"The Sound Track to Your Next Teenage Riot": Will Boast's Power Ballads

        Will Boast, Power Ballads. 
               University of Iowa Press, 2011. Paperback, 184 pp, $16.


       There are two types of ballads explained in the title story of Will Boast’s collection, Power Ballads. There is the power ballad itself, which is “tough and theatrical,” and the jazz ballad, which is “all restraint.” The former contains that hundred-to-one chance of connecting with an audience, while the latter is more self-reflective: “You work, you study to be older, wiser, so that you can play it from a distance, thirty years at least. Jazz knows that experience trumps all, that you take the blows as they come.” Throughout the collection’s ten stories, Boast’s characters are drawn to and torn between such conflicting emotional states. Through music, interwoven in each story, Boast explores connection and disconnection between his characters; the desire for security verses the monotony of stability; the possibility of starting anew juxtaposed with the weight of an uncompromising past.
       The opening story, “Sitting In,” introduces the reader to Tim, a recurring character who appears in a majority of the stories. “Sitting In” is a recollection of Tim’s childhood experience playing live music with a polka band, the Thirty-Pointers, at the local dive, Wenzel’s, in his small Wisconsin town. “My mother had died a couple years back,” Tim explains, “and Dad still didn’t know what to do with me.” Music fills the void between Tim and his father. It allows them to be together in a room without the burden of conversation.
        At twelve years old, Tim occasionally sits in for Ertold, the polka band’s tuba player. “When Dad and I walked through the door, it was always Ertold’s eyes I met first—he’d started watching for me, as well—and the look in them was not welcoming.” Tension escalates throughout the piece between the boy and the man, although the threat that Tim represents as a replacement does not cross his young mind. It is the desire to play that consumes Tim. And it is this desire that gradually wears on Ertold, who retaliates by the story’s end with an act that unintentionally destroys the Thirty-Pointers and ruins the Sunday night gigs at Wenzel’s. Near the story’s conclusion, Tim reflects: “It would’ve taken something I didn’t possess at that age to see how much all this meant to sad old Ertold, how badly he needed to be up there playing. Anyway, I didn’t have it. I couldn’t see.” 
       This lack of insight, and more specifically insight within moments of one’s life, carries on throughout the collection. In the title story, “Power Ballads,” Tim recounts his time with the band, Soldier, to his girlfriend Kate. Soldier, “a last-gasp eighties band that had lingered into the nineties like a stubborn stain before being erased by grunge and ‘alternative’” is intent on a reunion tour (“a counterattack against aging gracefully”). They hire Tim as their replacement drummer. Tim repeats throughout the story how he wants to leave the band, and how he is “ashamed to be seen” in the city with the monstrosity of his new drum kit. Yet Tim stays and bears witness to the band’s failed attempt to recreate their former, brief stint with fame. As Carlos, Soldiers’ guitarist, explains to Tim: Billy, the lead singer, “wants it to be like it was; acts like he’s happy playing these bars, but hell, he’s having his mid-life crisis, like we all are.” Carlos, perhaps the sole voice of reason in this story, goes on to say, “‘But what else you gonna do when the cars are paid off, the kids are in school, and you’ve redecorated the house five times already? I mean, why the fuck not, right?’” Lines like these, so devastating in their depiction of aging, both pain and invigorate the reader. 
       In all ten stories in Power Ballads, with writing that is at once humorous and heartbreaking, Boast touches on the issues of half-truths, failures to communicate, and the pain involved in self-reflection. In “Mr. Fern, Freestyle,” readers experience the generation gap between the church music teacher, Mr. Fern, and three of his students whom Mr. Fern has agreed to help with the recording of their rap album. A similar age gap is explored in “Dead Weight,” when the reader again encounters Tim, now a little older and in a new role as the replacement drummer for the up-and-coming metal band, VD3. As opposed to Mr. Fern’s use of equipment that is “‘older than old school,’” VD3’s album “thanks to some sophisticated recording software … sounded glossy and crunchy, slick and jagged, sensitive and angry all at once. The sound track to your next teenage riot [that] grandma could still buy for you for Christmas.” And while Boast’s critique of the modern day music industry provides the reader with some of the collection’s more humorous lines, it is in these very lines that Boast himself seems very much like some of his older, more nostalgic characters—characters who are unable and unwilling to let go of their past. 
       Beyond the music industry, Boast’s collection also delivers a healthy dose of social critique. In one story, modern day fame is attacked: 

Thirty years ago, people bragged about their sisters or uncle or brother-in-law … now everyone wants to be lauded on their own merits, adored if possible … does getting by no longer constitute life … now you despise yourself for missing the chance at something better, something that might have gotten you featured in a magazine. Fame is never out of reach.