"Good night the pleasure was ours is the third and final entry in an ensemble of book-length poems that includes Now that the audience is assembled and The Voice in the Headphones. Whereas the other two books focus on the concert and the recording studio, Good night the pleasure was ours describes three decades worth of touring, going back as far as David Grubbs' high school band Squirrel Bait. These groundbreaking works, which can be read in any sequence, spring from the idea of literature as a medium for writing about music. This trilogy represents through close description three sites of musical experience: the concert, the recording studio, and the tour. They aim to open up music writing to greater experimentation while at the same time serving a documentary function amidst changing musical cultures"--
In this book-length poem David Grubbs melts down and recasts three decades of playing music on tour, capturing the daily life of touring as a world unto itself.
With Good night the pleasure was ours, David Grubbs melts down and recasts three decades of playing music on tour into a book-length poem, bringing to a close the trilogy that includes Now that the audience is assembled and The Voice in the Headphones. In Good night the pleasure was ours, the world outside the tour filters in with eccentric sparseness. From teenage punk bands to ensembles without fixed membership, and from solo performance to a group augmented by digital avatars, Grubbs presents touring as a series of daily dislocations that provides an education distinctly its own. These musicians’ job is to play that evening’s gig—whether to enthusiastic, hostile, or apathetic audiences—and then to do it again the next day. And yet, over the course of the book’s multidecade arc, Grubbs depicts music making as an irreversible process—one reason for loving it so.
