Michael Azerrad's Desk Notes
The author and acclaimed music journalist gives us a tour of his space.
During the pandemic, I wrote The Amplified Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana at this desk. I've had a standing desk for maybe ten years. It's gotten so I'm more comfortable standing, which can be a little awkward when everybody else is sitting. I have those nice Rokit speakers but I prefer to write in silence or with very quiet ambient music playing, so they rarely get a workout.
1. That's a little stack of Glenn Branca CDs. I've been working on a definitive, updated entry on his albums for the Trouser Press Record Guide on and off for years — it's kind of my Joe Gould's Secret except that it really exists and I will finish it (one of these days).
2. Stacks of cassette tapes containing early '90s interviews with various Seattle music luminaries: Chris Cornell, Matt Lukin, Conrad Uno, Dale Crover, Mark Lanegan, et al. that I'll get around to digitizing (one of these days).
3. I recently unearthed a couple of pairs of Urban Dance Squad "Deeper Shade of Soul" sunglasses. I plan to sell them for a simply astronomical sum and retire to a lovely cottage in the Outer Hebrides.
4. A set of Soma blocks, one of my favorite toys since I was in the single digits. You can configure them all sorts of ways. I mess around with them when I want to avoid writing. Actually, that's a little lie I tell myself — in fact, I’m thinking about writing while I’m playing with the blocks.
5. I find that chewing on something crunchy and salty helps me focus. So those pistachio shells are from poring through an excellent book I'm editing. That's my sideline, editing books. I love the work.
6. When I do podcasts and Zooms, I put the microphone at right on top of that little pile of books in front of the keyboard so it's closer to my mouth. Composing Capital is a brilliant book by University of Massachusetts associate professor Marianna Ritchey about "classical music in the neoliberal era" and it's perceptive and provocative. The great Robert Greenfield's Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye is a lightly annotated compilation of his early-'70s Rolling Stone pieces about the Rolling Stones and it was a big inspiration for The Amplified Come as You Are. Dark, funny, and insightful, Damone Ramone is the best rock novel ever written: the lost Ramone brother reveals who really wrote those first four albums. The thing is, he's a spectacularly unreliable narrator. And then my own book, Our Band Could Be Your Life is on the bottom because it's a hardcover and thus provides a nice, steady base for the stack. I’ve heard it also makes a pretty good doorstop.
7. I found that copy of The Paris Review, vol. 53 (1972) on the street — besides a transcription of the Velvet Underground's "Murder Mystery," it's got poems by John Ashbery, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg and a bunch of other luminaries. Next to it is Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock 'n' Roll Group by Ian Svenonius, a clever, droll and highly accurate book. Then there's Strunk and White's immortal The Elements of Style, which every writer should read. Next to that is a booklet of the United States Constitution, which I am personally safeguarding in case all other copies are destroyed. And next to that is a brilliant book called The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born by Nancy Fraser, about the immense potential of left-wing populism.
Native and long-time New Yorker Michael Azerrad is the author of Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 and The Amplified Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. He has written for the New York Times, the Yale Review, the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone and the New Yorker. He is on Bluesky and Twitter and also has his own “Nine Songs” up on Best Fit.