The sick bag song

In one's head, or on paper, a cyclical map can be drawn based on musician Cave's latest book, which follows his novel, The Death of Bunny Munro (2009). What began as a series of notes jotted on airplane motion-sickness bags during Cave's 2014 tour with the Bad Seeds morphed into a radical odyssey of interaction and influence that is part poetry and part diary. Each North American location on Cave's journey inspired a passage of reflection, witness, or imagination. These significant human moments are ones of loneliness, inspiration, and encounter, and Cave never shies away from making these experiences glitter, not so that they are rendered more pure or beautiful but rather in a way that makes them more realistic. Many are viewed through his perception as a performer, even as he reminds us that the performer is not an icon but a human being. It makes perfect sense to call this book a song; it is sung with a voice of memory and yearning.--Susi, Danielle Copyright 2016 Booklist

This short tour diary puts the reader into musician Cave's frame of mind during his 2014 North American tour. Cave occasionally veers into verse and spontaneous compositions scattered within his diary. He muses about different events in his life that pop into his head while on the road. A bridge near Edmonton, Alberta, reminds him of when his "father and mother told [him] about the boy who had died jumping off the railway bridge." Cave writes about books he reads and records he revisits, including John Berryman's Dream Songs and Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate. He also shares anecdotes about other musicians, such as Bryan Ferry of the influential glam rock band Roxy Music. The book includes drafts of songs inspired by life on the road, such as "The Beekeeper's Wife," which, Cave writes, "hints at growing anxiety about my wife not answering the phone." The book's title comes from a song inspired by the refrain on the back of a Delta Air Lines air sickness bag: "Call the stewardess for bag disposal." Cave's stream-of-consciousness writing definitely makes this an engrossing read, enmeshing the reader fully in the musician's perspective. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The gloomy Aussie rock star ponders the ways of the road in this blend of prose and poetry.The sick bag: until the airlines decide to trim the cost, every seatback contains one. Constantly airborne but not prone to motion sickness, Cave (The Death of Bunny Munro, 2009) chose to use the device as an impromptu notebook to record a tour of 2014. You must take the first step alone, his guardian angel intoned as, packed into a van brought to a crawl on the highway by a decapitated accident victim, he tried to get some sleep. A few cities later, the author had a theme: a man at a German restaurant in Milwaukee served him a pretzel big as a severed human head. Its not the most appetizing vision, but Caves sick bag becomes a medicine bundle of a kind, a storeroom of such images, to say nothing of books by Patti Smith and songs by Elvis Presley and company. The author hovers above the Platonic domains of beauty and ugliness, the former perhaps best represented by Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry, who waves his manicured hand across an idyllic English landscape and confesses to not having written a song in years, saying, there is nothing to write about. A devotee of grimmer venues, Cave surveys the loveliness of a Canadian river (pleasant, faultless, and fabulous are three of the glowing adjectives that come in quick succession) and then rushes back to the hotel to write a poem that begins, I was born in a puddle of blood wanting everything. Well, at least the head remains on the body. Along the way, Cave channels Allen Ginsberg (Hop in my sick bag! All you wild Texas girls!), casts a sideways look or two at rock-star fame and the music business, and generally amuses himself with bouquets of words. Like Caves growling music, this book isnt for everyone, but who doesnt like the specter of a gloop of ectoplasm spurting through the orange air? Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.