Interview With Hugh McGrath / Page 4 of 9

McGrath: "You see the 60s as that much of a historical force?"

Trainor: "Absolutely. For those of us who lived through it, the 60s marked the end of an era, the end of the World War II generation, the end of authoritarian rule, blind rule, blind obedience -- and that's why George Bush and other militant extremists are so intent on overthrowing, on obliterating the 60s. Did you see the Time Magazine photographs of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and Powell praying before a cabinet meeting? These dudes are on a holy crusade."

McGrath: "Rocker Heaven makes an environmental statement, it also makes a political statement."

Trainor: "An economic one as well. See, the 60s were a time of great economic expansion, for western nations anyway. And you cannot understand the 60s unless you understand that the economy was expanding so fast that the kids of the 60s had the money and the leisure time to indulge in sex, drugs and rock'n'roll."

McGrath: "The QuotLinks are threatened by all that, they want to stamp the 60s out, get Chipper."

Trainor: "The last surviving remnant of that era."

McGrath: "To capture the 60s then, you felt you had to go beyond the music?"

Trainor: "Absolutely. The times were chaotic -- as well as bizarre -- John Kennedy had been assassinated, that hovered over the entire decade, then King got shot, Robert Kennedy got shot, Vietnam was hot, the Civil rights movement was hot and the political culmination was the Democratic National Convention, Chicago 1968 when tanks and troops faced off with protestors outside the convention hall. Add in the music, the drugs, the free love, and you have one of the most pivotal decades ever. Rocker Heaven tries to capture all of that and more, how that decade has survived until now."

McGrath: "Have other works succeeded in capturing that era?"

Trainor: "Apocalypse Now comes to mind, one of my all time favorite films, because in an entirely surrealistic way it portrayed the adrenaline of war, the male histrionics, the absurdity of it."

McGrath: "Did Apocalypse Now inspire you in any way?"

Trainor: "Greatly. It was so innovative. The issue was tearing the country apart, and Coppola came at the war and the culture surrounding the war in such a bold, such an imaginative way that it was shocking. It shocked me."

McGrath: "So you think movies, art can have that sort of social impact?"

Trainor: "Absolutely."

McGrath: "Even a movie as fantastic, as surreal as Apocalypse Now?"

Trainor: "For that very reason. Images. Fantasies. More of our lives is spent in the realm of the imagination than we would ever want to admit -- our hopes, our dreams, our pretensions, our beliefs, our fate, our most secret fantasies."

McGrath: "You are a writer. You write fiction. You deal in nothing but images."

Trainor: "Indeed, that's where I live nowadays, in my imagination, that's where I hide out. Occasionally I peek up from my bunker and wonder, try to imagine the future, the implications for the next decade or so.

McGrath: "Can we go back to that edge you were talking about. How does a work succeed at being both highly fictitious, yet very real?"

Trainor: "Admittedly it's a hard balance to hold. Another inspiration for me was this amazing film from New Zealand, from back in the early 80s, called Utu, and the director, a fellow named Geoff Murphy, actually pulled off a slapstick, a Keystone Cops chase scene right before this brutal massacre of the aborigines by the British. The combination was emotionally jarring, like scenes in Apocalypse Now -- the helicopter raid on the village with Wagner blasting. It's the unexpected humor, the absurdity of the situation that heightens the bloody reality."

McGrath: "Like the magical realism of South American writers?"

Trainor: "Exactly, although the adjective magical in that phrase distorts the concept in translation from the Spanish. In English I feel magical realism is reduced to a child's bedtime story. I prefer the term heightened realism or even fantastic realism. The story is presented more as a fable than as a newspaper account. And a fable always has a very real message. There are wolves out there, kiddies, they have fangs and they eat the sheep. Anyway, that's the style I find appealing, and the impetus for me to write actually came from Marquez."

McGrath: "Gabriel Garcia Marquez."

Trainor: "Right. Who was born in Colombia which has to be one of the most surreal countries on earth. What? Half the country is controlled by Marxist rebels who deal cocaine! This drug both supports their cause and offers peasants a livelihood. Then there's Bogota, one of the most sophisticated cities in the world, rich, capitalist, a major recipient of US military aid to war against these rebels and peasants. Only a Marquez could capture the dichotomy, not in a realistic account of today's war, but in his sweep of Latin American colonial history. His One Hundred Years of Solitude is a brilliant portrayal of many generations, the illusions they keep living, without any sense of real time. I have read it over and over again, I even have a copy in Spanish which I read aloud mostly for the sound of the language. Marquez is sheer genius."