Good night the pleasure was ours

With <i>Good night the pleasure was ours</i> 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 <i>Now that the audience is assembled</i> and <i>The Voice in the Headphones</i>. In <i>Good night the pleasure was ours</i> 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.