Atlanta native Robert Burke Warren is a songwriter, whose new novel, “Perfectly Broken,” comes with a batch of songs.
It’s about a songwriter, Grant Kelly, a ’90s rocker whose musician friends hit it big while Kelly’s fortunes dwindle.
Particularly galling for Kelly is the success of “Kiss My Ring” by his one-time buddy Paul Fairchild, who licenses it to Nike for a world-wide advertising campaign and becomes a millionaire.
"Kiss My Ring" exists. Warren, the songwriter, thought that as long as he was fabricating a late '80s, early '90s musical phenomenon, he might as well create — and record — the songs that set the story in motion.
On Sunday, June 19, when Warren comes back to his birthplace from his New York home and reads from his novel at A Cappella Books, he will bring along his six-string and throw in a few tunes, interweaving chapters about the fictional hero with the songs he inspired.
"I am a full-service cottage industry," said Warren, 51, who got his start in Atlanta in the 1980s backing up gender-bending superstar RuPaul in a band they called Wee Wee Pole. "I've been in front of people performing for most of my life so I thought: Why not use what you got?" he said.
Warren tried out the idea of combining book signings with song singing as he was finishing the novel in 2015, in locales around his home near Woodstock, N.Y. “I beta tested the format last summer: I’d play a song, read, play a song, read, then do a Q and A,” said Warren. The format is a hit. “I don’t think I could patent it legally, but I wish I could.”
Warren has had quite the career since he and RuPaul (now a television star) opened for the Now Explosion at a dive on Ponce de Leon.
He half-heartedly attended classes at the University of Georgia and played with the Athens band Go Van Go, before moving north and joining garage-rock legends the Fleshtones. Quitting that band, he moved to London and worked for a year as the lead in the "jukebox musical" "Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story," playing 17 songs a night, five nights a week.
He collaborated on songs with Roseanne Cash. He became a stay-at-home dad and sometime teacher’s assistant at his son Jack’s school. (Warren, his wife Holly George and their son now live in the Hudson Valley, near Woodstock — the other Woodstock.) Warren and Jack created a “kindie” musical group, Uncle Rock, and performed songs for children all over the place.
All along Warren kept writing — journalism, liner notes, songs — and in 2011 he sat down to write a novel “about fictional people I could possibly know.”
He has blogged about his time growing up in Atlanta and hopes to turn it into a book. “I look back on that time and I feel very lucky,” he said. “It was pre-AIDS, pre-Olympics. The Civil Rights Act passed the year before I was born. I grew up in an Atlanta that was becoming a different kind of Southern city, and I feel lucky for that. It was diverse, there was a sense of optimism and a sense of moving forward.”
Warren’s zig-zagging trip through the music industry has given him great book material and often a living wage, if not great fortune. Considering the hardships he visits on his main character (subjected to marital infidelity, physical injury, obstreperous children and a near-drowning) he’s considerably tougher on Grant Kelly than life has been on him.
“I am sort of a vengeful god,” he admits. “I adore my characters,” he added, but once he started having bad things happen to them, “it was hard to stop.”
The book has been described as a “sex, dads and rock & roll” novel, and it’s a telling comment on the new drug culture that Kelly’s most significant chemical experiences are the legal variety.
Here’s a scene at the doctor’s office as he receives his first prescription for a mood enhancer: “As he scribbled my script with a Zoloft pen, I note the Zoloft clock, the Zoloft Post-its, and his desk littered with sample boxes of Prozac, Paxil and several other drugs with frequent Z’s and X’s in their names.”
Warren has an eye for detail. And an ear. The songs that go along with “Perfectly Broken” sound like they came out of a grungy ’90s time capsule, which is no accident.
“It was like writing musical period pieces,” said Warren, who told his producer “make these drums sound as much like ‘Blood Sugar Sex Magic’ as you possibly can.” It worked.
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