The other day, Daphne sent me a link to an interview with Peter Wild, the editor of a planned series of short fiction anthologies taking inspiration from the music of several beloved bands. The first of those, Noise, is out now, taking its inspiration from Sonic Youth and featuring work from the likes of Mary Gaitskill, Laird Hunt, and Kevin Sampsell. That pretty much has me sold; I suspect I’ll end up picking up the anthology sometime this weekend. This also gets me thinking, though, about the roots of fiction inspired by pop songs: looking at Wild’s anthology series, 2004’s Lit Riffs, and the THE2NDHAND Mixtape series* indicates that there’s no shortage of writers today drawing inspiration from their record collections, and the blog Loose Strife blends criticism with a running narrative into something utterly unique. I’m wondering where the first instance of this was — Lester Bangs’s “Maggie May” comes to mind, but I’d have to think that something predated it. Is there something obvious I’m overlooking

(An aside: the Anthem interview mentions that a future volume in the same series will focus on the Velvet Underground; I’m wondering whether that’s the place that Tony O’Neill’s “Black Angel’s Death Song”-inspired story — which I heard him read at the October 2007 THE2NDHAND Mixtape reading, and which is one of the most unsettling pieces of fiction I’ve encountered in a while — will turn up.)

*-which I’ll admit I’m not entirely unbiased towards.