Jesse Malin’s memoir Almost Grown is a quintessential New York story, filled with chance encounters with legends such as Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone. It’s also the story of an artist growing up in New York City, discovering his identity, and his journey from hardcore to punk to singer-songwriter, rubbing elbows with Bruce Springsteen. Of course, there is the spinal stroke that brought him even more attention, but it would be a mistake to assume that the spinal stroke was the catalyst. Truth be told, Malin‘s life has been book-worthy for a long while.
“I wrote Almost Grown during an intense time. I started it just before the spinal stroke. I wound up writing a lot in the hospital and in a clinic in Argentina during probably the worst two years of my life,” Malin shares. “At the time, my present was not where I wanted to be. I really believe in being in the moment, but that moment was hospitals, so writing was an opportunity to revisit the past and to look back.”
Malin had the idea for Almost Grown for a while, conceiving it as a love letter to a lost New York and as a means to tip his hat to the people he met along the way who influenced him. While that includes some well-known people, Punk Rock 101 isn’t a prerequisite for enjoying the book.
“There are some household names in there, and some of the press people really focus on that. It’s made me feel a little self-conscious about it,” he says. “I didn’t want to write what amounts to another rock guy’s book on the merch table, filled with stories like, ‘We played the show, and we got wasted.’ Those books are fun, and I read them, too, but I was shooting for something more. I wanted the reader who doesn’t know Iggy Pop to still enjoy the book.”
That’s an easy task. Almost Grown flies by as Malin recalls his early misadventures on and around 42nd Street, and playing shows at CBGB as a young teen. “I could walk out my door, take a bus and a train or two, and within a couple of hours, I could get to everything that was happening. Even being near it at a distance was dangerous and exciting,” he recalls.
Just as important to Jesse Malin’s memoir are family and friends who aren’t famous. Almost Grown is also about his family and friends outside his rock aspirations, and those are some of the book’s most poignant stories.
“I tried to work on that balance really hard, to keep this from being just a list of famous people I encountered throughout my life. It would have been hard to leave that stuff out, because meeting some of these people as a young person really inspired me,” Malin says. “They were my professors, as the Hold Steady‘s Craig Finn says in the song ‘Constructive Summer’. Joe Strummer might have been our only decent teacher. People like Joe, Jello Biafra, and HR from Bad Brains taught me so much, but my favorite parts are not just me running into celebrities.”
Another aspect of writing Almost Grown was revisiting mistakes, ones made by others and ones made by Malin. Writing and the passage of time have led him to have a more balanced view of his past. “At this point in life, I just want peace with the past and peace with people. I am a big fan of acceptance, forgiveness, and love, as they say in the movies,” he laughs. “But seriously, I know of times when I’ve hurt people, and I hope I can be forgiven. I try to flip that around and understand those who hurt me, too. Shit happens when you are young, when people are fucked up, or when they are just going through shit. In my recent years, I’ve developed a softness and a sensitivity that might not have been there if I wrote this book ten years ago.”
There’s also the matter of writing about other real people, and how they might react to the stories told. For his part, Jesse Malin considered that and tried to show some sensitivity.
“It’s my version of what happened, and I am sure, you know, everybody’s got their versions of any particular story in the book. But I tried to reach out to close friends and ex-girlfriends and let them read things just to make sure that they were okay with it. I did have to change some stuff. You know, ten years ago, I would have just written the book and been like, ‘This is how I see it.’ For the most part, people weren’t that freaked out. Sometimes, I would get a ‘Maybe remove this one thing here. I am married now, and I have kids.’ That was fine with me. I wasn’t trying to write [Legs McNeill’s sordid, seminal punk history] Please Kill Me. That type of decadence wasn’t the point of the book I was trying to write,” he explains.
“Debra Devi, who worked on the book with me, said the best way to do it would be just to be truthful and cutthroat to what I felt, so it was a balance of doing that and reflecting on my part in all of it, too,” he continues. “I learned from my enemies, from breakups, and from bad bandmates. It’s a journey, and you have to flip it back at yourself to see that you were part of it, too.”
Almost Grown is also a tribute to people who have been part of the journey. “Of course, there are major influences, like my grandfather or the Vespolis, the family that I stayed with when my mother died, and people that I met along the way during van jobs, and my core group of friends from when I was 12. They’re people that I still speak with today. Sometimes family falls apart, and you lose people because of a divorce or a death or just a general dysfunction. I feel lucky to have had these people in my life. We create our own family outside where we can,” he says.
Jesse Malin’s parents passed when he was a teenager, and he wasn’t always able to make sure things were left on good terms. “My relationship with my sister ends up being the two of us after everybody’s gone, and we’re still teenagers, and it’s just that bond, even to this day. When I think about my father, here is this guy that’s not around, and the relationship is negative and unsupportive, but then suddenly he comes around a little bit, and then he’s gone. I came by some forgiveness and learning through the process of writing Almost Grown,” he explains.
There is also reckoning with the misadventures of youth, and the after-effects. “When you are hungry to get out of your town and see some other things, you also find some lessons. Curiosity didn’t kill the cat, but almost,” Malin laughs. “Getting mugged at age 11 on 42nd Street, at the time, was a real bum out, but now it’s a laugh. In a way, they saved my life. These guys did me a favor, you know. If they did what I wanted them to do instead of mugging me, I’d probably be a bigger mess than I am now. Tragedy plus time is comedy. Then there are the people like Giorgio Kamelski, who used that rehearsal space to help him pay his bills when he was down on his luck. He created a space for us to learn how to put on shows, how to promote, and so much more.”
Of course, many of these life lessons and stories are set in and around the late 1970s and 1980s New York music scene. Almost Grown is a memoir of a life and a study of a city, and since that DIY energy is what fueled Jesse Malin, it’s impossible to tell his story without it.
“Punk and hardcore in the early 1980s were huge for me. There were no rules. It was all coming together organically. I was part of something very small and tribal that was also somehow connected to the whole country, even without the tools we have now. All these people out there making their own records, fanzines, and flyers,” Malin recalls. “As my friend Victor Murgatroyd says, ‘There’s always ways.’ That scene was so vital for me and everyone around me,” Malin says. “You can’t do it alone. You need to find like-minded people, and you need to appreciate them when you find them,” he says. “It doesn’t always work out. There are the sketchy club owners, but you also find people who stick around.”
One of the more amusing anecdotes in Almost Grown is when a 12-year-old Malin gets Joey Ramone’s phone number and calls him. Malin grills Ramone about all the music of the day, like Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello, to which Ramone says, “They’re just British guys trying to be Bruce Springsteen.” “At the time, I was like, ‘What does he know?’” Malin laughs.
Eventually, Jesse Malin came to appreciate Ramone’s hot takes as he broadened his own palette. After time in punk and hardcore, including a major label run with his 1990s band D-Generation, his songwriting took a turn as he began to dig deeper into artists like Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bragg. It wasn’t always well-received in his circles, though, despite the acclaim his albums have earned.
“At that time, it felt so radical, because my friends were still into this scene down at CBGB’s or at the hardcore matinee shows. For me, those artists are similar. There are these different ways to be punk, which I think became more apparent with artists like Frank Turner and Chuck Reagan, and me. There is a connection to folk or roots music or songwriters with punk rock once you start reading the lyrics more carefully. Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and Bruce Springsteen were pretty edgy, too,” he says.
“When you are younger, you look at the outfits, and you look at the way it’s packaged,” he continues. “You need that. You need to be separate. You need to point fingers at the other thing. Lines used to be drawn, especially before festivals like the first years of Lollapalooza, but when you get older, you see that it’s connected and you open up to taking it all in. You start to see that it’s more about the message than just how it looks or sounds.”
Some of the best songs capture moments and leave the rest to the listener to imprint upon, where the memoir seeks to capture a life, at least in spirit. That distinction became part of Malin’s discovery process while writing Almost Grown.
“In a song, you can be poetic and vague, and you can change names and characters to make it so people don’t know exactly what you are saying or who you are talking about. I could be singing as someone else, even. There is a way to artistically and poetically keep yourself from being fully exposed,” he explains. “But here, I was writing about how things felt to me in a direct way. There is a different kind of coloring. I’ve always liked memoirs where people really open up, or works of fiction where the author is really inside the character’s head, so I wanted to do that,” he explains.
Malin received a great deal of attention after his spinal stroke, even from outlets that don’t cover music, despite being a respected singer-songwriter for decades. Likely, some people who saw him on CBS Saturday Morning in 2024 discussing the spinal stroke will start paying attention to him who wouldn’t have otherwise, but Jesse Malin has decided that’s not his concern. His latest music is the just-released I Would Do It For You Vol. 1, a tribute and fundraiser album that features him collaborating with other artists on new versions of some of his best songs, with more on the way.
“I’m working on my next record right now. It crosses my mind sometimes that people are going to think, ‘Oh, that’s the guy who had the spinal stroke’,” he says. All I can do is be who I am. I’ve always been resilient. Winston Churchill said, ‘If you’re going through hell, just keep going.’ The stroke has made me feel a little differently about myself, too. I don’t always see myself as the cool guy all the time, but I’m working on it. The title of the book is really about process. We are always growing until we are dead if we do it right.”
