Interview with Eric Segalstad

The 27s is a book that weaves the stories of several disparate artists into one narrative. The only thing the artists have in common - their death at age 27. Author Eric Segalstad and artist Josh Hunter have released an innovative book weaving the stories of these artist together through the course of music history. Starting with the well-trod story of Robert Johnson and making their way through history to the present their stories cross and affect one another in surprising ways.

Today's interview is with author Eric Segalstad and tomorrow I will be featuring an interview with artist Josh Hunter. Be sure to check the book out at www.the27s.com.

Music Tomes: Where did the idea to do a book on the 27 myth first come from?

Eric Segalstad: I think both Josh and I talked about how it would be fun "doing something" on The 27s. The idea of the book came a few years into our friendship when I visited him at the Chicago Art Institute. We had a couple brews at a downtown pub and the idea of the book came up. You know, we found it both very strange that nobody had written anything substantial on The 27s and as soon as we started talking about creating this book we spent hours brainstorming what this book should be all about. The main concepts remained throughout the project.

MT: At what point in the process did you decide to make it one continuous narrative, not breaking the book into chapters?

ES: At first we thought the way to create this was a quick bio on each 27 with a couple of illustrations, but as I dug deeper into the research and discovered more and more 27s I searched for a narrative arc - something that bound them altogether on a different level than the common age of their departures. That's when I realized that The 27s tell the history of rock & roll; it's various sub genres, the multifarious facets of artistdom, and so on. The lack of chapters came from the essay format and the notion that the design broke the piece neatly into unannounced "chapters."

MT: Did that present any particular challenges?

ES: Even though the design breaks it up for the reader I worked on the manuscript on Word and obviously wanted to make it read as a complete piece without any awkward stops or transitions. Every sentence is an excuse for the reader to put whatever she's reading down, so I knew it had to work independently on a very basic level. It took me some time and rewrites to make certain sections work the way I wanted them to.
Another challenge was telling the story of the sixties in that intertwined way. It was a big push, but here the problem wasn't for the lack of transitions - those were everywhere. Alan Wilson, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones and so on, were contemporaries whose lives intertwined and ran parallel to one another, so the challenge was to pack all that info into that section which probably makes up a quarter of The 27s.

MT: The book covers a wide range of music from blues to rock to hip-hop and must have required a large amount of research into the various genres and artists. Were there any surprises that you ran across in your research?

ES: Sure, lot's of little surprises. The biggie for me occurred when I realized that Dyke And The Blazers wrote and recorded the first real funk song: "Funky Broadway." James Brown slimmed down his band after The Blazers' single hit it BIG and had them play in a loose, syncopated groove. JB's first post-"Funky Broadway" single was "Cold Sweat"--arguably his first funky recording (everything he did prior to that was soul). The late, great JB even quotes "funky, funky Broadway" on that disc. So the surprise was that Arlester "Dyke" Christian is the forgotten father of funk.

MT: What was the idea behind the timeline that runs across the bottom of most of the book?

ES: The timeline was first proposed by Josh, I think. The idea was to provide quick pop cultural, historic, political, and musical placeholders that could work in tandem with the narrative. It was a lot of fun to put that together, actually. I think my favorite entry is that the CD, the McNugget, the Swatch watch, and the original 8-bit Nintendo all came out the same year: 1983.