Sean Madigan Hoen is no Keith Richards, and Thoughts of Ionesco, his first band, are no Rolling Stones. In many ways, though, Hoen's tough and emotionally wrenching memoir Songs Only You Know could be the story Richards would have told had he spent the late 1990s in Detroit's punk scene.
Hoen loved the music, loved being the in-your-face front man, loved the booze and drugs. He wrote the songs and recruited bandmates as over-the-top as he was. "I sang what I could," he writes. "What I couldn't, I screamed. Until the sun came up. Until our fingers bled and our ears filled with wax." In synch with the punk ethos of the time, his mission was "to corrupt all traces of harmony. When notes felt too 'right,' we augmented with wrongness."
Songs Only You Know is more than a road trip through half-empty Midwestern bars in his band's corroded, impound-auction '85 Chevy van nicknamed "Orgasmatron," however. It's also the story of how Hoen's family was wrecked by his auto executive father's crack addiction and his sister's frequent bouts with depression--both of them ultimately dying of their diseases. Only his mother seems able to transcend the pain and disappointment of the family's downward spiral and stand by her son as he too fights the sirens of addiction and musical obsession. Now teaching creative writing at Columbia University, Hoen's come a long way from the "crack shacks" of west Detroit, a journey his memoir traces in an almost uplifting saga. Almost. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.