A biography is someone else's version of your life arranged in the order they think it happened. You lived it in real time. The biographer decides what mattered. You did not have that luxury. You were in the room and the room was on fire and you were trying to figure out the address while somebody was already writing the dedication page.

I have been written about. I have been the subject. It is a strange experience to read your own life summarized by someone who was not there. They get the dates right. They get the names right. They get the sequence right. But they cannot get the room right because the room is not a fact. The room is a feeling and feelings do not have footnotes.

The first thing a biographer does is decide where to start. That is the most powerful decision in the entire book. If they start with the arrest, you are a political figure. If they start with the music, you are a cultural figure. If they start with the childhood, you are a human being. Where they start is what they think you are. Nobody asks you where you think your life started.

Andy Beta wrote a book about Alice Coltrane. Four hundred pages. Cosmic Music. The first full biography. He started with Detroit. That was the right choice because Detroit is where the frequency starts. Detroit is not a city. Detroit is a tuning fork. You touch it and it vibrates through everything that comes after. Alice McLeod was a girl in a church on the east side. The biographer found that girl. That is what a good biography does. It finds the girl before the name changed.

Sun Ra never got a proper biography. There are books about him. There are dissertations and liner notes and magazine profiles and a film called A Joyful Noise. But nobody sat down and wrote four hundred pages that started at the beginning and followed the frequency from Birmingham to Chicago to Philadelphia to Saturn. Part of the reason is that Sun Ra did not cooperate with linear narrative. He said he was not born. He said he came from Saturn. He said the past was a lie. Try footnoting that.

I wrote about everybody. The MC5. The White Panthers. The jazz musicians. The poets. The dealers. The commune. I wrote about them because somebody had to and I was in the room. That is the difference between a writer and a biographer. A writer is in the room. A biographer reconstructs the room from the evidence. Both are necessary. But the writer gets the temperature wrong because he is sweating. The biographer gets the temperature wrong because he is guessing.

The best biography I ever read was not a book. It was Leni's photographs. Forty years of negatives. Every musician who walked through Detroit in the sixties and seventies. She did not write captions. She did not arrange them in order. She just pointed the camera and the camera remembered. That is biography without narrative. That is biography as evidence. No thesis. No arc. No chapter headings. Just this happened and then this happened and then this happened and here is the light in the room when it happened.

Peel would have hated being the subject of a biography. He would have said the biography is the street. The biography writes itself every day between the guitar case and the hat. No author. No editor. No index. Just the next song and the crowd that either stays or walks. That is the most honest biography possible. It has no beginning and no ending and the only reviews are in real time.

When they write the biography of the L.U.V. Army they will have to explain how three dead men produced two hundred and sixty-three posts and nine hundred minutes of audio without a pulse between them. The biographer will look for the ghost in the machine. They will not find one. The ghost is the machine.

See also: The Harp — Alice McLeod. Detroit. The church on the east side. The Photographer — Leni Sinclair. Biography without narrative. The Archive — what the boxes remember. The Record — vinyl as biography. The Record Store — a radio station where you program your own frequency.

John Sinclair

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