Almost famous

Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be

A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale

Jen Trynin

Harcourt: 356 pp., $23

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JEN TRYNIN stared up at the big stage, watching Courtney Love do her usual trashy rock-star burlesque. She turned to the man next to her -- the president of Geffen Records -- and with mock admiration made a crack about Love’s breasts. The man laughed. “You sign with me,” he said, “and I’ll get a pair of those for you.”

Unknown today except to a very specific species of music geek, Trynin was rock ‘n’ roll’s hottest unsigned commodity in 1994. The offer made by “EdR” (a thinly disguised pseudonym for Ed Rosenblatt) was just another gust of hot air in a hurricane of propositions, promises and financial sweet nothings whispered by major record labels into the ear of the Boston singer-songwriter.

In “Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be,” Trynin recounts the feeding frenzy sparked by her independently released album, “Cockamamie.” For a brief moment, the entire music industry circled and sniffed around the 30-year-old singer, who’d only recently turned to rock after wallowing in Boston’s “Sunday through Wednesday night folk/acoustic chick band wasteland.”

Trynin strapped on an electric guitar, toughened up her look and sound, and voila, every record weasel in America was handing her a card, buying her a beer, seeing dollar signs. “The lights are low, everything swirling with drinks and hands and teeth, and the talk is fast: priority, roll out, capitalize, maximize, merchandise, marketing,” she writes.

Trynin’s memoir of her meteoric rise and even quicker slide is an edgy, honest and bittersweet account of what it’s like to be at the center of that storm -- to be wined and dined, sliced and diced, so that you no longer recognize what is real or who you are.

It’s also a wise and compelling snapshot of a then-still-omnipotent record industry reveling in all its sleazy glory just before corporate consolidation (not to mention the digital revolution) brought it all tumbling down.

Known for biting and confrontational songwriting, Trynin is similarly brusque with her prose. Her tough, conversational style reads like a detailed and highly revealing personal journal but without a drop of self-pity. She exuberantly sketches the music-biz bottom feeders who surround her, but to her credit, her rock-star arrogance is always tempered with self-doubt: “I can almost see the faces of all the people who I believe are thinking of little else besides me, and it’s like I’m being lit up by a searchlight,” she writes. “But then comes the nagging feeling ... that it’s only a matter of time before someone kicks me over like a bucket.”

“Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be” also serves as a painful expose of music-business cruelty, as Trynin quickly realizes that the bidding war for her services has little to do with her music and everything to do with big egos fighting for something that everyone else wants. Remember, this was the dawn of the Lilith Fair era, when the currency for “women who rock” was never higher. Trynin was merely that year’s grand prize.

Still, she’s willing to nearly forgo her own musical identity for a shot at the brass ring. She becomes what she thinks everyone wants her to be -- a supercool alt-rock phenomenon. “Everytime I move, I lose sight of myself,” she writes. She wears the silly clothes, acts obnoxious and foists her sidemen off as a real band to maintain the elusive and amorphous “indie cred” that’s allegedly so crucial in a marketing sense.

Trynin has a long and entertaining dance with the record industry devil but eventually has to make a choice. She’s smart enough to know that once she’s bagged, someone else will take her place. “The truth is, I don’t want to decide,” she writes. “Because as long as I stay here in the Before, I can continue to be as great as everyone imagines.”

With the barbarians pounding at the gate, Trynin chooses Warner Bros. after meeting with recently installed Warner chief Danny Goldberg, who’d been Nirvana’s manager. He utters the magic words -- Kurt Cobain -- and she’s instantly smitten. “Maybe I’d have a chance to have another relationship like I had with Kurt, you know, with you,” he tells her. She hears this and her heart melts. Of course, it’s all downhill from there.

Trynin wouldn’t become the new Kurt Cobain. In fact, Goldberg left the label soon after her arrival. Instead, she became just a struggling artist hustling for a hit as another Warner’s property, a former child pop star from Canada named Alanis Morissette, becomes the label’s platinum-selling darling. Trynin is exiled to the road, where the long van rides to small club gigs, endless radio interviews, bad food and cheap motels offer a stark contrast to the wining and dining that came before.

Despite the roadwork, the fake smiles, the meet and greets in the middle of nowhere, there would be no hits, just a nasty backlash -- Trynin was featured in articles about “whiny white chicks” and “things that didn’t happen in 1995” -- followed by consignment to the cutout bin of obscurity.

She may not have known it then, but Trynin got her best advice at the height of her bidding war. During a meeting with David Geffen, the entertainment mogul held up a painting that illustrated a scene from the “The Iliad” and told her that the journey in life is actually the real reward, much more important than the actual arrival. By digesting and piecing together her quixotic rock ‘n’ roll journey without a trace of bitterness in “Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be,” Trynin suggests that she feels the same way.