COYOTE

A sturdy, revealing biography of the playwright, actor, and musician Sam Shepard.

“Sam Shepard,” an acquaintance once observed, “was a ‘sworn enemy of stasis.’” Raised by an alcoholic, abusive father and a patiently encouraging mother, he grew up in the Mojave Desert, a place he called “just a dead end.” As Shepard scholar Dowling notes, that background shaped Shepard’s plays, in which characters “crash around in this space for a while making a certain kind of rough music and then disappear again.” An intelligent interpreter of Shepard’s work, Dowling blends lightly worn literary criticism with plenty of dish, for Shepard lived a rough-music, messy life. His title, for one, comes from Joni Mitchell’s song of the same name, written in the aftermath of a brief fling while on Bob Dylan’s storied Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. Shepard was just coming off of a relationship with the emerging rock star Patti Smith, whom he met while he was playing drums for the psychedelic jug band called the Holy Modal Rounders (having previously played in a band presciently called Heavy Metal Kid). Said musician T-Bone Burnett, also on the Dylan tour, “Sam Shepard is an incredible drummer, among other things….If you take rhythm out of his plays, there’s nothing left.” Those plays, of course, are now classics—True West, Fool for Love, A Lie of the Mind, the list goes on—often with characters who are brothers in conflict, about which Dowling sagely remarks, “The bipolar nature that’s reflected in his work was very much represented in the man.” Shepard’s own personal inconstancy and unrelenting angst can be attributed in part to his reliance on alcohol and, in his younger years, drugs (he kept up with Keith Richards, after all), and in part to a restlessness that kept him on the move over a long, productive, but always troubled life.

Readers will emerge with a deeper understanding of the roots of Shepard’s plays, and of an endlessly complex man.