Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective, 1972-1992

by Laurie Anderson

Great retrospective on Laurie Anderson's work! Softcover book with wonderful photos and text...her fans would love this book.

Genres: Art, Music, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Biography

Paperback

Published January 1, 1993

About the author

Laurie Anderson (born Laura Phillips Anderson) is an American experimental performance artist and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance art piece in the late 1960s. Throughout the 1970s, Anderson did a variety of different performance art activities. She became widely known outside the art world in 1981 when her single "O Superman," reached number two on the UK pop charts. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave.

She has also invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a "tape-bow violin" that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she developed a "talking stick", a six-foot long, batonlike MIDI controller that can access and replicate different sounds.

Reviews

[Ben Houge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impossible to overstate what a tremendous influence this book has had on my life as an artist, and just as a person, since I first read it shortly after it was released. I still routinely quote from it.

[David]

Always interesting to consider and reconsider Laurie Anderson. Stories from the Nerve Bible is a fascinating collection of things spanning the first 20 years or so of her career. It is a combination of the very familiar—United States Live, Home of the Brave—and the very unfamiliar —including some bits that didn’t make it to the recorded versions of United States Live, Home of the Brave, etc. One of the things I find odd in the collection is occasional confusion of dates. Anderson speaks of having written certain songs for the Home of the Brave film which were actually recorded several years earlier on Mr. Heartbreak. Similarly, she repeats on a couple of occasions the idea that she met Peter Gabriel in 1984 to work on “this is the picture (excellent birds)” but that was broadcast on 1 January 1984, so one suspects that they at least met, given the narrative about putting the piece together, on the afternoon of 31 December 1983! Still, Anderson is fond of the way minor things change and was always in her earliest days, anyway opposed to much recording of performances, as it “fixed” them — as one a “once this way always this way” manner, so these errors in the book are really in her performing spirit even if they are wrong.

[Alexandria M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. So much of her work and stories that I didn't know about. It is amazing reading about her adventures, the inspiration behind her stories, songs and visual art and how she constructed her instruments. A storyteller like no other.

[Keith Mercer · Rating 5 out of 5]

What Burns Never Returns.

[Shawn Persinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Work, work, work! Just do the work. Inspiring.