Sound Tucson

A look at my friend's book about a city I've never been to.

I can’t say that I went into Sound Tucson with a sense of critical neutrality; the volume’s author, Nick Prevenas, is an old friend of mine.

We met in the halcyon days of college creative writing workshops, and I watched him refine his writing sensibilities (as he watched me do the same). We became pretty tight — there were a handful of us who showed up in those workshops from semester to semester, and about four of us that bonded outside of workshop, drinking watery Sharri’s coffee after our two- or three-hour evening classes.

I was the youngest of that group, and the others all seemed very put together, worldly even if only by a couple of years. In Nick’s case, he was incredibly savvy in that record-geeky, music-minded way that I was so desperate, in my teens and early-20s, to achieve for myself.

Nick had a vastly wider knowledge than I did; I was sticking primarily to the emo and indie rock courtyard, and Nick was out in the wider world; he showed me Kanye back when no one knew who Kanye was (and before everyone wished they didn’t know who Kanye was). I listened to The Hold Steady because of Nick.

Apropos to the final chapter of Nick’s book — wherein he heartbreakingly discusses a friend and bandmate who is no longer with us — we also talked The Replacements. He was a Tim guy; I was a Let it Be guy.

So it’s with a bit of bias that I recommend Sound Tucson, but it isn’t a recommendation without merit. In those twenty-odd years since we sat in workshops, I, too, have been in the murky, boozy world of a music scene, playing shows and being a little stage-shy in front of a microphone. I, too, have done deep dives into minor histories, trying to explain why a certain place became the very particular and weird way it is.

Perhaps more pressingly, I’ve spent the last couple of years reading a lot of books about music; a full quarter of my reading last year was made up of biographies, chronologies, and critiques in the form of freelance review copies. Dense fuckers, too, on niche subjects I had little or no experience with outside of those pages.

I don’t know Tucson — I don’t know that I’ve been to Tucson, let alone know anything about it (other than that Nick lived there). I don’t know the bands Nick discusses in this book, and I’ve never listened to those radio stations he so thoroughly chronicles.

What Nick manages, in this slim volume, is to make me want to be involved with the city he explores. It’s a book that sent me to Discogs in a fever, desperate to hear these bands and be a part of this history. My Spotify algorithm is now severely altered by the plays I’ve given the bands discussed in this book.

“People don’t come to Tucson to chase a fabricated desert sound. They’re here chasing the sounds they hear rattling in their own heads,” Nick writes, and the wealth of bands he discusses, name checks, and gushes over illustrate how lush and vitally diverse those sounds are. From the heartbreaking story of Nowhere Man and a Whiskey Girl to the rollicking, Spanish indie of Anchorbaby, Nick’s playlist dodges that ‘desert sound’ one expects (you know the one; you’ve heard it all before).

The book achieves this quick cross-section of the city’s music; it delves into the history of radio stations and public works projects. Nick goes from discussing Bob Dylan’s coming to Jesus moment on one page to Fucked Up the next. At one point, he writes this insane analogy: “Imagine Robert Pollard dropping his oldest four-track tape recorder into a boiling bucket of rubber cement. This record sounds how I’d imagine those fumes smell.”

Which is to say that I could feel the author throughout the book — I have prior experience. It’ll take new readers a small while to get to know him because it isn’t until the final half of the book that he shows up, himself. First peeking out around the corners of the city’s narrative, and finally, vulnerably, as himself. His music — as bassist in Redlands and as momentary frontman of Radio Wires — serves mostly as context to his emotional state and not as the narrative drive one might expect.

It should be said, as this praise winds down, that Sound Tucson isn’t a wide-release book; in a Herculean feat of determination, Nick released this book himself. As much as I (desperately) want more people to read this work, there’s something uniquely appropriate that this book is as it currently is. Like so many of the bands Nick writes about, the book feels like a beautiful secret for us fans to gather around. A scene in itself.

For those interested in joining that club, you can always reach out to Nick.

I strongly suggest you do.