6,557 MILES TO NOWHERE 5
A MATTER OF Life and Death
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
CCH001.inddH001.indd 5 88/10/10/10/10 88:57:32:57:32 AAMM CCH001.inddH001.indd 6 88/10/10/10/10 8:57:388:57:38 AMAM 1 6,557 Miles to NOWHERE Revisiting the sites of rock’n’roll departures
by CHUCK KLOSTERMAN DECEMBER 2003
This is the piece that (eventually) became the skeletal structure for Killing Yourself to Live , a book some people love and many people hate. The principal reason certain readers dislike that book is that they feel betrayed— they go into the process assuming it’ s going to be about the locations where rock musicians died, and that ’ s not the point. Killing Yourself to Live is a memoir about all the spaces in between, and the relationship between the past and the present and the imagined. Thematically, it ’ s totally different from this original story, which is only about the places I visited (as opposed to how I got there). I remember this article as mostly straightforward journalism, except that the para- graphs are pretty long and I occasionally snort cocaine.