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Society's Child
 AnAutobiography
By Janis Ian
Tarcher Penguin
The acrid smell of self-combusting child stars permeates the annals of pop culture. The stories of those who make it big early, only to crash and burn later in life, are so ingrained in our cultural myth, that we almost take it for granted that the Tatum O’Neals and Britney Spears’ who ride the rocket to the stars before they are old enough to vote, will have to pay for their good fortune with miserable adulthoods. In the end, some youthful celebrities sink obscurely into the ashes from whence they came — and some, like Janis Ian, survive.
During her almost-five decades as a folk singer and songwriter, beginning at the age of fifteen, Ian’s has experience enough ups and downs to satisfy even the most gnawing appetite for schadenfreude. Yet, in her surprisingly buoyant, new autobiography, Society’s Child, she does much to explain how she managed to avoid self-immolation and mine success from her iconoclastic vision for the past half-century.
To most, Janis Ian, is best known for two unlikely hit songs recorded a decade apart. The first was, “Society’s Child,” a plaintive lament about interracial dating, written and pressed to vinyl in 1965, when she was still in high school. The second was, “At Seventeen,” a folk song about adolescent angst that reached number one on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart in 1975, and which she performed on the first episode of “Saturday Night Live.” Both songs, while hardly representing her huge body of work, still stand in as a kind of shorthand for the confessional — some would say, depressing — type of songwriter she was, and continues to be.
Several forces shaped Ian’s somber sensibility. The first was her atypical family life. She was born to working class parents in New Jersey who were suspected Communists during the years when the House Un-American Activities Committee ran roughshod over anyone thought to be even the slightest bit, red. While her contemporaries wondered which poodle skirt to wear to the prom, Ian wondered when the FBI would show up at the door and force her family to move again.
If that didn’t make her feel like an outsider, there was always her genius-level IQ and preternatural musical talent to further set her apart. At the age of three, Ian was already a prodigy on the piano. By the time she was in fourth grade she had taught herself to play guitar and written her first song. At 14, Ian was offered her first recording contract from Elektra records.
This contract led her to The Shangri-Las’ producer, Shadow Morton. He wanted to record a song Ian had written called, “Baby, I’ve been Thinking,” though he insisted they change the title to something catchier.
When Leonard Bernstein featured Ian’s performance of the renamed, “Society’s Child,” on his TV special, “Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution,” the teenager found herself at the center of a racist firestorm. It was the height of the Civil Rights era, and this song, about a white girl with a black boyfriend, was incendiary stuff to scores of listeners. Yet, "Society's Child" managed to reach number14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and cemented Ian’s success. This led to the first of several national tours during which she was befriended by everyone of note in the 1960s pop music world from Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to folk-music idol, Joan Baez, who later recorded the Ian-penned ballad, “Jesse .”
By the early 1970s, with six albums to her credit, Ian abandoned the coffee houses of New York to try her luck in Los Angeles. It was there, under contract to CBS, that her professional life again accelerated, and her romantic life took a risky turn: she fell in love with a woman. Becoming a self-identified homosexual in the pre-Ellen 1970s was about as unpopular as singing about mixed-race relationships had been in the pre-Obama 1960s. However, as she’d already shown, societal disapproval was never likely to suppress her instincts.
Her 1975 album, Between the Lines, it’s number one single “At Seventeen,” and her Grammy win that year for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance pushed Ian to a new level of fame and prosperity. She rode this wave of success into the early 1980s, with at least one more hit song, the Georgio Moroder produced, “Fly Too High,” featured in the movie Foxes. However, her failure to produce another hit album led to a fallow period that lasted from 1982 to 1992, during which her record company dropped her.
This was a turbulent time in her personal world, too. In a regrettable turn of events, Ian describes how she met and married Tino Sargo, the abusive, but charming former boyfriend of her first girlfriend. By 1985, the marriage had devolved into physical violence, finally ending when Sargo threatened to murder her.
Restless to get her life back on track after dumping her husband, Ian went to Nashville, Tennessee, where A&R executives at MCA Records had suggested she might team up with some of the local songwriters and get back to hit making. Though she knew next to nothing about Nashville or country music, as she tells it, “I set foot on the tarmac, and the oddest thought popped into my head: I’m home. I’m finally home.”
Ian did team up, both romantically and professionally with songwriter, Kye Fleming. “Some People’s Lives,” the song they wrote together would become a hit for Bette Midler. But the fragile stability of this period would be short-lived. Soon, Ian would be plagued by a series of events far more life threatening than heartbreak.
First, she was almost-fatally downed by a ruptured intestine. Then, just as she was recovering from surgery, she discovered that her long-time business manager had embezzled money and failed to pay seven years worth of her income taxes.
The Internal Revenue Service stepped in and demanded payments that exceeded Ian’s earnings and savings combined. The agent assigned to her case was unsympathetic to her circumstances, and singled her out for harassment — much as the FBI had beleaguered her father during her childhood. Liens were placed on her bank accounts. Her royalties were confiscated and she was obliged to liquidate her home and investments. In the end, she would have to sell her publishing catalog, including “At Seventeen,” to a Japanese publishing firm to pay the debt.
Meanwhile, her affair with Fleming ended and her mother’s health was degenerating. Ian recalls, “My home was gone. My life with Kye was over. I’d never again feel the comfort of my mother’s arms around me. What did I have left?”
Apparently, what she had left was a potent combination of brains, talent and resiliency. In 1993 she would emerge from her financial and health struggles with a new love interest, another album, Breaking the Silence, and a ninth Grammy nomination.
“Life was back to its old routine,” she says of this period. “Write some songs, make a record, tour behind it, then start the whole thing over again.” But, the monotony was getting to her. “I felt like a broken record… I’d be fifty soon — did I really want to spend the rest of my life doing exactly what I’d done since I was fourteen?”
In addition to songs, Ian had begun writing columns for the GLBT publication, The Advocate and for Performing Songwriter magazine. It was in Performing Songwriter that she, once again, took an unpopular public stance — this time against the status quo for musicians and the recording industry. In an article, titled, “The Internet Debacle,” she asserted that the Internet was becoming the final refuge for struggling artists. Instead of killing the music business, she maintained that downloads, which were then in their pre-iTunes infancy, were its next logical outlet.
“I argued that we’d made our audience mistrust us, by charging them $15.99 for CDs they knew cost just a few dollars to manufacture. I was convinced that, given the choice between stealing music and affordable downloads, people would be willing to pay.”
“The Internet Debacle,” unleashed a familiar tempest of criticism. So, without a record contract — and no prospect of one in the near future — Ian put her monetary prospects where her pen had already gone and started an Internet portal to distribute her music — which, as she predicted, became a money-maker.
Now nearing her sixth decade, Ian still records and tours as a performer. She also continues to write prose, including, in an unlikely turn of events, science fiction stories. She sells her songs and memorabilia on her website, runs a scholarship fund for women returning to college, and has just released, The Autobiography Collection, a double-CD of her greatest hits.
In the engaging Society’s Child, Ian provides a candid look at the triumphs and pitfalls of an individual who has always proudly held her freak flag high. Her somewhat clunky attempts at self-analysis in the book are heartfelt, but less illuminating than one would hope. Still, her straightforward telling of events suggests that her long-time survival as an artist is the result of two basic qualities: her inability to compromise her fundamental values and her capacity to consistently evolve — from child star to adult, from singer to writer and even from vinyl to digital.
For her, childhood stardom wasn’t a predetermined path to self-immolation — but selling herself out would have extinguished her flame long ago.
For more about Janis Ian, or to purchase her songs, autobiography or memorabilia go to www.janisian.com.
Rating: 
This review appears in the September 2008 issue of Record Collector News.
Evil Genius
 By Catherine Jinks
Harcourt
Nine-year-old Cadel Piggot is the anti-Harry Potter. Like Harry, he’s an orphan who has been raised by uncaring, clueless adults. Like Harry, he feels a sense of isolation and sadness because of the lack of real affection in his life. Like Harry, he is imbued with powers greater than all those in his sphere. And just like Harry, Cadel is finally freed from his dull life to study at a school that is designed to hone his special talents. However, unlike Harry Potter, Cadel Piggot does not end up in a school that teaches him to fight evil in order to save the world. On the contrary, Cadel is has been chosen for a different path.
As he discovers from his therapist, Thaddeus Roth, Cadel is really the offspring of one Phineas Darkkon, a mad scientist and master criminal. Like every mad scientist before him, Darkkon has but one goal, world domination. This however is difficult for the aging criminal, since he is incarcerated in a maximum-security prison in the U.S. Still, he is determined to continue his quest through his sole offspring, a young boy with a genius IQ.
He communicates his plans to the boy during Cadel’s thrice-weekly therapy sessions by means of a series of concealed videophones that employ fantastic biotechnology. Given his status as an arch-villain, Darkkon must hide these devices in a variety of places, including at one point, his cell’s toilet bowl.
At the age of thirteen, newly minted high school graduate, Cadel begins attending the Axis Institute. The college, run by Darkkon and Roth, boasts a highly unusual curriculum. Its syllabus includes mandatory courses in forgery (cultural appreciation), disguise (personal presentation), explosives (applied physics) and embezzlement (accounting). Cadel excels in each subject, but his personal interest lies in computer infiltration.
Like many a modern genius, Cadel is a hacker. When not using his computer expertise to infiltrate transportation systems and national security, he starts an online dating service called Partner Post. Partner Post is a way for him to make some money while studying one of his primary interests, human behavior — because, as his therapist reminds him, world domination begins with dominating and controlling people. Cadel uses the postings of his clients to observe human weaknesses and desires, and, employing various guises, answers all the mail himself. One female client, in particular, intrigues him, and he creates a clever persona to befriend her.
Back at the institute, all is not well. The halls are filled with burn-marks from errant explosions, and redolent with noxious smells from biological terrorism experiments gone awry. The staff is a motley bunch of criminals who hate the students only slightly less than they hate each other. And the students are dying off, one-by-one, under mysterious circumstances. Cadel dutifully attends Axis classes and does his work, but becomes increasingly worried that he is not cut out to be a criminal if murder is involved. When he begins to unravel the secrets of the institute and his own past, by hacking into the teachers’ email, he decides to make a break for it.
This is easier said than done since he is being monitored 24-hours a day. But Cadel is a genius, after all, and using all the skills a child trained to be a criminal can muster, he begins a process that brings down everyone in his world.
Part young adult novel, part fantasy and part cat-and-mouse suspense tale, Evil Genius is a compelling and delightful romp. Australian author Catherine Jinks strikes just the right note between humor and menace, and never gets too ridiculous in her fictional constructs. The book makes one long to don a disguise and see what mischief he or she can pursue, without getting too amoral about it. Evil Genius, and its sequels, may do much to fill the void left by the conclusion of Harry Potter’s adventures. And while the magic in this story is of a very different nature, it is magic just the same.
Rating:
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