The Smiley Smile Message Board

http://artsfuse.org/76025/fuse-remembrance-be-the-rock-star-a-tribute-to-jules-siegel/

Sad. Interesting fellow. R.I.P.

Damn. Back in November, and we're just now finding out about it?

“Be the rock star. Don’t be the rock journalist.”

What a great quote. RIP.

Steve Webb posted a link on Facebook. I hadn't heard anything.

RIP, Jules Siegel.

Cool little memory of posting him a couple of paperbacks in exchange for a text file copy of "Goodbye Surfing, Hello God".

A 

Sad to hear - "Goodbye Surfing, Hello God" was such a huge milestone on my path of Smile discovery back in the day.  RIP Mr. Siegel.

Well - this was the first I'd heard about it. Looking at the Thomas Pynchon list at waste.org, I see that on Dec. 3, someone pointed out that Jules Siegel's Wikipedia entry had been changed to note a date of death, and someone else mentioned that Siegel's wife's Facebook page had condolence posts on it.  

But other than that, nobody had anything to say at the list about his death - remarkable, because in its early days in the '90s, Siegel was a very prolific and volatile contributor to it, later converting his posts into what is still the only book of a biographical nature about Pynchon, "Lineland."

(The book incorporated his Playboy article about the writer, which discusses the evening he took Pynchon to visit Brian, and also quoted the future novelist's words when his parents came to visit him at Cornell University, where Siegel was his freshman roommate: "Jules, I'd like you to meet my mother. She's an anti-Semite. Mom, this is my friend Jules. He's Jewish.")

And apart from the blogpost linked to above I see no obituary for Siegel online, as yet.

I was on the Pynchon list back when Siegel was posting there. He was not well thought of, I recall...

Yes, this.  

I also love listening to that weird studio session from '66 with Siegel, Anderle, Vosse, Brian, Diane, and whoever else may have been there on whatever substances they were using.  (quoted in my signature)

"Fade Jules out." 

R.I.P.

RIP, Jules.

Like many, Goodbye Surfing Hello God piqued my interest in the original Smile tapes when I read it in LLVS, and not only that, it's a fine piece of journalism - lucid, enthusiastic yet not gushing without cause. It perfectly surmises the dichotomy of Smile - the jubilation of Brian's creativity and the paranoia that came with it, and doesn't sensationalise Brian either for making music at the dinner table or bugging out because a friend has 'bad ESP'. It's a great, great piece.

Very sorry to hear this. I had a lovely correspondence with him in 09. I just bought the PDF of "Goodbye Surfing" and he emailed asking my interest. I would've assumed that was self-explanatory but we got yakking, mainly about his career. I'm interested in people's life after their moment of fame. He had a lot of cool insights about the writing life, then sent me a copy of his memoir, MAD LAUGHTER, complete with photography nudes (not of himself). I avoided asking about Brian and Pynchon just bc I figured he was tired of those subjects. He finally asked me if I was playing a game by not addressing what brought me to his email doorstep. I said I figured the story was in the books already. He said it wasn't---and then didn't say more. Ha---I got a chuckle out of that.

"Goodbye Surfing, Hello God" pretty much created the whole Smile mythos and remains the key text. JS was a very interesting guy, who will be missed. In all my exchanges with him, he was never less than kind and helpful.

One of best experiences of my life was studying "Goodbye Surfing" in the mid-80s in a journalism class. This was a couple of years before LLVS, when the piece wasn't widely anthologized. I knew all about the article, of course, but it was the first time I'd read it in its entirety (as opposed to excerpts that everybody and their mother culled from it). I was in a magazine writing class where we analyzed long-form profile writing, New Journalism style. Lots of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, of course, but also some really cool obscurities that made us all heady with the idea we could go on wild hairs (maybe not Hunter S. Thompson wild, but still...) and write as much as report. Alas, that was about the time when the Sunday magazine market, which was the entry for Midwesterners into that type of work, began drying up. But to get back to Jules, it was exhilarating as a Beach Boys fanatic even then to get to tear the article apart, debate the first person in it, try to sort the timeline, etc. Long self-indulgent story short: I count it as one of the best pieces of rock criticism period. (And Jules's Dylan piece for the SEP ain't bad either).