ElleBee

During my first foray to the Golden Public Library, I came out with a motley assortment of books that I mostly just happened upon while wandering through their meager fiction collection. Petal Pusher caught my eye because of the bright pink binding and because of the subtitle "A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story." How could I resist?

Petal Pusher is a memoir of a woman who moved from Madison, Wisconsin to form a rock band in Minneapolis in the late 80s, when that city's music scene was exploding with great bands such as The Replacements and Soul Asylum. Lindeen writes about forming ZuZu's Petals with her two close friends, their Minneapolis gigs and subsequent low-budget tours around the US, getting signed by a minor label, their low-budget tours around England, and dating her future husband, Paul Westerberg, one of the Replacements (now, of course, more famous for his solo career).

Lindeen's book is a bit scattered at times and a bit mundane at others. Tales of life on the road are fun the first time around, but don't need to be rehashed in such detail as she devotes to them in the "second tour" scenes of the book. One element of her life that could have been more interestingly woven into her memoir is her fight with MS from a very young age. Readers get a detailed chapter early on about her discovery of the disease, but very little about how she manages a career in rock and roll while fighting MS is included in the book.

Petal Pusher was interesting enough to send me to YouTube to see if any old videos exist of Zuzu's Petals, and I was able to dig up this:

I think I would've loved this band in third grade when I was obsessed with someday becoming Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles.

And, a funny side note, I was talking to Nate about the book and he asked the name of the band. Turns out he owned a Zuzu's Petals album back in the day when his favorite record store in Fort Collins used to have "10-CDs for a Buck" sales at which he would buy all sorts of weird shit. Sadly, Zuzu's Petals did not make it onto the mp3 player and was sold at our garage sale along with all of Nate's other CDs in 2005.