a great deal about femininity, womanhood, girlhood. These smiling masks that conceal these warrior selves.

AD: To what degree do you think that Dare Me has something to say about what it’s like to be a teenage girl and about the relationships between teenage girls

MA: I try not to think about that too much when I write, or you risk writing a “message” tale. And I think it really depends on each reader’s experiences, personal history. For me, though, the intensity of female friendships at that age is a rehearsal for every relationship that comes thereafter. And no relationship will ever feel quite so dramatic because you never have that intensity again. After high school, your world is bigger, your responsibilities greater. So there’s something powerful about those early friendships. They’re like an invisible tattoo you wear forever after.

AD: I find it hard to ask questions about the book just because I don’t want to give anything away, though I think that holds true for many of your books. You enjoy telling stories about characters who realize at one point that what they thought was happening isn’t happening and they don’t really know or understand the people around them. What do you find compelling about these kinds of stories?

MA: I tend to think every story is really a coming of age tale, no matter how old the characters are. All stories are, in some ways, about disillusionment, including self-disillusionment. I love that John Gardner quote: all stories have one of two plots: someone goes on a journey; or a stranger comes to town. They both involve you seeing a world you didn’t know, and the experience changes you. We can all identify with that. We’ve all had those moments, painful and powerful.

AD: Did you know what the last chapter of Dare Me would be from the beginning?

MA: Maybe halfway through the first draft. In my original conception, it wouldn’t have been possible. Both Addy and Beth changed dramatically from my early ideas of them. They each became more complicated and willful. They kept surprising me.

AD: Why did you go from telling stories about adults in period pieces to your last two novels which are set in contemporary times and focusing on young women?

MA: After writing four books set in the mid-century, I wanted to shake things up for myself. I’d never tried writing anything that had any connection to my own life, so I wondered what it would be like to set a book in a world I knew, that felt palpably real. And as for writing about young women girls, it felt like there was so much room to explore there. There’s still so much that, as a culture, we don’t want to think about when we think about teenage girls. There’s a yearning for them to be pure, unsullied, blank rather than reckon with their darker corners. Their desires, their aggression, their rage, their ambitions. So it’s ripe territory.

AD: I know that you have a background as an academic and received your Ph.D. from NYU. Did you always want to be a writer or at what point did you turn to novel writing?

MA: Growing up, I never could quite imagine how one would be lucky enough to be a novelist. It felt too impractical, a big dream. It really wasn’t until I was in grad school and I decided to focus on 1940s-50s hardboiled crime fiction and film noir for my dissertation. It was an excuse to read tons of these wonderful dark books. Reading them back to back, it was like falling in love. I found myself wanting to write my way into their glamorous world—movie studios, racetracks, nightclubs but also the big emotions of life laid bare. Longing, greed, envy, regret. So I began writing my first novel, Die a Little as a way to try to write myself into that world. And once I started, I was hooked. I couldn’t stop.

AD: Was part of the appeal in writing your earlier books the setting because it sounds as though you have a love for the period?

MA: Yes, transporting myself back in time was probably the primary appeal. Not necessarily the “real” past, but the past shimmering in my head from growing up on Golden-Age Hollywood. Writing in those worlds was, in part, a fantasy, a kind of dreaming on paper.

AD: You said that the other appeal for the crime novels you read was that the big emotions of life were laid bare and I couldn’t help but think that it’s when we’re young is when that tends to happen most. It’s easier to write such a story in a contemporary setting if you’re dealing with teenagers.

MA: Definitely. That’s what made the leap seem so natural. The world is a pretty noir place when you’re young. Everything feels so urgent, so overwhelming. You’re just consumed by your own urges. And you’re constantly prevented from doing what you want to do.

AD: You wrote a nonfiction book, The Street Was Mine, about crime fiction and white masculinity. In what ways are your early novels–and even Dare Me and The End of Everything–a response to that book and the tradition and ideas that it identifies and analyzes?

MA: Not consciously. That’s two different parts of my head. I try not to analyze my own fiction or “make points” with it. Otherwise, it just kills it for me. The imaginative part of my head is so unconscious and I fear putting too much light on in there!

AD: Are you in the midst of another novel?

MA: Yes, it’s called The Fever and is about a mysterious outbreak among high schoolers in a small town.