A road tripper’s sardonic offerings

WELCOME to Chuck Klosterman’s world, where every museum is a “rip-off”; where “the Grand Canyon is just an attractive accident”; and where Shakespeare ranks about as high as Elvis does for Chuck D. in the Public Enemy song “Fight the Power” (“Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant ... to me”). In his new book, Klosterman proudly notes, “I have never read ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ and I’ll never read it, and I don’t even care what the ... it’s about.”

These and countless other gleefully low-brow bons mots pepper “Killing Yourself to Live,” Klosterman’s follow-up to “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs,” a bestselling 2003 roundup of dorm-room rants and dive-bar epiphanies, including how Billy Joel is an underappreciated genius and why soccer is for idiots. In that book, the native North Dakotan presented himself as “America’s best-loved semi-pro freelance conversationalist.”

In “Killing Yourself to Live,” he reinvents himself as a road-tripping necrologist, traversing the United States in a rented Ford Taurus equipped with GPS and 600 compact discs on a pot-fueled Tocquevillean journey to America’s best-loved rock-star death sites. (Klosterman is a frequent contributor to Spin magazine; his first book, “Fargo Rock City,” chronicled his adolescent obsession with ‘80s hair bands.) “I want to find out,” he tells us at the outset of this 6,557-mile, 18-day tour, “why plane crashes and drug overdoses and shotgun suicides turn long-haired guitar players into messianic prophets.”

What emerges in “Killing Yourself to Live” is an amusing gazetteer of modern America, seen through the lens of high-profile plane crashes, overdoses, nightclub fires, drownings, suicides and motorcycle accidents. At the site of the band Great White’s 2003 pyrotechnic disaster that killed 100 people in West Warwick, R.I., Klosterman encounters a moving landscape of makeshift memorials and ends up inhaling cocaine with one of the mourners.

Near Magnolia, Miss., he tracks down the remote patch of forest where a plane carrying members of Lynyrd Skynyrd went down in 1977, now a sort of landmark with a hand-built archway decorated, naturally, with a Confederate flag and their song title “Free Bird.”

In Minneapolis, one of the author’s former hometowns, he tries to gain entry to the house where Bob Stinson, the diaper-wearing lead guitarist of the Replacements -- arguably the best American band of the 1980s -- drank himself to death in 1995. The tenant treats Klosterman like a canvassing Jehovah’s Witness, moving from an open window and pretending not to be home.

It’s a significant moment in this veering, shaggy-dog narrative, in which Klosterman’s itinerary is merely an excuse to do what he does best: crank out rapid-fire opinions with all the over-the-top indiscriminateness -- and mindless bravado -- of Eddie Van Halen taking a guitar solo. Klosterman can sometimes be brutally correct: “I do think about what it would have been like if John Lennon had lived, and sometimes I worry that he would have made a terrible MTV ‘Unplugged’ in 1992.” “[M]ost rock journalism is just mild criticism with a Q&A; attached; nobody learns anything (usually) and nothing new is created (ever).” In the author’s estimation, Eric Clapton is “the most overrated rock musician of all time” and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer is “a bearded jackass.” This is all well and good, but are people who are embarrassed to eat at Olive Garden really just unthinking sheep? (Klosterman likes to establish his rube credentials by aggressively noting his love for Outback Steakhouse, Cracker Barrel restaurants and Mountain Dew.)

“Killing Yourself to Live” inflates its thin premise to the breaking point -- the effect is like a double live album that should have been cut to 12 songs -- when Klosterman tells the saga of four love affairs that have ostentatiously perished, burned out or faded away. He does make devastating use of the four KISS solo albums from 1978 to illustrate the various idiosyncrasies of these women, but they remain as elusive as the meaning behind the deaths of rock stars Elvis, Duane Allman, Jeff Buckley, Kurt Cobain and Buddy Holly (among the other late rockers in the book).

Perhaps the most revealing episode in this awkward slow dance between love and death -- with its asides on why Los Angeles is the “worst city in America” and a “bozo-saturated hellhole” and how “There is no truth ... no culture” -- comes when Klosterman imagines an ex-lover saying to him, “[Y]ou’re either a moron or a guy who’s trying way too hard to create a persona for himself.” In “Killing Yourself to Live,” the author, who can be as unceremonious about himself as he can about, say, Led Zeppelin or the White Stripes, leaves the question open.

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Mark Rozzo writes the “First Fiction” column for Book Review.