Perfect from Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life Book

In his essay collection "Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs," Chuck Klosterman, America's sharpest pop-culture writer includes a brief rant about a guy who, during a drunken conversation at a funeral for a friend who died of bone cancer, told him that in high school, punk rock had literally "saved his life."

"Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy?" Klosterman writes. "I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records."

Replace "punk rock" with "indie rock" and "Black Flag" with "Pavement," and Klosterman's drunken friend could have been John Sellers.

Sellers, author of the musical memoir "Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life," is the kind of person who seems to believe in the miraculous healing properties of pop music. He is not, as most people who write about music are accused of being, cynical, jaded and jealous. He is an unabashed fan ' a super-fan, in some cases ' and this is his valentine to his heroes: Joy Division, the Smiths, Sonic Youth and especially Bob Pollard, the alcoholic songwriting machine behind Guided By Voices. At 36, Sellers still listens to music with teenage adoration, deifying his favorite bands even while discussing a genre built on the idea of eliminating idolatry from rock'n'roll. He gushes so much he practically soaks the pages.

But the subtitle of his book is misleading: His life has never actually needed saving. He grew up in middle-class Grand Rapids, Mich., a town where "[t]here wasn't much crime, other than fashion-related." His parents are divorced but, aside from his father's infatuation with Bob Dylan, his family is fully functional. He has never done hard drugs, and his drinking is relegated to the occasional Miller Lite binge. As he makes clear, Sellers' existence has been utterly free of any significant tragedy, discomfort or pain. Frankly, it is remarkable a publisher agreed to devote 75,000 words to it.

Should he ever be diagnosed with bone cancer, however, Sellers would almost certainly reject radiation treatment in favor of headphones and a copy of "Slanted & Enchanted."

In that way, "Perfect From Now On" is a charming piece of rock lit refreshingly free of critical over-analysis, written with little irony and only slight traces of snark.

It is also pointless.

By setting his autobiography to a soundtrack (or giving his soundtrack an autobiography), Sellers' goal, it seems, is to find out why he is who he is. But by the end, all the reader really knows about him is that he has a penchant for footnotes (there are tons of them, some four pages long) and that he really, really loves indie rock. We get a bunch of anecdotes displaying his level of obsessiveness ' traveling to Manchester, England, to visit landmarks mentioned in Morrissey lyrics, for example. The story climaxes when he meets and hangs out with Bob Pollard, then nearly hangs himself (figuratively speaking) when he thinks he pissed Pollard off. (This, obviously, is the greatest drama of his adult life.) But after all that, Sellers' biggest revelation is that he has become his father ' a fate that eventually befalls the entire male species.

None of the things Sellers has done in the name of music make us question his sanity (well, his annual day of mourning for Ian Curtis is a bit nutty), but you do wonder what void he is filling by living through his idols. He never figures it out ' or he never tells us. And because of that, "Perfect From Now On," like the mainstream pop Sellers hates, ends up being an entertaining but empty experience.