bigamericandemon Punk icon Jack Grisham and his semi-fictional and totally fantastical memoir, An American Demon, cannonballed into the pop-culture hot tub last May 1, which is … let’s see, oh wow, is that really almost four months ago?

Yep.

If it doesn’t seem that long, that’s good. It mostly means you’re not Jack Grisham, who has always seemed much too much for anyone to be. For many years, especially the ones that dressed him in the fame that he still wears today, it was most especially too much for Grisham.

Not anymore—not from the outside, anyway—although it’s clear even from here that being Jack Grisham is still a lot. At age 49, with a bad back among the aches and injuries of a bloody youth, Grisham has been fully—and perhaps painfully—aware of the promotional interviews and appearances that have dominated his life since April. Of course, at 22 years sober, he has only had to do them one day at a time.

Last Thursday was the day he spent an hour on Greater Long Beach Radio … with Elizabeth Glazner?

Yep.

It is Glazner, an accomplished journalist and storyteller—and most important to this situation, a story reader—who brought Grisham to Greater Long Beach Radio.  Quickly: she bought An American Demon, got immediately and deeply into it, pulled herself away just long enough to ask if she could write a review of the book—including an interview with the author—for GreaterLongBeach.com, tried to get off the line and back to the book, but stayed maybe a minute more to consider a request that she conduct part of the interview on Greater Long Beach Radio … and said, “Yep.”

An American Demon is the story of an abused little boy from Long Beach who became a powerful influence and an intriguing star in the earliest days of Southern California punk music by stuffing his songs with the pain, rage and absurdity of those childhood beatings—and still had so much left over that filled his own life, and of course, the lives of his victims, with episodes of almost unspeakable violence.

The book is part graphic novel and even-more-graphic confessional. Grisham tells the story of his music and mayhem from the point of view of a demon, and plays loosely with some of the details, but there is no doubt that most of what unfolds in the book, really and disturbingly happened.

Obviously, life is immeasurably better for Grisham now, but that’s not always the same as easier. He’s changed, which is among the points of An American Demon—and the only reason it was possible for him to write it.

But as Grisham has acknowledged in several interviews, his change—his sobriety—doesn’t begin until the book’s last page. It has endured 22 years, but as much as some people in recovery talk about their new life or their two lives, Grisham’s sobriety has not erased or disguised the evidence that he is the same man, living the same life—but living that life  much differently … isn’t he?

With An American Demon, as with his most-famous music-making years with TSOL, Grisham is once again making art by drawing from his shockingly deep capacities to be alternately—and extremely—riveting and revolting. He is once again riding the momentum of a wave he created, which once again may be getting to the verge of becoming more than he anticipated.

This time, finally, that could be good for everybody.

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