Everything I Know, I Learned From Grover Gardner

May I now present reality: Lunch is inside the van and dinner is inside a dark rock club. I've no complaint about the dinner part, of course. Would rather play and chat to a Parisian Deerhoof fan than to a Parisian tower any day. But what of these endless hours on the roadway?

The gamechanger came in the form of audiobooks. I bought my first one with only one stipulation. I didn't care about genre or popularity or how sure their A.I. algorithms were that I would love it. No, it just had to be LONG. I got William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. 65 hours. By the end I had not only had a deep and intense learning experience that would prove all-too-helpful come 2017, but also had made a new friend: Grover Gardner, the narrator.

This man spoke into my ear for hours every day for weeks. His somehow simultaneously smooth and gravelly voice, the slightly AM-radio quality of his microphone, his constantly varying pace and musical inflection, and above all that slightest whiff of sardonic humor in his delivery, resulted in my total devotion. Without that Gardneresque pinch of outrage and disbelief and irreverence towards the text, 65 hours on the lives and ideas of Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and the gang would simply have been unbearable. So for my future purchases, a new criterion had replaced the old one: It had to be Grover Gardner!

What started an ingenious way to kill time on the road has turned into a collection of the most meaningful books in my life. I discovered David Graeber's breathtaking anthropological economic history called Debt: The First 5000 Years, in part a thorough takedown of destructive but enduring money myths like the one that claims capitalism is somehow a truer expression of "human nature" than communism or any other economic system or nonsystem. Blown away, I realized that Grover Gardner had also done Graeber's subsequent book The Democracy Project, an insider's document of the Occupy movement Graeber himself helped organize, and a primer on non-heirarchical, non-voting principles of decisionmaking that are as relevent to a rock band as they are to post-2008 macroeconomics.

Soon, through Gardner's voice, Alex Ross was spinning the history of 20th century classical music into a sweeping, inspiring tale in The Rest Is Noise, a major influence on Deerhoof's 2016 album The Magic. Frank Rich's utter maceration of the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the gang for destroying the country and population of Iraq, and their constant deception of the American taxpayer without whose dime that destruction would have been impossible, came across harshly and rather hilariously in Gardner's reading of The Greatest Story Ever Sold.

There were bios of John D Rockefeller and John Quincy Adams. There was 5th Avenue, 5 AM, Sam Wasson's amusing behind-the-scenes analysis of Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast At Tiffany's, and sexual liberation, in which Gardner is required to sing at one point. Then in Train, Tom Zoellner's incredible fusion of autobiography, world history, technical erudition, and frank assessment of contemporary rail travel throughout the world, we get to hear Gardner speaking in Russian, Spanish, Hindi, and Chinese.

Now Deerhoof is on tour again in Europe and I've got the headphones on. In a few days we'll be in London, so Grover Gardner has agreed to reread Debt for me, because I've got a dinner plan inside a dark rock club with a new Twitter friend named David Graeber...