Christine Weiser has created excellently-named bands both actual and fictional. In real life, she played bass in Mae Pang, the '90s all-girl garage trio fronted by her partner in crime, Lynette Byrnes, with whom she still plays bass around town in The Tights. And with Mae Pang - misspelled after John Lennon's '70s "lost weekend" girlfriend - as her template, Weiser's now given birth to Broad Street, the terrific Philadelphia rock roman a clef that she'll read from this weekend at the Atlantic Bookshop on South Street on Saturday and at the Big Blue Marble bookshop in Mt. Airy on Sunday.
Broad Street is the name of the book and the name of the band that Weiser's bass playing protagonist, Kit, forms with her cool friend Margo. Kit works for a medical publisher in Center City, and though she used to spin Chrissie Hynde and L7 records on her college radio station, she's a passive member of the Khyber Pass and Trocadero-centric Philly rock scene until she meets Margo, a charismatic presence with hidden vulnerabilities who turns her on to Wanda Jackson's "Fujiyama Mama."
And the rest is herstory, or at least a female friendship tale of growing self-esteem that gets all the grimy details right - from the deceitful rock boys in Stooges T-shirts to the shout-outs to long lost local bands of the era like Electric Love Muffin. Kit and her sister Nikki have enough boyfriend trouble to satisfy readers seeking a chick-lit fix. But the core of the book is Kit's relationship with Margo, and the compelling and convincingly rendered scenes of them learning to make music together.
The best part about Broad Street, though, is that Weiser, who lives in Elkins Park and is cofounder of the literary journal Philadelphia Stories (and has already completed a sequel to Broad Street), is a real writer who gets Kit's interior voice down in clean, concise prose. "I felt like a frog pinned down to a board, a scalpel dangling above me," is how the self-conscious protagonist describes being dissected by Margo's gaze when they first meet a Center City hipster party with a Nirvana soundtrack. And she's funny, too: She captures the perils of being in an all girl band when a pervert approaches the stage, "gray tongue slithered out between thin chapped lips" and "brown teeth emerged in a reptilian smile," Kit realizes the mic stand was "my only bodyguard against his drunken hormones." (There's also a cool part where a Broad Street show at the Troc gets reviewed in the Inquirer by some hack music critic with alliterative initials, but you'll have to read the book to find out about that.)
Weiser reads from Broad Street at Atlantic Books at 5 on Saturday and at Big Blue Marble at 3 on Sunday.
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