I just finished reading The Fourteenth Colony by Jason T.
Lewis. The book comes with an eight song
companion CD/download.
Lewis was a well known regular in the
Morgantown WV
music scene back in the early 90s. He later
moved to
New York City to pursue his music,
started an
Americana rock band there called
Star City,
worked with the late Jay Bennett (Wilco) and for the last couple years has been Director of the Writing and Humanities Program at the University of Iowa.
My first memories of Jason Lewis are that of a musician and journalist. If I remember right, he was a music writer for The Daily Athenaeum, the WVU student newspaper.
He interviewed me 20 years ago when my cassette “New World Out of Order” came out.
To be from West
Virginia is to be an artist. You
must be creative to stay, but you must be creative to leave and stay away. Staying away is the real trick. Some find it
impossible. Others live their lives
tortured by it. Pining away for the Great
State or the selective
memories of what they thought was great before they left. In West
Virginia there’s art in the way people speak, in the
food, the land, the slice of a buck’s belly, the pain and the heaven that is there
or almost there, daily.
I spent my twenties trying to get out of West Virginia and I spent my thirties trying
to get back.
The Fourteenth Colony is a fictional work about trying to
“get back” home and slipping as you try.
It is about trying to mend your broken past somehow.
It is about a musician from a broken family, a broken state
and heart stepped on by a mother and a father who didn’t know how to be a
mother and father. A musician who moved
to New York
and was signed to a major label, but then the bottom fell out and left him with
nothing but some master tapes that he had no legal right to release.
I know that some of this work of fiction is fact and follows
Lewis’ actual life, but I’m somewhat afraid to ask him which is which as it all
seems so painful.
The story is a compelling one for me as I too come from a
broken home and am a musician who moved away to search for my musical “legacy”.
My reasons and motivation to start playing rock and roll were not sexually
motivated as is the case with most young men, but possibly a reaching out to my
family. An attempt to prove something to
them. If Dad had hugged me once or twice as a baby, maybe I would have been an
accountant.
I feel this to be the case with the main character in Lewis’
book, John Martin. I can’t shake the
name. Or maybe the name shakes me in an interesting way. John Martin.
John=John and Martin=fine guitar.
Crapper Guitar. Crap Guitar. Music in the crapper. Ha.
At any rate, The Fourteenth Colony is a book of struggle
that is more than worthy of a read from anyone, but especially those who grew
up in West Virginia
then moved away. Maybe it is best to
never go back, but sometimes going back is the only option.
John Martin finds himself going back to the same haunts,
losing sobriety and his mind or possibly finding his mind as he gets lost. He seems to be connecting himself with those
people who most remind him of his past.
A stripper who reminds him of his mother who has a teenage son comes to
mind. The stripper talks about how she
had her son a bit too early in life and one of my favorite lines of the book falls
here. She talks about how her boy will
take off without letting her know where he is, just long enough to make it
hurt. “He knows how to make time
painful”, she said.
John Martin sees his teen years in that boy and his mother
in the stripper. He desperately attempts
to mend his past by connecting with both of them. The spark of the book is in this ongoing friction.
John Martin’s dying father’s request for a deer steak for
his possible last meal turns into a wonderful metaphoric trip through the
familiar West Virginia
hills of my boyhood. I can almost smell
the words. As John Martin reluctantly
hunts the deer down he is thinking, “It
wasn’t in me, but I had to try. I stood and walked further up the hill, past
the place where I’d been the day before, toward the clearing above. It was an unknown place. Maybe unknown things
could happen there.”
Unknown things do happen there.
Throughout the story, Martin refers to the master tapes that
are in his van, the major label release that fell through. In most books you would simply imagine the
music, but Lewis has included a CD/download of some of the songs mentioned on
the master as well as others that touch on the book’s theme. The book gets so desperately dark at times
that I expected the songs to venture into Lou Reed’s territory, lyrically I
mean, but they don’t. They are straight
forward Americana
rock songs with a well rehearsed band.
No hillbilly twang here. They are
aching Americana Rock tunes. They sound
like songs from a man who may have spent his twenties running away from his West Virginia roots only
to realize that there was nowhere to run.
They most certainly sound like songs that could have been on John Martin’s
never to be released CD. The book stands
strong on its own, but it is really great/unique having this musical companion.
As a songwriter, this work was inspirational to me. It is an exciting and admirable achievement by
Lewis.
Read it.
Todd Burge Jan 11th 2012
