In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Jeff Miller’s novel Temporary Palaces is an enthralling debut with a punk heart.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“A memorable debut … Miller’s bittersweet novel burns with the warmth of lasting friendship.”
In his own words, here is Jeff Miller’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Temporary Palaces:
Music is at the heart of my novel, Temporary Palaces. The book is full of songs playing in cafés and late-night bus stations, on tape decks in kitchens and living-room turntables, broadcast on pirate radio or performed by punk bands in sweaty, crowded rooms.
The novel takes place in the do-it-yourself (DIY) punk and hardcore scene that I grew up in the nineties and beyond. As we follow punk singer Ben and visual artist Alex through two timelines of friendship, loss, and hope, music is more than a soundtrack. It reveals the characters’ secret lives and pushes the plot forward.
The underground was more than music, of course. Zines (like my Ghost Pine), visual art, letters, and anti-authoritarian political ideals circulated through this space alongside records. But music was what originally grabbed me. Experiencing weird music opened my mind to different ways of living and offered a glimpse into another world.
1) Los Crudos “En Mi Opinión”
The novel opens in a tent dense with summer heat where two young men, Ben and Rob, lie entwined. Ben wakes up and, doing his best to sneak out, grabs his Chuck Taylors and Los Crudos t-shirt. As he unzips the door, we realize the tent isn’t in some bucolic nature spot, but on the roof of a building in the centre of the city where the two are hiding out.
Ben’s Los Crudos shirt is a bit of a shibboleth. While I want the novel to be accessible to all readers, I wrote it for the punks who grew up in the scene. Los Crudos were a ferocious hardcore band from Chicago. Frontman Martin Sorrondeguy, who sang in Spanish, also led the gay straight-edge band Limp Wrist.
Angry, political, and DIY, for me Los Crudos are a metonym for the 1990s HC scene at its best. Listening to them now evokes the smells of sweat and nutritional yeast, and the heat of bodies pressed in tight, moving to volatile music.
2) Cat Power “Cross Bones Style”
Next we meet Alex, listening to a mix tape that Ben gave her as she develops photographs in a darkroom. In a classic mixtape move, Ben tried to show off his sophisticated taste. Instead of punk songs, he selected brooders by Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave, country despair from Songs Ohia, and pop chanson courtesy of Rufus Wainwright.
Tired of all the male melodrama, Alex fast-forwards to the only song by a woman, this haunted riddle by Cat Power. Her tangled guitars ride a relentless Jim White beat, intertwining into something almost pop and wistful, but also troubled and troubling. Sad music to shake your hips to.
3) What Cheer? Brigade “Malagueña”
Alex and Ben attend a massive anti-globalization demo, marching to the soundtrack of dancehall rumbling from a flatbed truck mingling with the drums and horns of an anarchist marching band.
Anarchist marching bands like Providence’s What Cheer? Brigade perfectly embody the political theory they advance: their ephemeral, ever-changing personnel come together either for a single march or wider campaign, making beautiful cacophony in protest.
Riot Grrrl spread all over the world in a tidal wave of records and zines in the 1990s. Within a few years of the first Bikini Kill EP, there was an all-girl band in every city in the world. For me the initial lightning bolt of this rebellion is audible on “Her Jazz” by Brighton’s Huggy Bear when they sing “This is happening without your permission,” followed by a scream of pure joy.
Enlisted to sell merch at the record release show for Ben and Rob’s band, Alex watches the openers Period 52 and reflects on how her own musical ambitions were dashed. In the rose-colour of nineties nostalgia, just how aggressively women were discouraged from playing music at the time is often forgotten. It took so much courage to play out in the face of indifference or flat-out aggression from the dude-dominated scene.
5) The Deadly Snakes “Oh My Bride”
At nineteen I started going to bar shows at the Dominion Tavern in Ottawa where they booked raw rock ‘n’ roll and sold cheap pitchers of beer. Ben and Rob’s band The Blank Tapes are a scrappy garage rock trio that would have fit on that stage.
In dreaming up The Blank Tapes I thought a lot about the purity of The Gories’ minimalist songs. I also recalled Jay Reatard’s synthy group Lost Sounds. They simmered with dark charisma when I saw them play the Dominion to an audience of maybe a dozen people.
But to sum up The Blank Tapes in a single song, I’ll choose this cut from The Deadly Snakes’ classic LP Ode to Joy. Like Ben and Rob who end their triumphant set with a scuffle on-stage, Snakes singers Max McCabe-Lokos and André Ethier possessed a seething animosity on and off stage. It was a high-tension wire that electrified every performance of their trashy teen cantatas.
6) The Breeders “Safari”
Alex has been working for weeks to produce a series of portraits for her upcoming photo exhibition at the local café. As she selects which prints to show she listens to another mixtape, an older one she made herself. “Safari” is the last song to play before the power goes out in a city-wide blackout. There’s such coiled menace in this song that it felt like a perfect harbinger for what comes next.
7) Dirty Three “The Restless Waves”
Ocean Songs always feels like a September record to me. The perfect set of songs for when the nervous system needs a reset after the summertime highs. It’s as constant as the tides. Put it on and ponder time, where it goes. Squint and try to see what’s on the horizon.
This is the first song that Ben plays on his stereo when we meet him again following a ten-year gap. His life is different, but music is still at the centre of who he is and how he sees himself.
8) METZ “A Boat to Drown In”
Ben now owns a stake in his friend’s restaurant and plays in a band called Grass Stains. In my mind as I wrote the book, Grass Stains were an impossible mix between the metal-core of Converge and the Upper Canadian heartland rock of The Constantines. Then I realized I was describing METZ.
In METZ’s twelve years of releasing albums, no one could match them at merging pop hooks with massive rock heft. The perfect balance of sweet and salty, their live show melted faces. Their longest song, “A Boat to Drown In” has a cinematic scope, balancing frantic vocals, motorik rumble, and a glittering tapestry of harmonic noise at the end.
9) Peaches “Boys Wanna Be Her”
After a decade apart, Ben and Alex reconnect at their friends’ wedding. At the reception, they dance to the queer party anthems of their youth. The Gossip, Kelis’s “Milkshake,” and the incomparable Peaches.
This is a tiny tribute to Vazaleen, the party thrown by my friend Will Munro, to whom Temporary Palaces is dedicated. Vazaleen was a deliriously queer mix of rock, camp, drag, trash culture, and art performance. Everyone played Vazaleen, from Peaches to ESG, Limp Wrist to Carol Pope, and more. I remember taking the bus from Ottawa and rolling up to the El Mocambo one afternoon before a party, Will gripping my hand and gleefully leading me backstage to a colourful world of punk camp nonsense. Later we pogo’ed together in the DJ booth. I miss him.
10) Unwound “Hexenzsene”
I spent my twenties living in punk apartments, large rambling places with lots of rooms, many inhabitants, cheap rent, and grime. One of the best parts of collective living was how all roommates piled their records, tapes, and CDs in the living room. The number of hours we spent sitting on couches listening to the stereo and talking about our days is incalculable. Music was the small fire our little household communities gathered around.
This is depicted in Temporary Palaces in a scene where Ben returns to his former punk house to hang out with his old friend Gabe and meets the new roommate Ruth. Unwound were a perennial favourite on the turntable at most apartments I lived in. All their records are imperishable classics.
11) The Jesus and Mary Chain “Darklands”
This song plays as Ben and Alex slow dance in Ben’s apartment. Slow dancing is one of the most romantic things ever, and there is no cooler record than Darklands to sway to in someone’s arms.
12) Elvis Costello & The Attractions “No Action”
Writing about punk shows is incredibly fun so there is a second gig in the book, very different from the first. The headliners, Telephone Junkies are another combo of impossible influences, a kind of raw DIY punk smashed together with intricate guitar solos by Ruth, riding the wave of Saharan rock from the Sahel Sounds label.
Their name comes from “No Action” by Elvis Costello & The Attractions on This Years Model. What a sick band. I wish this song was in their set recorded live at El Mocambo in 1978. Hyped on speed, the Attractions smash through songs from the first two Costello records at incredible speed. I bought that LP on my sixteenth birthday and it blew my little mind.
13) Godspeed You! Black Emperor “Mladic”
Near the end of Temporary Palaces, we hear the clanking sounds of les casseroles banged by protestors during the student strikes of the Printemps érable. You can hear a field recording of this at the end of “Mladic” by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The joyous banging and clanging on pots and pans of people in the streets marching for what they believe in. It’s a beautiful sound.
One of the things I miss about living in Montreal is how Godspeed would play residencies with cheap ticket prices every year or two. You could see them play a few times in a week. As a result, I’ve seen them play a couple dozen times over the course of nearly thirty years. I vividly recall catching a cab home after seeing them at the Corona in 2011. News radio was on in the car, and the story was that Osama Bin Laden had just been killed by the Americans in Pakistan. With the gig still ringing in my ears, it felt utterly surreal.
JEFF MILLER is the author of the award-winning creative nonfiction collection Ghost Pine: All Stories True. His stories have appeared in several anthologies, and he frequently publishes criticism. Jeff holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and lives in Nova Scotia.