Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked

This time, however, there were two e-mails, from someone called Alfred Mantalini. The first was titled “Your Review.” It was very short. It said, simply, “Thank you for your kind and perceptive words. I really appreciated them. Best wishes, Tucker Crowe.” The title on the second was “P.S.,” and the message said, “I don’t know if you hang out with anyone on that website, but they seem like pretty weird people, and I’d be really grateful if you didn’t pass on this address.”

Was it possible? Even asking the question felt stupid, and the sudden breathlessness was simply pathetic. Of course it wasn’t possible. It was obviously a joke, even though it was a joke removed of all discernible humor. Why bother? Don’t ask. She draped her jacket over the back of her chair and put her bag on the floor. What would be an amusing response? “Fuck off, Duncan”? Or should she just ignore it? But supposing… ?

She tried mocking herself again, but the self-mockery only worked, she realized, if she thought with Duncan’s head—if she really believed that Tucker Crowe was the most famous man in the world, and that there was more chance of being contacted out of the blue by Russell Crowe. Tucker Crowe, however, was an obscure musician from the 1980s, who probably didn’t have much to do at nights except look at websites dedicated to his memory and shake his head in disbelief. And she could certainly understand why he wouldn’t want to contact Duncan and the rest of them: the torch they were holding burned way too bright. Why Alfred Mantalini? She Googled the name. Alfred Mantalini was a character in Nicholas Nickleby , apparently, an idler and philanderer who ends up bank rupting his wife. Well, that could fit, couldn’t it? Especially if Tucker Crowe had a sense of self-irony. Quickly, before she could think twice, she clicked on “Reply” and typed, “It isn’t you really, is it?”

This man had been both a presence and an absence in her life for fifteen years, and the idea that she had just sent him a message that might somehow appear somewhere in his house, if he had one, seemed preposterous. She waited at work for an hour or two in the hope that he’d reply, and then she went home.

Tucker Jerome Crowe (b. 1953-09-06) is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. Crowe came to prominence in the mid- to late seventies, first as the lead singer in the band The Politics of Joy, and then as a solo artist. Influenced both by other North American songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen, and by the guitarist Tom Verlaine, he achieved increasing critical success after a difficult start, culminating in what is regarded as his masterwork, Juliet , in 1986, an album about his breakup with Julie Beatty that frequently features in “Best of All Time” lists. During the tour to support that album, however, Crowe abruptly withdrew from public life, apparently after some kind of life-changing incident in the men’s toilet of a Minneapolis club, and has neither made music, nor spoken in the media about his disappearance, since.

EARLY LIFE

Crowe was born and raised in Bozeman, Montana. His father, Jerome, owned a dry-cleaning business, and his mother, Cynthia, was a music teacher. Several of the songs on his earlier albums are about his relationship with his parents, for example, “Perc and Tickets” (from Tucker Crowe , “perc” being the abbreviation for “perchloroethylene,” the chemical used in the dry-cleaning process) and “Her Piano” (from Infidelity and Other Domestic Investigations ), a tribute to his mother written after her death from breast cancer in 1983. Crowe’s older brother, Ed, died in 1972, aged twenty-one, in a car accident. The inquest found that he had “significant” levels of alcohol in his bloodstream.

EARLY CAREER

Crowe formed The Politics of Joy at Montana State and dropped out of school to tour with the band. They split up before they were offered a recording contract, although most of the members of the band played with Crowe on his albums and tours, and his third album was titled Tucker Crowe and The Politics of Joy . Crowe’s self-titled first album, released in 1977, was a famous music-industry disaster: the record company’s confidence in the artist led them to place a series of advertisements in trade magazines and on billboards bearing the hubristic tagline BRUCE PLUS BOB PLUS LEONARD EQUALS TUCKER underneath a photograph of a pouting Crowe wearing eyeliner and a Stetson. A drunken Crowe was arrested for attempting to tear a gigantic poster down on Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, California, in October 1977. The rock critics were merciless—Greil Marcus in Creem ended his review with the line “Drivel plus feyness plus John Denver equals not much to go on?” Stung, Crowe recorded a savage four-track EP, Can Anybody Hear Me? (now the name of a website given over to earnest, sometimes pompous, discussion of his music), which helped to turn his fortunes, and the critical reception, around.

CONCERT TOURS

Crowe toured extensively between 1977 and his retirement, although his live shows are generally regarded as being variable in quality, mostly because of Crowe’s alcoholism. Some shows could be as short as forty-five minutes, with long breaks between songs broken only by Crowe’s abuse of, and evident scorn for, his audience; other nights, as the justly celebrated “At Ole Miss” bootleg demonstrates, he played for two and a half hours to ecstatic, devoted crowds. Too often, though, a Crowe concert would degenerate into name-calling and violence: in Cologne, Germany, he leaped into the crowd to punch a fan who had repeatedly requested a song he didn’t want to play. Most members of The Politics of Joy had quit before the end of Crowe’s career, most of them citing abuse from the singer as the reason for departure.

PERSONAL LIFE

Tucker Crowe is presumed to be the father of Julie Beatty’s daughter, Ophelia (b. 1987), although her mother has always denied this. He is believed to have achieved sobriety.

RETIREMENT

Crowe is believed to be living on a farm in Pennsylvania, although little is known about how he has spent the last two decades. Rumors of a comeback are frequent, but so far unfounded. Some fans detect his involvement in recent albums by the Conniptions and the Genuine Articles; the album Yes, Again (2005) by the re-formed The Politics of Joy is regarded—wrongly, according to the band—to feature two songs by Crowe. Juliet, Naked , an album of demo versions of the songs on Juliet , was released in 2008.

DISCOGRAPHY

Tucker Crowe —1977

Infidelity and Other Domestic Investigations —1979

Tucker Crowe and The Politics of Joy —1981

You and Me Both —1983

Juliet —1986

Juliet, Naked —2008

AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS

Crowe received an honorary degree from the University of Montana in 1985. Juliet was nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Album” category in 1986. Crowe was nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Male Rock Performance” category, for “You and Your Perfect Life,” in the same year.

While Annie was waiting hopefully in her office for Tucker Crowe’s reply, Tucker Crowe was wandering around his local supermarket with his six-year-old son, Jackson, trying to buy comfort food for somebody neither of them knew very well.

“Hot dogs?”

“Yeah.”

“I know you like ’em. I was asking you whether you think Lizzie might.”