Wednesday, August 19, 1992 - North Shore News — Sf

é

A@ Kicking Tomorrow, By Daniel Richler, Published by Mclelland &
Stewart Inc., 376 pp., $6.99 soft cover

DD ANOTHER to the list of teenage-angst slash
coming-of-age stash odes-to-misunderstood-adol

, photo submitted

"WHILE THE Greed EP glides through pop charts across the land,
"Pure showcases live at 66 Street Music Hall on Friday, Aug. 21.

/ancouver alter-
Op agitators Pur

escence novels.
Having spent four months on

- the national best-seller fist, Daniel

Richler’s Kicking Tomorrow has
recently been released in paper-
back form.

Robbie Bookbinder, a coddled
Westmount blueblood, expresses
his coming-of-age angst in Mon-
treal during the “edited out and
handed down” ‘70s, convinced,
like many teens today, that his
sentence of adolescence must be
served incarceraied in a world cut
off from the heady days of
Woodstock and free love.

His current world asks — really,
demands — nothing more of him
than to become, in his wards,
“one of those drones bowing
down to the God of mundanity.”

Making sure to make every con-
ceivable mistake possible along
the way, our denim and leather-
armored hero's drug and alcohol-
fuelled quest for his Holy Grail —
in psycho-babbie, his search for
self —- takes us into the strip clubs
and taverns of Montreal, rubbing
greased elbows with a myriad of
chatacters, including a naively in-
sightful stripper, the beautifully
borderline psychotic Ivy, and
other — in the truest sense of the ,
word — characters.

In the end; Robbie, through an
unlikely turn of events, steps off
the dead-end path and rights his
rocking self.

Acommon theme in the |
aforementioned list of ‘‘coming

N. of age’’ sagas, among them Port-

ave alréady put greedheads

otice witha promising
k EP ‘on Reprise Re-
‘Greed reveals a young band toy-
1g With some interesting sound:

possibilities. The highlight here is. -:

the most excellent Morphine Mix

ically contem-

porary kind of way... -

‘Meanwhile, the Greed EP is
gliding through many authoritative
pop charts across the land.: Pure

“showcases live at 86 Street Music
Hall on Friday, Aug. 21.

{The full-meal-deal Purefunalia,
produced by Jerry (Talking Heads)
Harrison, debuts Sept. 15 on

-.. Reprise Records.

“Music Now recently spoke with
Pure bassist Dave Hadley as he
* <"teok a breather from rehearsals for

: the upcoming Big Bad and Groovy

‘Tour with Bootsauce, Sons of
» Freedom and Art Bergmann.
": Music Now: You’ve seen some
-. »| Significant chart action with the.

"EP. Are you surpsised?

- DH. : “Yeah. It’s doing what we
~ wanted it to do. It's getting lots of
” airplay. The focus is on Greedy:

we made a video fer that. 1 don’t
think it's gettin a tremendous
:; amount ot airplay. Basically we
: wanted to get the EP out a couple

‘of months ahead of the album so
_ we could get our name out — get

a buzz going. It seems to be work-

ing. And then the Cool World

soundtrack came out, which really
helped.’’

Music Now: The connection
_ with Jerry Harrison — was that

something you were really

shooting for?

D.H. : “We wanted to initially

work with Matt Wallace of Faith
. No More, but he was working on

: Michael Becker

RECORD REVIEW

the new Faith No More. We met

: him last summer when we were |
still in the process of getting sign- -
ed. So Jerry was offered through —
the record company, and we
thought he would be a good
choice based on his past record
with the Talking Heads.”

Music Now: The EP was re-
corded in Vancouver. Did you
record Purefunalia here in
Vancouver?

D.H. : ‘No, we recorded in
Sausalito.” -

Music Now: What took yo
down there? .

D.H. : “We just wanted to get
out of Vancouver. We did a lot of
recording at Little Mountain. We
just wanted to get into a different
environment tc get a different
focus for the record, and we
thought it would be a great place
to go to so we recorded at The
Plant. Stevie Wonder used to do
stuff there, (and) Fleetwood Mac.
It was a great studio — really
funky and down to earth.”
Music Now: Have you been in
other bands before Pure?

D.H. : “Oh yeah, the usual. The
first band was the Hip Waiders.
That was like a high school band
at West Van High. It was sort of
like a surf-R&B-Rolling Stones
cover band. It was a Jot of fun — a
party band.

“Vm from the Ventures school
of thinking. That was the first band
1 was really into.”

Music Now: What are your
hopes going into this with
Pure?

D.H. : “4 guess to be intergalac-
tic. There’s no set agenda with
what we're trying to achieve.”

~ noy’s Compiaint, Brighton Beach

Memairs, Catcher in the Rye, is

_ the desperate search for identity

by the hero, though the setting
and manner of rebeltion differ
from auther to author.

Fittingly, for an angry young
man in culture-torn Montreat duz-
ing the ‘70s, Richler’s Robbie gets
his ya-yas out by spiking his hair,
finding solace in recreational
drugs, and dreaming of fronting
his dream band, Hell’s Yells, a
band built on the belief that
“spontaneity, uncertainty, and
violent instability wre the keys to
success.”

During one of many soul sear-
ching episodes, Robbie realizes
“he’s addicted to not being nice.
He should know better, but he
doesn’t. Because he doesn’t know
hirnself at all.”’

There is tittle doubt that Rob-
bie’s experiences and feelings are
those of Richfer himself, as the
writer of this book had to have
lived this life, or close to it, to have
put to memory the little details
consistent throughout the novel.

Though every cliche ever ut-
tered since the '70s finds its way
into the pages of this bock, —

oe ee

Richler’s clever turns of phrase
and details of memories of Mon-
treal and the ‘70s make the
reading quick and insightful.

Richter seems to have inherited
his father’s sense of humor, con-
fidently casting his most humorous
light during some of Robbie’s most
desperate moments.

During his own rnurky punk
days in Montreal, Richler was the
lead singer (2) of the punk band
the Alpha Jerks, and ike Robbie —
whose TV talk show mom is
constantly being arrested for
chaining herself, on camera, to all
manner of property owned by en-
vironmentally unfriendly factories
— Richler grew up under the con-
siderable shade of a successful, -
famous parent, though | doubt
we'll ever see Mordecai Richler
strapped to a security fence at Lip-
ton Industries.

The fact that Robbie finds his
outlet for his untapped anger and
frustration by demonstrating
against the poisoning of the Earth
is, considering the year in which
the story is set, hard to believe,

| MOM _THURS

Sorn-midnight
 FRIL-SUN. iam-6om ©:
Augest 1 to Sepiomber, 7/92

In Review
LOOKS AT BOOKS

but the point is an interesting twist .
at the close of the book and gives
Richler the chance to flex his con-
siderable writing and intelfectua
muscle. :

: “When you dumponher ___
(Mother Earth) too much, she'll get

’ vicious, volcanic, and primordial
- all over again. She’li welcome the.

release, the chance to punch holes ~~
in some walls ... slap you around |”
with a hurricane, let too much
sunshine in. She'll be an angry
god, demand the sort of respect

- pagans once gave her.”

As a first novel, Daniel Richler’s*
ambitious Kicking Tomorrow -
marks the coming of age ofa
perhaps not-so-angry-anymore
young Canadian writer. — _
— By A.P. McCredie, an angrily — -
content young journalist from: 7°:
Vancouver. rr inne

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