Chasing Ronnie
The Obsession that Launched a Book
By Laura Lee Bennett
How does a
scholar of the 19th-century novel become a hard-core,
scarf-tossing, Rolling Stones fan, hopping planes, trains and automobiles
to see the Stones play live, in all manner of venues—all over
the world? The answer is
simple enough: an obsession with a smile.
Former
academic and current Hugo House member Wendy Ellison Mullen—known to her
friends and family as “Wem”—has written a book that describes the path of
her obsession with rocker and artist Ronnie Wood, guitarist for the
Rolling Stones and formerly with Rod Stewart and the Faces, Jeff Beck, and
an early British R&B band called “The Birds” (not the American
“Byrds” with David Crosby).
The
book, Ronnie Wood’s Smile: And Where It Led, starts out with Wem’s
“innocently” attending a Rolling Stones concert in December 1994, at the
Seattle Kingdome. She went with two of her high school students—none of
her contemporaries would go along. She describes her first experience:
“The music drove
the hour, rolled it up and flowed into the next with barely a pause and
into the third—all the while I remained unaware of time. The power of the
band was extraordinary. Why had I ever imagined that the Rolling Stones
wouldn’t be able to play live? Foolish woman! Gone were all doubts about
whether rock could be as compelling as classical music. That night…I
rediscovered this music of the Rolling Stones. I’d lost it for a few
years. But I was back. They were here. Life was now. The power. The
rhythmic drive. The absolute necessity of moving with the music. And yes,
the volume. The volume was definitely part of it.”
A Fateful Smile
It was during
this first concert that Wem received a fateful smile from Ronnie Wood. His
effect on her was almost “Merlin-like”; her description of the
moment—during a rendition of the song “It’s Only Rock’n’
Roll”—incorporates italicized song lyrics, a device she uses often
throughout the book to capture and emphasize emotion:
“…this guitarist was
different. He came out towards us as though with a purpose, scanning the
audience before him. When he saw me, he stopped. His hands came off the
guitar, and he grinned. He looked at me alone. Oh, what a beautiful smile!
And as we stood there for a brief moment eye to eye, two look at two, a
couple amidst 50,000, he spoke to me. “Love is so strong and you’re so
sweet and someday soon we’re gonna meet.” His smile pierced through me and
drew me in. We were together. Alone in a crowd. At the foot of 15 stories
of stereo speakers pulsing with rhythm. “A glimpse of you was all it took/
A stranger’s glance it got me hooked.” Mick danced somewhere in the
distance.”
Thus,
with this song, “Love Is Strong,” begins her (re)discovery of the Stones’
music, their lengthy discography, their touring life, and, not least, her
search for that smile. She describes the beginnings of the online
search—back in the “Internet Dark Ages” for fan clubs, writing to her
newfound brethren out in the ether—for a simple promo shot of Ronnie Wood,
but how none were to be found. (No smiles, all grimaces.) Addressing her
audience as “Dear Reader,” wem describes the painstaking process of
writing to ask Wood for a photo of himself in which he is smiling. She had
to have something to confirm and yet puncture her make-believe world.
She
does eventually get a note, and a photo. It puts her into a literary swoon
that lasts for some 300 pages. Wendy Mullen the writer becomes Wendy
Mullen the character, part fiction, part commentator on popular
culture—the classic double bind of the narrator “I” in fiction.
Through the Internet she finds friends who help her along the way, fellow
fans who help her deliver the letter, and who later meet up with her in
strange cities to attend concerts together. She becomes an expert on
technical details, and regales the reader with descriptions of guitars and
their sound. She befriends Ronnie’s head guitar technician, the late Chuch
Magee, and finally sound man Robbie McGrath, who invites her for a drink
“after the [fateful] concert” in San Francisco.
Will
she get her chance to meet the man with the smile, or will she realize the
chase is “hopeless and invasive” and give it up?
In
addition to the colorful descriptions of her mindset, Mullen writes about
Ronnie’s solo playing and the Stones’ performances—a verbal tapestry of
concert “footage”—with all the love and zeal of a fan, and all the love
and poetry of a writer.
Cataloging Her
Obsession
Mullen
has a Ph.D in the 19th-century novel, and she draws on this
knowledge as she catalogs her obsession, as in the following passage,
where she describes her revelation, when she encounters a particularly
pushy Mick Jagger fan who is oblivious to her effect on others:
“ Recognition ripped
suddenly through me. Aghast, I saw myself in Mandy. I was looking in a
mirror that showed me my worst side—and exaggerated it hideously. My own
personal Picture of Dorian Gray. …
No,
I tried to assure myself. I was not that bad. Not yet. I was more like
Conrad’s Marlow, standing on the edge of an abyss looking down at the
horror. Mandy was the secret sharer of my heart…my ship plunging towards
the shallow, rocky shore.”
The
German elegiac poet Rainier Maria Rilke once said (in translation) that
“naming is the first step in taming.” We write about our passions, our
demons, our obsessions, in order to conquer them—to expose them, so
that they either flatten out in the world of daylight and air, or they
become more sharply drawn, more lovely and robust. Either way our
obsessions no longer rule us. We rule them.
If
Mullen has any advice for other writers, it would be this: Write for the
sake of writing. Writing can give release. Writing this book was her way
of “gently releasing” Ronnie Wood, and in so doing releasing herself from
the grip of her obsession. The demon has been exposed. |