GalleyCat caught up with Mike Edison’s I Have Fun in Brooklyn Five-Star Super Tour last night, a raucous mix of storytelling, book promotion, and rock & roll crammed into a skinny Fort Greene bar.
The tour already hit the neighborhoods of Cobble Hill and Williamsburg, as musicians helped Edison pitch the paperback version of his memoir, “I Have Fun Everywhere I Go.” He’ll make two more Brooklyn stops–a burger flipping music event at Red Hook’s Freebird Books and a final party at Roberta’s Restaurant in Bushwick.
After the show, GalleyCat caught up with Edison to find out why New York book tours should spend more time in Brooklyn. He explained: “Everywhere I hit on this tour, no one is jaded, no one is suffering from the typical seen-it-all ennui that so many literary types seem to suffer from. Everyone is genuinely appreciative that we are coming out, and and working hard for them, doing something different. No kidding, this is the future of book touring. Forget fancy ‘name’ bookstores, you gotta go where the people are–where they sell drinks.”
Edison concluded: “A better question is what doesn’t Brooklyn have, and the answer is attitude … I am sure that it helps that my band The Space Liberation Army is so completely beyond. At this point I am having a hard time calling what Jon Spencer does ‘guitar playing’– more like sound sculpture for six-string magnet and eruption box.”