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PETAL PUSHER by Laurie Lindeen

PETAL PUSHER

A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story

by Laurie Lindeen

Pub Date: June 5th, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9232-0
Publisher: Atria

The autobiography of a little-known alternative music-maker whose greatest claim to fame is being married to a punk-rock icon.

After dropping out of college in 1984, all Wisconsin native Lindeen wanted out of life was to start a female punk band—and to get out of Wisconsin. As research, she hit a bunch of rock clubs throughout the Midwest, eventually deciding that Minneapolis is an ideal musical breeding ground. Up to Prince-land she went, accompanied by her friends Phyll and Coleen. Once settled, Lindeen became happily immersed in the punk scene, but her excitement is tempered when she’s diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. This doesn’t stop her from creating and fronting a band she dubs Zuzu’s Petals, a nod to the film It’s a Wonderful Life. Zuzu’s Petals suffers through the typical trials and tribulations of a typical indie rock band—but the road for Lindeen is bumpier. Eventually she meets Paul Westerberg, the mercurial leader of the Replacements, which leads to marriage and motherhood—and, it seems, a book deal. Lindeen is a competent storyteller, but the ground she walks here was trod upon last year in far more compelling fashion by singer/songwriter Jen Trynin in her music-tinged memoir, Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be. Lindeen relates too many of her life’s mundane details, which come across as filler, and grow tiresome.

An inspirational fight against a life-altering illness can’t save this clichéd debut from staleness.