The Other Night at Quinn’s, by Mike Faloon
Mike Watt of the Minutemen exclaims, “Whoa, these spiel batches pack much punch and got their grip way into brain-frame! Faloon had me captured and I had to keep reading.” Wayne Kramer of the MC5 adds that it’s “...a deeply personal dive into the psyche of a hardcore music fanatic...utterly indispensable. A truly great read.”
Don’t let The Other Night at Quinn’s: New Adventures in the Sonic Underground scare you. Yes, it’s a creative non-fiction collection about the explosive uncertainty of free jazz in a diner-turned-club in upstate NY.
But you didn’t have to do mounds of coke and wreck Italian sports cars to be riveted by Neil Strauss’ Mötley Crüe tell-all, The Dirt. You didn’t need to live in a rat-infested apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to be swept up in Legs McNeil’s oral punk history Please Kill Me.
And you don’t need to embrace the steep wall and seeming chaos of improvised music to enjoy Mike Faloon’s The Other Night at Quinn’s. Like the best of Ali Smith, David Shields, and Mary Roach, it’s not just the topic. It’s your guide. It’s Faloon’s approach of deep immersion and careful listening. His wit, openness, and sympathy for whom he’s writing about. His absorption of audio pandemonium, filtered through a buzzing membrane, and translated into text as propulsive and vibrant as the music itself.
Mike Faloon is your guide throughout The Other Night at Quinn’s, a fascinating window into a community of creators surviving beyond the mainstream in an otherwise overlooked outpost of the cultural underground that cuts across distinctions of culture, gender, race, age, and genre. The Other Night at Quinn’s is a circuitous anatomy of a scene where initially opaque and elliptical experiences are transformed into the rewards of deeper understanding and humanity.
More praise for The Other Night at Quinn’s
“...like listening to a jazz impresario reflecting and improvising ... a lucidly well-written journey.” –Rudy Wurlitzer, Nog, Two Lane Blacktop
“A joyful exploration every bit as impassioned, provocative, and searching as the music and musicians it celebrate...Read this book.” –Josh Wilker, author of Benchwarmer and Cardboard Gods
“Carefully and thoughtfully leads the reader into unknown territory with an infectious charm.” –Jennifer Whiteford, Grrrl, a Novel and Matilda Zine
About the author:
Mike Faloon is a former DJ, dishwasher, and drummer. He is the author of The Hanging Gardens of Split Rock and co-editor of Fan Interference. Faloon co-founded the Go Metric and Zisk zines and has contributed to Cabildo Quarterly, Cashiers du Cinemart, Razorcake, Submerging Writers, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He has toured often in the past decade, with stops at the UCB Theatre and the Baseball Hall of Fame. Faloon lives in upstate New York.
