STARTING YOUNG: Flanagan decided to be
a writer at the age of 12.
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Bill Flanagan certainly had a lot of himself and Rhode Island to bring to his second novel, New Bedlam, which was released last month by Penguin Press.
As executive editor of Musician magazine in the 1980s, Flanagan chatted at length with Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Joni Mitchell, Joan Armatrading, and the like, which resulted in Written In My Soul, a collection of interviews with rock songwriters. He later traveled the globe for two years for U2: At the End of the World. So he had plenty to put into his 2000 novel A&R, about a cheerfully diabolical recording label, and he has plenty of street cred left over for his CBS News Sunday Morning music commentary. Flanagan didn’t have to pad his resume to become executive producer of Crossroads on Country Music Television. Specializing in music programming, he is also an executive vice-president of MTV Networks.
Presently living in Greenwich Village with his wife and three children, the 52-year-old Flanagan grew up in Apponaug, which he takes pains to differentiate from generic Warwick. After graduation from Brown in 1977, he wrote for numerous local and national publications, from a junk food column through political pieces and movie reviews to stories for Marvel Comics. Until 1984, when he moved to New York, he contributed to the NewPaper, the precursor of the Providence Phoenix.
Flanagan says that he’s a pretty casual TV viewer, although he did watch a lot of Bonanza episodes with his 12-year-old son to research his latest novel.
Was journalism a backup plan? Did you start out with novelist ambitions?
Well, I certainly started out with novelist ambitions, but I didn’t make too much of a distinction. From the time I was about 12, I figured I’d be a writer. Really because that just seems the easiest job that was available, from what a 12-year-old could tell.
It was your mother tongue.
That’s right. I already speak English and I know how to write. Playing a piano takes a lot more work.
It was what I did best in school. I remember thinking, “Well, I know I’m better than most 12-year-olds, so all I have to do is stay level and by the time I’m 30 —” In a way, that really, really ignorant idea paid off. If I’d known any better I might have been discouraged.
Who and what in Rhode Island were you satirizing specifically rather than generically?
I wasn’t specifically a satirizing Rhode Island. (Pause) I don’t know — maybe I was. But I didn’t think of it that way.
My editor said, “You tell such funny stories about Providence, about these guys, and all these characters, why don’t you make that your setting?” That was a light bulb going off. I said, “Oh, that makes perfect sense. Because now the world he goes into will be as familiar to me as the world he comes out of, so I can really work both sides of the street here.”
In those over-a-beer conversations, what did you find yourself telling them about Providence? Besides the usual Cianci stories?
A lot of stuff is in the book. The description of Richard’s Rhode House, which is obviously Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel. And the shoe shots, the ritual that’s maybe still going on, I don’t know [with Steve Smith and the Nakeds]. Where people would yell “Shoe shot! Shoe shot! Shoe shot!” and everyone would pour their drinks into each other’s shoes and then scarf them down. The book is just filled with stuff that Rhode Islanders will recognize and I think get a laugh out of.
When the guy from New York first drives into New Bedlam, he drives past the French Catholic Church, the Italian Catholic Church, the Portuguese Catholic Church. Again, that’s one of those things where until I left Rhode Island I didn’t realize it wasn’t universal. They tend to divide churches by religion, not by ethnicity in most places.
People must be coming to you all the time with crazy programming ideas.
I saw a show in Portugal that was presented to us at an MTV retreat from a local channel that I really thought was — as much as you always think they could go lower, it could not go lower. It was three guys in a bathtub. They shoved a hose up one guy’s rear end and gave him a beer enema, then they pump him full of beer from the wrong end. And then he had massive diarrhea, which they then scooped up and drank. Then they vomited it all out because, basically, they poisoned themselves. I remember sitting in a room full of television executives going [shakes his head]: “You better get out your rosary, because clearly we’ve reached the end of the world. The Visigoths must be coming. This civilization has reached the end.” Now when you see stuff like that, there’s no room left for satire. You can’t parody that. Frankly, I feel uncomfortable describing that. I guess all I’m saying is that there’s no limit to what people are willing to do to get themselves on television.
What about hopeful signs? There are Deadwoods as well as Wife Swaps.
Well, mathematically the more people there are, the more chances there are to make something good.
Aside from the fact that, yes, there is a lot of good stuff on TV is the fact that now I can time-shift [with TiVo]. It’s like having novels that you pile up on your nightstand until you have the opportunity to actually pick them up and read them. The fact that you can now digest television that way makes me much more of a television fan.
There can be more quality on TV with cable programs because a smaller niche audience is enough?
Exactly. The music business, the TV business. Through DVDs, the movie business has become more like the book business. Everything doesn’t have to be The Da Vinci Code, you know? Everything doesn’t have to be a blockbuster.