“Catcher in the Rye,” J. D. Salinger’s most famous book, has been a pop-culture icon for a half-century, for better and for worse. Rock-and-roll bands have been particularly attracted to it and to its anti-hero, Holden Caulfield, who has what can only be called a rock-and-roll personality: both passionate and cynical, protective of innocence and drawn to beauty. Artists like Billy Joel, the Offspring, and Old 97s have mentioned the book in their lyrics. Green Day even recorded a song called “Who Wrote Holden Caulfield” on its second album, “Kerplunk.”
Of all the songs written about, against, or in thrall to the work of J. D. Salinger, one of the strangest is one of the most straightforward: “Catcher in the Rye,” by Guns N’ Roses, which appeared on the band’s almost infinitely delayed “Chinese Democracy.” The song appears to be about childhood abuse and the loss of innocence, both themes in the novel, and also about the way that shattered innocence can trigger a cycle of violence. Axl Rose’s lyrics gesture toward the saddest way in which the book is associated with rock and roll, Mark David Chapman’s murder of John Lennon—the book obsessed Chapman, and he was carrying it when he killed Lennon—at the same time that they allude to “Comin’ Thro The Rye,” the Robert Burns poem that Holden Caulfield misreads, giving the novel its title:
And then the voices went away from me
Somehow you set the wheels in motion
That haunt our memories
You were the instrument
You were the one
How a body
Took the body
You gave that boy a gun
The New Yorker
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