The Agit Reader: That Summertime Sound by Matthew Specktor

In 2009 Matthew Specktor published the novel That Summertime Sound, which is set in the music scene of 1980s Columbus, Ohio. Some of it is fiction, some it is based on real bands and folks from the city. Stephen Slaybaugh of The Agit Reader discussed the book with the author, here is some of that article:

For those of us who had our first experiences with rock & roll crammed into the clubs and scouring the record stores that populated the strip of Columbus, Ohio’s High Street between Blake and King, the setting of the new novel from Los Angeles–based writer Matthew Specktor will seem immediately familiar. Set amongst the record bins of “School Daze” records, at the booths of “Perry’s” bar, and the dance floor of “Crazy Lady’s,” That Summertime Sound, as the title indicates, is a search through those dilapidated confines for a sense of place and meaning. 

The book follows an unnamed narrator who is convinced by a friend, Marcus, to spend the summer of 1986 in Columbus on a quest to find the Lords of Oblivion and their singer Nic Devine. The band and the few 7-inches they self-released have become something of an obsession, and our hero makes it his mission to see the band play live at least once before the summer ends. While the Lords and the city of Columbus itself take on mythic qualities before the college chums even make it past the outerbelt, the narrator, and in a larger sense, the book itself, continues to propagate, rather than dispel, such urban mythology as further cultural heritage is revealed. 

”My thought would be hopefully it’s not puncturing a mythology,” Specktor told me when I spoke to him on the phone. ”In the end, the idea behind the book is it’s necessary to mythologize a place to want to live there, that on some level we all create mythologies about the cities that we’re living in. Sometimes they’re exciting and invigorating mythologies, and sometimes they’re deadening mythologies. There’s no shortage of horrible, dulling mythologies about LA, for example. My feeling is that when one’s life is interesting or successful, you have one foot in that enlivening mythology all the time.”