Come Down from the Hills and Make My Baby

By Cole Coonce

Los Angeles, they say, is a siren. Calling all of us not born in this in this city, like the Whore of Babylon to an end-of-the-world orgy. Its easy for those of us recent additions to this... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0971997713
• ISBN13: 9780971997714
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Kerosenebomb Publishing
• Length: 172 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Better to live through and laugh at the recall

This little jewel is one of the hippest and most brutally funny and honest recollections in novel form you will ever read. If you love language, if you find the quick-fire, mud-slide, life run amuck, back alley, main street, coyote breathing mystery of LA to your liking then this is your book. Truth is, you can pick it up but you can't put it down. There is madness in the foothills as well that as in the punk-rock dreams that seem to come from out of nowhere, latterly pulling characters out of the woodwork. This book take possession of you, then it finally delivers you at the end totally exhausted with the sheer art of a hero's personal transformation. The people in this book are real because both nature and some dyslectic demigod would never admit boredom. Poetry seem to flow from every broken hearted and whiskey stained, amphetamine addled moment that opens unexpectedly like some unearthly flower of despair, redeemed by raw, excited adventure as if the energy of the book itself would "laser" at any moment. The book moves everyone in it, and the reader too, along on a pícaro of fatal deconstruction music that exhausts itself in the exposure of everyone and everything it touches. Yet there is a honest affection the hero has for the other characters in the book if it is not known to himself in the beginning--but at least this psychology is shared with everyone in the book and this gives the book its narrative unity. The hero sees and you see with him without any need to soften reality because you discover in this book that reality is its own worth and justification. Even the Scientology "Freaks" are exposed with the untrammeled exactness that only human comedy can muster. You will laugh because you will see. That's probably the most certain outcome if you read this book. But what is really interesting to me is the ethos of concern without interference in others basic existence you find here. This is possible because no one know what is happening until it happens and then and only then can the lived narrative of each life fined it way into and out of the dithyrambs of music that is "not" music but the expression an existential truth that nothing exits in us but it's laud and amped on every ounce of electricity it can pull from Edition, life and the very air we breathe. This book is on, always on, and even in postcoital calm there is a edge to remind us something propels us forward like the fates in a Greek tragedy to the final conclusion that something is happening and it changes everyone and it will take a thousand lives lived at full exposure to ever understand what it was and it will not likely happen again. This book will fined its way because it exceeds itself; and as long as people have a language, and therefore a soul, this book will transform its story at each reading into something universal, something enduring like language itself. If there are people, it will be read.

Fascinating account of a little-known band

I loved the band Braindead Sound Machine when their first album came out on Chicago's Wax Trax! label in 1990--they were a cut above most of the Wax Trax! crowd and clearly something mysterious and interesting was going on with their cryptic lyrics and self-presentation. But they disappeared without a trace after the implosion of Wax Trax! and a second album on another label, and I always wondered what happened. Many, but not all, of my questions about them are finally answered in this fascinating book, an account of BSM's brief life and adventures in the music industry. BSM fans will be glad of some backstory (how did it start, what's the deal with the wind tunnels and "Nitronic Research", who is the mysterious Dogvillasan, what is the origin of the phrase "come down from the hills and make my baby" [I would have never guessed this one, really funny], what are all those strange answering-machine messages from the second album?), and will easily read past the psuedonyms the author has given to people and entities that might sue (the record label is Wax Trax!, the German band is KMFDM, the aspiring singer who supplies the immortal line "Spit in my mouth" is the infamous Angelynne). But even if you've never heard (or heard of) Braindead Sound Machine, I think this book would be a fun and interesting read--the author is an entertaining writer with a unique perspective, and there is humor, sadness and mayhem here in his story of a band came together, made an album, went on tour, and fell apart. Now, the next step should be: remastered reissues of the albums and singles!

Unusual title -- unusually good book!

First of all, with a title like "come down from the hills and make my baby" it isn't suprising that this book caught my eye. I'd never heard of Braindead Sound Machine but that didn't stop the book from engaging me immediately, almost like being told a really fascinating story by a remarkably lucid drunk or recently recovered drug addict in a red leather booth in a some dive, which can be a good thing in theory. I was impressed with the author's ability to sustain my interest in a musical group whose music i was (and am) unfamiliar with -- in fact they should have given away a cd with the book for free. this is more a cautionary tale about the record industry and the damage done than a self-serving 'music' book about some band's career. and i suppose that's what is MOST compelling about it; the author's slow realizations about the nature of his dreams and aspirations (however subversive they are)can't survive in the even more hostile environment of the idiocy of the music biz. any musician, and anyone that likes music, should read this book.