”The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most, and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unh”The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most, and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.”
Rob Fleming owns a record store. We can call him Rob Fleming, but really he is John Cusack playing Rob Fleming. I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve seen enough clips from the movie to know that I can’t read this book and see Fleming as anyone other than Cusack.
He is thirty-five, and his girlfriend Laura has just packed up a suitcase and moved out. This is his seventeenth relationship, and every single one of them has ended the same way...in failure. Of course, moving out with a suitcase could be just a shot across his bow. Change, or else this will be a permanent situation. The apartment, though, is still brimming with her possessions, which means there are many more skirmishes to be fought and lines in the sand to be drawn. Laura has a new job, a grown up job, and her spiked hair is gone, and her leather jackets have been pushed to the back of her closet. She has changed. Rob has remained the same.
Is this the age old problem of women wanting men to change and men wanting women to stay the same?
Or it could be about Ian, the upstairs lothario who routinely serenaded them with the squeaks and groans of his epic bouts of sex. Is Laura’s interest in Ian about curiosity? Does she want to see what all that moaning and groaning for hours is about? Rob is insecure about his sexual prowess, and thinking about Laura with Ian drives him crazy. Most men are bundles of masculine insecurities, especially regarding their sexual performance, and since Rob is a man who likes to make lists, he even has a list of all the things that can go wrong for men.
”There’s the nothing-happening-at-all problem, the too-much-happening-too-soon problem, the dismal-droop-after-a-promising-beginning problem; there’s the size-doesn't-matter-except-in-my-case problem, the failing-to-deliver-the-goods problem. A spot of I-wonder-how-I-rank?”
Fortunately, most of the time, a man’s brain short circuits (blood flow to the mind is sent elsewhere), and he isn’t worried about any of these things at the moment of impending coitos, or there would be more failures to launch and fewer successful liftoffs. But if a man is unfortunate enough to have any of these insecurities wiggle into his brain at the most inappropriate moment, it can lead to a less than satisfactory conclusion and a doubling down on his rampaging inferiority complex.
Rob can no longer claim to be a kid, but he is far from an adult. He is trapped in an adolescent’s view of life. He’s afraid of commitment, but he flounders when he isn’t in a relationship. It becomes obvious that Laura and Rob are miserable apart, but it doesn’t take long to realize that Laura will have to be the one to take the initiative.
I worked in a bookstore that also had a record/CD/cassette department. The people who worked in the music department were definitely different than the people who worked in the book department. We each had our own language, but of course, book people listened to music, and music people read books, so we did find ways to communicate. The list challenges that Rob and his workmates throw at each other are funny because we did that as well, pre-internet by the way. We had to pull our lists from our memory, which made for errors. I’d be driving home and suddenly remember a book that should have made my list of favorite fiction books featuring a real life person and be really irritated that I forgot it.
I was just beginning to amass a book collection. Even though I had all these cheap books available to me to buy, I also had insufficient pay to buy them with, so fortunately, I didn’t have the massive library that I have today or my future wife would have certainly dumped me, smartly so, for some guy with a BMW and an obsession with the stock market, rather than sticking with a nearsighted guy obsessed with musty old books. Rob asked the age old question, ”Is it possible to maintain a relationship and a large record [book] collection simultaneously?”I can say, it is possible. I’ve been married for twenty-eight years and counting, but I would suggest a few things: don’t expect her to be as obsessed about your collection as you are, keep your collection orderly and contained (as best you can), be able to maintain conversations about things other than your collection, watch a chick flick once in a while, grit your teeth and hang out with her “normal” friends occasionally and make her look good by being charming, and make sure the money you spend on your collection doesn’t impact the normal flow of the family finances.
I know it's a mental shift from being quite willing to eat beans for a month to buy that Cormac McCarthy first edition. I can tell you, she is not willing to do so, and that is a good thing. It’s called having a more complete life.
This is one of those books that makes you grin and wince in equal measure as you read it. Rob will have you thinking about your ten most embarrassing moments while dating, and as he makes his nostalgic tour back through all the women who left him looking for insight about himself (another problem that he suffers from is self-obsession), you will remember some of your own miscues with trying to form lasting relationships. I would have really enjoyed this book when it came out in 1995. I was 28 then, a bit younger than Rob, but still working in the book biz and certainly a bit bruised and battered by the dating wars. I would have probably found Rob’s trials and tribulations more insightful than I do now, but regardless, I still enjoyed this quirky romp through a past not that dissimilar to the one I left strewn behind me.
Janis bites her lower lip and nods. ‘And our fame raises the value of locker-room bragging. ”’We’re like…
Princesses in the age of dynastic marriages.’
Janis bites her lower lip and nods. ‘And our fame raises the value of locker-room bragging. Which the guys gain from. Oh, yeah, Janis Joplin? I know Janis. She gave me head on the unmade bed. I hate it. But how do you fight it? Or change it? Or survive it?’
‘I’m not on your level yet,’ says Elf. ‘Have you any advice?’
‘No advice. Only a fear and a name: Billie Holiday.’
Elf takes a third sip of Brutal Truth. ‘Didn’t Billie Holiday die a heroin addict with no functioning liver, under arrest on her death-bed, with only seventy cents in her bank account?’
Janis lights a cigarette. ‘That’s the fear.’”
I don’t know if there has ever been a more exploited group of artists on the planet than musicians, especially rock musicians. They hit it big with record deals and sold out crowds at their concerts, and everyone around them assumes they are rich, but in reality, they don’t have a pot to piss in. The studios and agents lock them up in contracts that make sure the bulk of the money stays with the nontalent side of the partnership. ”’Often, the talent doesn’t want to believe it, because that would prove they’re gullible morons. They prefer to look away. I know one manager who gets the talent so hooked on drugs, they’re too fried to ask about the money.’”
The road to being successful is so difficult, and everyone is aware of the number of bands that implode or never get any traction before disappearing without a trace. Bands are desperate to get a deal, and frankly, the money is secondary to just being recognized. It is easy to exploit desperation. I’ve seen writers do it, too. They are so relieved that someone wants to publish their book they couldn’t care less about the money. Goodreads depends on all of us to write reviews for free to make their site work. We do it for the love of the game.
There is a lot of suffering creating art of any kind, and I’m not sure why our system is designed to make it so hard for artists/writers/musicians to be successful. In 1967, the beginning of drug culture, the birth of rock and roll, and free love, it was so easy to exploit these creative people who were bursting with wild thoughts they needed to express and desires that needed to be fulfilled. The wrong people, as usual, became rich.
So that brings us to Utopia Avenue, made up of Jasper de Zost on guitar, Elf Holloway on the keyboard, Dean Moss on the bass, and Peter “Griff” Griffin on the drums. The first three are also writers, and so they have that special Beatles mixture of talent that gives them an edge over other bands. With that many writers in a band putting together material for an album or three is not that difficult. For me, the only real bands are those that write their own material, not that I can’t enjoy the performances of bands who buy their songs, but I love it when I know a song was written by the people performing it. So I’m already rooting for Utopia Avenue from the early pages of the novel. As the reader, I am a roadie and love helping them, from the comfort of my reading armchair, lug their equipment around to various venues as they try to find their sound.
They are lucky and find a decent agent, reasonably honest, who is there to wipe their noses, book their gigs, make sure they show up on time, and mother them through the process of reaching stardom. Success is an addictive drug, and listening to crowds start to sing your words back at you and scream for more songs the moment your set ends is like mainlining heroin or, for some, a brilliant LSD trip.
No one is affected by burgeoning success more than Dean Moss. He, in many ways, has the least. He is estranged from his family and camping out on this bloke’s couch or this chap’s hard piece of floor. He owns nothing but his bass and the songs in his head. He finds amazing girlfriends, but then can’t resist the occasional one night stand with a fan on the road. He gets caught every time, mainly because nothing about his life is private anymore. There are eyes watching him all the time. Despite his faults, or maybe because of them, I actually like Dean the best. There is something naive and honest about him, despite his sexual indiscretions, that I, if I were his friend, would do my best to keep him from tripping over his own dick. He needs some direction in a directionless world.
We have Elf Holloway, who is struggling with her personal life, not because of Deanesque problems, but because she seems attracted to the wrong people, or the wrong people are attracted to her. She brings a folksie blend to the band that has a lot to do with the unique sound they produce, which sets them apart from other bands. These are early days for girls to be in rock and roll bands, but it doesn’t take long for producers and managers to understand that the public likes seeing girls on stage. Imagine that! Her boyfriend Bruce tries to interject himself into the band politics like an Australian Yoko Ono, but it doesn’t work. The band has formed its own cosmos, and outsiders need to stay on the other side of the glass.
Jasper de Zost is a brilliant musician, on a different level than anyone else. There is money in his family, but that life exists in a parallel, non-intersecting universe. Music is everything. He is in a crucial battle with his own brain. An invader he calls Knock Knock, a demon type creature, is trying to take over his brain. The drugs that keep the creature contained are also dangerous for Jasper’s future health. He needs time to get all this music out of his head before the demon takes control. Not much was known about mental health in the 1960s, and trying to explain his condition to someone would be like trying to make them believe he is really a Martian.
Drummers always seem to take a backseat in bands. They are generally at the back of the stage and rarely a fan favorite. Griff has a good sense of humor about that, most of the time, though he can become hilariously acerbic. When he is in a car accident, the band immediately sees the problem with using another drummer. The timing is all off, and that special sauce that makes Utopia Avenue different from other bands is missing too many ingredients.
The real people populating this book, from Mick Farren to David Bowie to Janis Joplin and the ongoing hunt for John Lennon at every party, certainly add extra layers of enjoyment for me. I love this description of Jimi Hendricks:
”’We taught ourselves, sitting down in rooms. Jimi’s a street guitarist. Plays with his whole body. Calves, waist, hips.’
‘Balls, ass, and cock,’ adds Pigpen. ‘He’s the first black cat who white women, y’know, forthed for. I’ve never seen anything like it. They kinda...dripped lust.’”
So what David Mitchell does in this book is make me like all the band members. I may have my favorite, but I find myself worrying over each of them as if they are my own bundle of musically talented friends. This book will always be remembered by me as the book I read while waiting through my father’s heart valve replacement surgery. Elf, Jasper, Dean, and Griff kept me company in the corner of the waiting room while I waited for the eventual news of a successful surgery. There is always a book close to my hand, so anything that happens in my life becomes attached to the book I’m reading at the time. My memories of book plots and the ongoing plots of my life fuse into one interconnected memory. This book is forever a part of the happy news I received in the Heart Institute in Lincoln, Nebraska.
***If this review disappears. I’ve been compromised. Send in the...well, hell, there really isn’t anyone to send to save me.***
”There is no doubt in m***If this review disappears. I’ve been compromised. Send in the...well, hell, there really isn’t anyone to send to save me.***
”There is no doubt in my mind that this book will not be warmly received by all readers. In our celebrity-driven culture, calling into question the character and motivations of so many widely admired and respected figures from the entertainment community is never a good way to win popularity contests. And when those revered figures are overwhelmingly viewed as icons of various leftist causes, it is definitely not the way to win fans among those who consider themselves to be liberals, progressive or leftists. But while my sympathies lie solidly in the leftward flanks of the political spectrum, there are no sacred cows in either this book or in any of my past work.”
Prepare to have you mind blown.
I started reading this book very late at night, and after reading the preface and about half of the first chapter, my hair was standing up on the back of my neck. “Danger, Will Robinson!” was running through my brain on a continuous loop. It was so quiet that late at night I could hear the synapses crackling in my brain. Paranoia started rampaging through my mind like Godzilla ravaging Tokyo. (Seriously, no drugs involved here folks.) I thought to myself, I bought this from Amazon...there is a paper trail a mile wide saying...yes, Jeffrey D. Keeten bought this book.
Shit!
I don’t want to die. I’ve got too many fucking books to read. Who is going to read these piles of books sitting around my house if I have what is referred to as a...premature death? So maybe I shouldn’t write a review. Maybe I should not involve all of those innocent bystanders on Goodreads. Those hearty, few friends and followers who still read my reviews...all...what two of you? Okay, okay, so the body count won’t be that high if the Christians In Action (CIA) actually decide that a nobody like me shouldn’t be posting my thoughts on a book that reveals some very insidious and incendiary behavior by the very people who are supposed to be protecting us from foreign enemies.
But the CIA isn’t supposed to be working in the US?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Okay, let me wipe the tears away from my eyes so I can form some more pixels into words.
The 1960s counterculture movement was an intelligence operation managed by the CIA.
What? No way, man!
LSD was a product of a CIA program studying how to control people. Timothy Leary was a painfully obvious CIA asset. These drugs were being manufactured for distribution on the street to turn the anti-war movement into navel-gazing morons. The CIA wanted the face of the anti-war movement to be dirty, drugged out hippies, not professors and clean cut kids whom the American public might actually take seriously. Charles Manson was part of this program. Well...probably...truth is a difficult commodity to come by whenever someone is looking into a CIA program. Finding proof is never good for your health.
You’re out of your fucking mind, Keeten.
Am I? Imagine my raised eyebrow. I’ve read enough about this to begin to believe that, as crazy as any of this sounds,...it starts to make sense. The first step is to understand the agenda of the CIA.
David McGowan’s research revolved around all the strange activities that have happened in Laurel Canyon for the last several decades. The shadow looming over the sunshine and surf is coming from Lookout Mountain Observatory. The California music scene originated here, and it was primarily driven by kids of career military men. They migrated from Washington DC, and somehow all ended up in Laurel Canyon and started “producing” music that would become the driving force behind the counterculture movement. Okay, I’m going to say something shocking that will be very upsetting to many of you, especially those people who have defined their lives by the music of the 1960s. Three Dog Night, Frank Zappa, the Doors, Love, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Gram Parsons, Buffalo Springfield, and many more were all musicians/bands created by the CIA.
This is going to be the part that feels like a gut punch.
They couldn’t play their instruments for crap. Studio bands produced the records.
Oh come on, not the Lizard King...not Jim Morrison! ”So here was a guy who had never sang, who had ‘never even conceived’ of the notion that he could open his mouth and make sounds come out, who couldn’t play an instrument and had no interest in learning such a skill, and who had never much listened to music or been anywhere near a band, even to just watch one perform, and yet he somehow emerged, virtually overnight, as a fully formed rock star who would quickly become an icon of his generation. Even more bizarrely, legend holds that he brought with him enough original songs to fill the first few Doors’ albums.”
What was really irritating to me was I couldn’t resist putting the Laurel Canyon produced music on while I was reading this book. I have to hand it to the CIA; those SOBs could really write some great, fucking music. That alone kind of blows the mind. Okay, so Brian Wilson was the real deal. The guy can write music, but for most of his life, he has been a mental basket case, as if he has received too many signals on his antenna from the mothership (LOM).
So where did the hippies come from? ”Vito and his Freakers were an acid-drenched extended family of brain-damaged cohabitants.” Vito Paulekas and his wife had a similar situation as the Manson family. They engaged in sex orgies, free-form dancing, and drugs. They started dressing oddly, growing their hair out, and became the blueprint for the flower children. They were cool, and middle class kids started emulating them. These freaks would go to concerts and be the main attraction. Someone had to take attention away from David Crosby/other made up bands and the badly performed music they were making on stage. I do think, over time, these guys did learn how to make music, but in the early days they needed a distraction, and lovely people who looked like they had dropped in from outer space, dancing like fiends, was a pretty good diversion.
Come on, man. The hippie movement was real. I smoked dope, got laid, and didn’t take a shower for six months at a time. It was very real, especially everytime I raised my arm and a noxious cloud emerged. Welcome to being a manipulated low level asset of the CIA...Mr. Moonbeam.
Chapter three: The Laurel Canyon Death List is pretty sobering. I mean, this place is by far the most dangerous place on earth. The number of premature deaths, suicides, and bizarre murders that have happened to residents of this area borders on the ludicrous. Some of the suicides were simply ridiculous, but then if you’re a cop getting a late night phone call from a breathy, deep voice explaining the whys and wherefores of a short life or long future, you might just decide that suicide is the best way to wrap up a sticky case.
So why kill the very musicians and peripheral people who were perpetrating your agenda? I don’t know. David McGowan was not especially clear on this, except to say that they knew too much. Some lived long, normal lives, while many others were cut down in their twenties. I do understand that the CIA would see all of these people as expendable, but at same time, these were sons and daughters of the very people who protected and served us in the military.
David McGowan shared all the information he had gathered. Some of it was loosely threaded together, but he lets you draw your own conclusions. I’m still not sure I really grasp exactly all the nefarious things that were going on inside the Canyon, but I do believe that the CIA was involved in creating a counterculture movement that they could control. I think the moral of this story is to do our best not to be manipulated by the right or the left into being their stooges by being a distraction from the people who are really trying to make social change. Riots...are a distraction. Hippies...are a distraction. Trump...is a distraction. They all make the CIA smile.
One last freaky thing to reveal.
RIP David McGowan, who died a premature death shortly after the publication of this book. He had an aggressive form of lung cancer that took him quickly.
She pressed her forehead gently against his shoulder. ‘I know, sugah...I kno”’Pearl…’
‘What’s wrong?’ she whispered.
‘I love you...That’s what’s wrong.’
She pressed her forehead gently against his shoulder. ‘I know, sugah...I know.’”
Demetrius Octavius Calhoun (D.O.C.), trumpet player extraordinaire, was a member of the famed Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s and a veteran of World War Two. He was among 2800 Americans who volunteered for service in the Republican army of Spain, the same war that Ernest Hemingway supported and which later inspired his Pulitzer Prize winning novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Okay, let me amend that statement. The committee voted unanimously for the novel to win the Pulitzer, but because of the “scandalous” nature of the book, the president of the board, Nicholas Murray Butler, convinced them not to give an award for letters in 1941. Hemingway fully expected to win the award, so I can only imagine the steam coming out of his ears when he heard about the board’s decision.
Can you envision what would have happened if Butler had ever walked into the wrong bar in Key West?
The interesting thing about the Spanish Civil War is that, since Germany and Italy were fighting for the Nationalists, this war was really a dress rehearsal for WW2. Doc was fighting on the right side of history. If America and Britain had supported the Republican army and defeated Germany and Italy, they could have very well avoided fighting WW2 altogether. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and both Britain and the US were still licking their wounds over WW1, and another war was almost unimaginable.
So you’re thinking this book is about the Spanish Civil War, or maybe it is about Hemingway? Nope, this book is about Pearl and Doc. When Walker Smith writes a book, she places her fictional characters firmly in the realities of history. Contemporary society, soon to become history, has a very real impact on people’s lives. There is one more nugget of history I have to talk about, and it is really Smith’s fault because she makes it a central piece of her novel. The McCarthy communist witch hunts from about 1950-54, one of the darkest stains on American politics, swept up people like Paul Robeson, who, thank goodness, was born with a silver tongue. ”Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you. And no Fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?” That man gave me chills. Doc, because he fought on the communist side of the Spanish Civil War and had a good buddy who was a communist card carrying member, was right in the crosshairs of the Communist witch hunt. Being an honorable veteran of WW2 gained him nothing.
Meanwhile, Doc was trying to win his Pearl, who just happened to be inconveniently married to a deadbeat junkie.
”’This is Pearl. She’s our new singer.’
Everyone went stone silent.
Doc closed his eyes and her name took up residence in his mind. Pearl.”
Most of us might have a summer thing or a spring fling or a winter wonderland of lust/love, but for Doc, this moment was the beginning of a lifelong obsession. He’d found his North Star, his soul mate, his yin for his yang. He blew a better horn when Pearl was frolicing through his mind.
And then they lived happily ever after.
*The sound of the power going out on a record player.*
Real life isn’t Disneyland.
Periodically, investigators showed up to harass Doc over his communist associations. Redneck Southern racists wanted to string Doc up for having the audacity to try to entertain them with music. Pearl’s brother, Ronnie, was struggling with a whole host of issues. They were raising kids now, which meant that Pearl couldn’t go on the road with Doc, which was always a recipe for dissatisfaction in the strongest of relationships. The spectre that loomed over their lives was worse than all their other problems put together, and it was aptly called Hydra.
The many headed beast from mythology was a designer form of heroin, where the highs are higher and the lows are lower. Trying to get off it could cost Pearl her life. Doc would do anything to part her from her addiction, except risk her life. He started to realize that their were insidious connections between a man with a badge and the drugs that were proliferating on the street.
The drug war had begun. Was Doc ready to take on one more fight? One more war?
I first met Pearl and Doc in Walker Smith’s book Bluestone Rondo, and even though this book is a prequel to Bluestone Rondo, I would suggest reading Bluestone Rondo first. You will be left with a burning desire to find out more about Pearl and Doc, and that is when you make the very smart decision to read The Weight of a Pearl. I actually enjoyed knowing Pearl and Doc without the baggage of their history. They are suave and sexy, caught in an epic love story, but when I reached the end of Bluestone Rondo, the first thing I said to Walker Smith was...I want to know more about Doc and Pearl. She already had my hit of hydra in the needle and a tube to wrap around my arm.
The incredible amount of research that Smith had to do for these books lends weight to every book she writes. Her characters are not just living in history; they are caught up in history. The reader is brought into the story with them. If you are fortunate, you might even hear Pearl call you sugah or Doc blow a few crystal notes on his horn. You’ll feel the outrage, the hardship of just trying to live, and the sadness of knowing the forces aligned against you are powerful enough to destroy you. But like Doc and Pearl... you will fight on.
”He had always heard that a light complexion was supposed to be the most valuable asset a colored person could possess, but Joe hated the term ‘light,”He had always heard that a light complexion was supposed to be the most valuable asset a colored person could possess, but Joe hated the term ‘light, bright, and damn near white.’ The hard truth about being light-skinned was that ‘damn near’ was still damn far. He had seen too many damn nears laboring their lives away, just like his father and all the other darker Negroes in the cotton fields.”
In the beginning, there are two brothers.
They are brothers, like Romulus and Remus and Cain and Abel, and their story, like the tragic consequences of those other brothers, is not about the blood that binds them, but those insidious, sneaking thieves of reason, jealousy, and envy.
One brother is light, and the other is dark. Joe is so gifted with song that you could believe that Artemis has taken the ability of both brothers and fused it into one. Calvin Jr., missing that song in his heart, is left with seething self-loathing and vengeful anger that curls his fingers into fists. It is a story as old as the world, told here with musical accompaniment...jazz.
Joe has a Betty Grable picture over his bed, and Calvin has a picture of Lena Horne. Betty Grable’s bathing suit pinup is the most popular photo of World War Two. That is what all those American lads went to war to fight for. They dreamed of coming home, and a Grable surrogate was going to be serving them beer in an Angora sweater and poodle skirt, while the fried chicken sizzles and pops in a cast iron skillet on the stove. Calvin can’t even dream about Betty Grable, but Joe, with his light complexion, believes that there is no dream he can’t make into reality. It is interesting to me that Calvin chooses Lena Horne, as if he is still trying to possess that song that is missing from his life.
Joe Bailey dies, and Joe Bluestone, the crooning jazz singer, emerges. Calvin Bailey often wishes he’d died but lands in prison instead. Two lives that start out in the same womb diverge, but of course, there are more types of jail than the ones with bars. Joe, living as a white man, has to live with the constant fear of exposure that someone will recognize Joe Bailey lurking behind the mask of Bluestone.
Joe hooks up with a jazz band, and that is when Doc Calhoun and his wife Pearl enter his life, but at the same time, Doc and Pearl enter our lives as well. Doc and the band are trying to help Joe see beyond the words and notes. ”Junior, I’m gonna tell you this one more time: Jazz tells stories, man. Let yourself get lost in one of ‘em. And some night one’a those antiseptic songs you croon is gonna grow a soul.”(Doc calling Joe Junior has more significance than he can even know.)
The band:
”’It’s sex, man.’
‘Sex?’ Joe repeated incredulously.
‘Yeah, baby,’ Reet said. ‘Remember? Musical intercourse. Music is loaded with sex.’
A lewd grin lit up King’s face. ‘Triple tonguing and ticklin’ the ivory, baby.’
Doc caressed his trumpet. ‘Lips on her mouthpiece, and she opens right up to Papa.’”
I’m going to cut this scene short because I’m already rolling a cold water bottle across my forehead and fanning myself with a French copy of Jazz Hot.
Pearl, by her very presence in his life, is teaching Joe about what it means to really love somebody. The relationship between her and Doc is added evidence for me to believe in the concept of soul mates. ”Doc’s smile seemed to draw her to his side, and she pressed herself neatly into his arms like an interlocking piece of a jigsaw puzzle. They spoke in low whispers, laughing and touching, and seemed to generate a heat that Joe could feel from across the room.”
Joe can see, but unfortunately he cannot seem to do. His life is on a trajectory to tragedy. As Joe’s star begins to descend, Calvin’s is rising. Cain is emerging from the wilderness, and redemption is within his grasp.
You can read this story just for the plot and thoroughly enjoy yourself, or you can delve deeper into the story by stopping and reading the letters that Walker Smith has strewn along the road that will guide you through the canyons and down the arroyo to sip at the river of truth. You can certainly say that she is a writer, a novelist, but if you want to be precise, you should say that Walker Smith is a consummate storyteller. The Houston Homer still gifted with (in)sight.
Walker and I played rock, paper, scissors, and she lost so she had to answer some of my burning questions.
[image]
Look how surprised Walker Smith was to lose at rock, paper, scissors. As you can see from the great answers to my questions she provided that she is a good sport.
Jeffrey D. Keeten: I thought it was interesting that you used the word rondo in your title. Reading through descriptions of rondo, I saw the words digressions, episodes, speed, which are descriptive terms that really do fit the structure of the novel. I always think of rondo in association with Mozart and Bach pieces. Jazz is like a second skin wrapped around the plot of your novel. I’ve never really thought about rondo in regard to jazz, but of course, the music reflects its usage. What inspired you to connect rondo with your novel?
Walker Smith: Rondo: I knew the term “rondo” had to be in the title because of the music and the circular connotation. The precise definition is: “from rondeau, meaning round; a musical form with a recurring theme that often repeats in the final movement.” I write historical novels, which is a sort of circling back in time, and all my novels are presented in a circular format, not linear.
I started with one simple plot: a racial Cain and Abel story set to modern jazz. There is usually an occurrence early in my novels that is always revisited at the end, because life is filled with circles. Read the first text line of Chapter 1: “Calvin Bailey was singing again.” Then read the last line of the book. Neither Calvin, Sr. nor Calvin, Jr. could sing well, and they both lived harsh lives, but somehow found their respective songs. In the beginning, Calvin, Sr. is driving his family along the edge of the River. (Note: The River is the symbol of God in the novel’s Mississippi River Valley as Eden motif; this is why the word River is always capitalized in the novel). At the end, Calvin, Jr. circles back in his memories, all the way back to the River as the song A Change is Gonna Come plays on the radio. I did not have the permission to reprint the lyrics of that song, but the first line is: “I was born by the river – in a little tent – and just like that river, I’ve been running ever since…” Both times, the River was in the scene. I was sort of glad the lyrics weren’t there. Without hitting the reader over the head with it, the rondo has played. And perhaps it might encourage readers to download Sam Cooke’s rendition of that song.
Race has been the most divisive issue in American history, and Cain and Abel always seemed so appropriate to show the folly of that division. At first, I was just going to show it through a white boy and a black boy, but then I hit on the idea of making them true blood brothers, which makes their mutual hatred even more absurd; their only difference is pigmentation. And mismatched siblings, even twins, are a much more commonplace occurrence in black families than you might expect. That also dovetailed beautifully with my jazz theme, because of the juxtaposition of harmony against the caustic division of the races symbolized by Joe and Calvin. The harmony was so easy to depict because I had seen it growing up in my household. Daddy was a jazz drummer, and the jam sessions described in the book were from my childhood memories. White, Mexican, Jewish, Black, Cuban – you name it, they were all at our house like a United Nations of bebop! As my friend Jack Gibson used to say: “Jazz was the first great integrator.”
The opening gun scene is visited twice more in the book – after Joe’s tragic odyssey as a white man, and then relayed by Calvin near the end. Each retelling provides a new piece of information about what actually happened in that room. This is structurally the “recurring theme that often repeats in the final movement” and establishes the musical world of the novel. The radio is also a key musical element that establishes itself as an anthropomorphic villain in many scenes.
Music is all through the book, not only in the obvious elements of several characters being musicians, but also in the rhythm and tempo, the rises and falls of conversation. Example: when Joe is asking his bandmates how they know when to come in for their solos when “trading fours and eights.” Their entire conversation was written as a fun little musical segment of trading fours and eights as spoken conversation. If the reader doesn’t get it, it doesn’t matter. It still shows how much fun these guys are having in their adoration of jazz. Also, I don’t know one human being who doesn’t have a virtual soundtrack to his or her life. A song plays, a grin spreads across a face, a memory of a high-school dance, a broken heart, a wedding day, a lover that got away. Bluestone Rondo has its own soundtrack.
Bluestone: The story is filled with divisions, duality, splits, discord, and separations. This theme is reflected in the Cain and Abel twins, the overtone of the country’s racial divide, the ruptures created by McCarthyism and the Red Scare, references to the Mason-Dixon line, but mainly the divisions inside the psyches of each character. The aquamarine cuff links given to Joe by the girlfriend he stole from Calvin were an obvious bit of symbolism. Split during the pivotal fight at “the crossroads,” Joe’s link is a good luck charm that inspires his assumed name – Bluestone. For Calvin, the link becomes a symbol of doom as a piece of evidence that convicts him of murder. The title itself is a subtle hint of duality, as well as a tribute to Dave Brubeck’s iconic Blue Rondo a’ la Turk. Known for its radical switches in time signature from 9/8 to 4/4 and back again, it jerks the listener from a feeling of mania to laid-back cool, then back to mania, then back to cool again. It was perfectly emblematic of the story, and I just couldn’t resist the similarity. (It was also my father’s favorite piece to play.)
And that’s how the title became Bluestone Rondo. (Sorry for the long-winded answer! OMG!!)
JDK: Pearl was the most fascinating character in the book for me. She was the gorgeous Nefertiti, exuding sultry charm and gracing all those around her with her soul deep empathy. Her soaring voice evoked an inner tremble in people, but that talent was being hidden away under the weight of her tragic heroin addiction. “The Hydra was making love to her, moving with the skill of an experienced lover, and exploding like a separate climax in each nerve of her body. When she felt him hit that spot ‘down low’ again and again and again, she remembered screaming and then seeing herself smiling like a trick....” She has this great love story with her husband Doc Calhoun, but no amount of love from him or for him can compete with the need she had for heroin. Hey, Sugah (as Pearl would say), talk to us about the process of her creation in your mind?
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Walker Smith at the Atlanta Barnes and Noble.
WS: For me, characters sort of form themselves. I began Pearl with physical traits and mannerisms of my own mother, whose name was Pearl. The deep, unrushed contralto voice, the chain-smoking, the love of books, the ultra-cool look and demeanor. The Pearl of my story and her husband Doc serve as the “bridge” to the song that is Bluestone Rondo. So I knew they had to be memorable, despite being secondary characters. They are both composites of people and ideas, but Pearl is more complex – a paradox of heroin addiction, wisdom, and pure love, which is the symbolic meaning of a pearl. I wanted readers to love her, to root for her, not to judge her for her failings. As she began to take shape, I realized that she had a teetering quality that made me want to reach out to keep her from falling. I knew that if I felt that way, the readers would, too. But the clearer she became, the more she began to rebel. She showed herself to me in memories of all the strong women I had known in my life, who had struggled and failed, only to rise up and keep going. Pearl then became the unlikely pillar of strength that held those two families together, while fighting the pull of the Hydra. I stepped back and gazed at her from a distance. She was whole when I realized that I loved her. She possessed a stately grace smack in the middle of her “damn mean world.”
JDK: I love the fact that you infused the novel with the history of the era. You have the McCarthyism of the 1950s. You have the famous Berlin, Germany, Kennedy speech that lit a fire in the civil rights movement. You have the cascade of assassinations from JFK in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and then as if the left wasn’t getting the message MLK and RFK within a matter of months of each other in 1968. Vietnam is not just a background noise for your characters but a very real part of their lives. Talk a bit about the process of infusing history into the novel and the influence the history had on the direction of your story?
WS: My first novel, The Color Line, was set during World War I and the Harlem Renaissance. I decided to dig for the most unknown history I could find, then place my characters there to live it. My goal was to dust off the feeling of history to give it the tension and immediacy of current events as seen through their eyes. I was going for a virtual ride in a time machine. Other writers have done it, of course; I’m certainly not the first, but I love it, despite all the hard work.
JDK: I am, to put it mildly, a jazz and blues devotee, and so I was excited about reading your “jazz novel.” I was not surprised to realize how well versed you are with the shakers and movers who contributed to this innovative sound. You even dropped a new jazz pianist on me that I’ve never heard play before... Horace Silver. Tell us a bit about your relationship with jazz and where your interest in this music comes from?
WS: From the womb! My father was a constantly working jazz drummer, and my mother was a literary geek with a beatnik coffee-house cool. They met in a jazz nightclub where he was playing. She was not a singer like the Pearl of my novel, but to quote my father, “She walked into the club right in the middle of a set, and man, I nearly dropped both my sticks! Then when I heard her talk, she just knocked me on my ass.” I ended up being their love child, born about six months after they got married. I had the coolest parents on earth! It was jam sessions in the living room, jazz and classical records on the hi-fi, and Mama’s books. I knew it was either going to be music or literature for me, but it ended up being both. When I was eighteen, I left home, drove to Los Angeles, and started gigging and doing background sessions. Somehow, I was in the right place at the right time and ended up being signed to the Casablanca label. But writing was still my passion. Singing was just something I could DO. Writing was something that demanded hard work, anger, frustration, self-criticism, passion, and fidelity. It had to be the love of my life, nothing less. I took creative writing courses at LACC and kept reading all the classics. Three albums later, I was done with the music business, and it was done with me! I headed for New York, and that’s when I really began to write. Between working a day job and editing for two local magazines, I began researching my first novel. In longhand. On the floor of my unfurnished apartment. No social life whatsoever. FIDELITY, baby! I had never been happier in my life!
JDK: With the turbulent relationship between the two brothers, Joe and Calvin Bailey, there is certainly the overtones of Cain and Abel. For me, what I really appreciated about the arc of your story is that my sympathies swung heavily in one direction, but then with time, my sympathies swung to the other brother. Both brothers have a tough path, but one steadily becomes a better version of himself, while the other flounders and drowns in his own lies. We tend to judge people by their worst traits or by the worst moments in their lives, but you really did a great job of showing the redeeming qualities of your flawed characters. It puts muscle on the bone. Can you talk a bit about your philosophy of redemption and how it played such a role in your novel? WS: Your shifting sympathies are the result of the internal duality inside each brother. They were both Cain, and they were both Abel. Perhaps that’s what the Bible story was telling us all. And in that recognition lies our redemption.
JDK: Tell us about your writing process. Do you write in the morning, the afternoon, the middle of the night? Do you write every day? Do you have a consistent schedule? How long does it generally take you to write a novel?
WS: My writing process is wild, unreasonable impulse controlled (somewhat) by a solid foundation. I have great respect for the principles of good writing, and I value great literature. Structure, symbolism, arc, rhythm, tension, character development, settings, etc. I’ve been told that I’m pretty good with dialogue. I’ve lived in many different regions, and I’m drawn to dialects. I fall in love with people and embrace their diversity. A soon as someone begins to talk, I turn on my mental tape recorder and my internal video camera. Speech inflections, laughter, a lifted eyebrow, a hand gesture. Committed to memory, locked in the vault for future reference. I do not start with outlines, only a time frame and a region. Then I begin to write visual scenes. Some occur early, others are ending scenes. I always write my ending very early in the process, and then all the scenes that will take me to that end. My timeline shifts and changes all over the place, and I do a lot of moving things around, switching the order of chapters, etc. I am ruthless with my editing. I overwrite to begin with, writing all sorts of detail that I know I will throw out later, but it gives me a deep knowledge of people and events that is essential to me as the writer, but will probably bore the reader. So, once I finish the long version, I start hacking away. I’ll read an entire chapter and grin at myself: “Lovely prose, Walker. You sound very pleased with yourself in a pompous, overwritten sort of way. Bye! Delete, delete, delete!” It gets my ego out of the clouds. There are plenty of others out there who can write circles around me! I have to keep telling myself, “Just tell a story; this ain’t Cirque de Soleil!” (Note: I promise you that “Cirque” was an inadvertent pun, but I’m leaving it in for no good reason.)
See the rest of the interview continue in the comments....more
”Compelled by the act of an innocent girl in a graveyard in Paris, something is moving within the stone sepulchre. Long forgotten in the tangled and o”Compelled by the act of an innocent girl in a graveyard in Paris, something is moving within the stone sepulchre. Long forgotten in the tangled and overgrown alleyways of the Domaine de la Cade, something is waking. To the casual observer it would appear no more than a trick of the light in the fading afternoon, but for a fleeting instant, the plaster statues appear to breathe, to move, to sigh.
And the portraits on the cards that lie buried beneath the earth and stone, where the river runs dry, momentarily seem to be alive. Fleeting figures, impressions, shades, not yet more than that. A suggestion, an illusion, a promise. The refraction of light, the movement of air beneath the turn of the stone stair. The inescapable relationship between place and moment.
For in truth, this story begins not with bones in a Parisian graveyard, but with a deck of cards.
Meredith Martin, under the guise of researching her book on the composer Achille-Claude Debussy, goes to France to see the places that Debussy lived and frequented, but she also has an alternative agenda to discover more about a family connection to a place called Domaine de la Cade. While in Paris, she would like to do some of the normal tourist things, like visit Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank, but the thought of dealing with all the tourists at such a place is too daunting.
My most recent experience with this was the Empire State Building in NY. I went in and stood in line, listening to the cacophony of excited people speaking in languages from all over the world, and, after a few minutes, left to go to the Strand Bookstore instead. It is hard to complain about tourists when I am a tourist myself, but alas, they are such intrusive, noisy people while on vacation.
Almost as if being compelled by forces beyond her, Meredith ends up in a Tarot Card shop in Paris where a woman convinces her to have her cards read. The reading is, to say the least, interesting even, one might say, awkward with overtones of unnerving insights.
”She brought out a large square of black silk and folded the cards up within it. ‘There,’ she said, pushing them across the table. “Another Tarot tradition. Many people believe you should never buy a deck of cards for yourself. That you should always wait for the right deck to be given to you as a gift.’
Meredith shook her head. ‘ Laura, I can’t possibly accept them. Besides, I wouldn’t know what to do with them.’
‘I believe you need them.’
For a moment, their eyes met once more.
‘But I don’t want them.’
If I accept them, there’ll be no way back.
‘The deck belongs to you.’ Laura paused. ‘And I think, deep down, you know it.’”
Meredith may possess a healthy dose of skepticism, but those beliefs have been shaken. Her less used senses are tingling with speculations of things unseen, of forces that pluck the strings of fate with malevolent intent.
In her research, the year 1891 keeps appearing, and that brings in the other side of the story. Like with her first book in the Languedoc series, Labyrinth, Kate Mosse tells two stories separated by time, but the two timelines are entwined by a mystery. In this case, 1891 and 2007 become separated by a very thin veneer, with villains on both sides of the timeline, intent on possessing what they should never have.
In 1891, Victor Constant, Comte de Tourmaline, a very wealthy, syphilitic aristocrat is intent on enacting revenge on Anatole Vernier, whom he perceives as the man who stole his lover from him. Anatole’s sister, Leonie, is also his target. What better way to create the maximum pain for Anatole than to seduce his sister. Leonie has been reading about the history of the Domaine de la Cade, where they are staying, and is discovering a past that is beset with strange occurrences revolving around a sepulchre and a deck of tarot cards. She has romantic views of the world and is certainly susceptible to the charms of a sauve, seemingly elegant man.
In 2007, Julian Lawrence, now the owner of what is now the Hotel Domaine de la Cade, has also done extensive research on the history of the estate and wants the power that he knows the tarot deck will give him access to.
Meredith and Leonie, in two different eras, will find themselves desperately trying to understand the mystifying clues that will help them to understand the dangers they face from the ethereal and the very real present. Can they figure out the clues to the puzzles before they run out of time?
I read Labyrinth back in 2006 on a plane ride back from Milan, Italy. I had been dangerously close to running out of reading material when I spied the turquoise cover of Mosse’s book in a spinner rack in the airport. By chance this turned out to be the perfect book to read on a long, boring flight back to the States. I am frequently baffled by how long it takes me to return to an author I enjoy, but here we are 12 years later, and finally I read the second book in the series. I’ve got the next two in the series, Citadel and The Burning Chambers, squirreled away on my shelves. I do sincerely hope it doesn’t take me another 12 years to get to the next one in the series.
The books all take place in the Languedoc region of France and have similar themes, but can be read as stand alone novels or out of order, so if one plot of one of the books appeals to you more than another, have no fears that you are breaking one of the cardinal sins of reading books in a series out of order. There is a television adaption of Labyrinth that was released in 2012, and there are current negotiations underway to do the same with Sepulchre.
If you like a bit of gothic atmosphere with your timeline smashups, then you will not be disappointed.
”What he did too little of was sleep and what he did too much of was drink and many interpreted his later crack-up as a morality tale of a talent that”What he did too little of was sleep and what he did too much of was drink and many interpreted his later crack-up as a morality tale of a talent that debauched itself. But his life at this time had a fine and precise balance to it, with a careful allotment of hours. A barber, a publisher of The Cricket, a cornet player, good husband and father, and an infamous man about town.”
Buddy Bolden takes ragtime and infuses it with the blues, creating a new music called Jass, an early offspring of what eventually becomes known as...Jazz. He messes around with the spirituals, too, blending in some of his hoodoo music with the voice of the Lord. There are no recordings of his music known to exist.
The music is eating him alive from the inside.
Those musical notes that dangle around in his head make off with his mind. A guy who plays like that makes some kind of deal with the Devil, and what if that deal goes beyond Bolden’s own precious soul and demands a piece of everyone’s soul that is ever touched by the sound of his horn?
Uh-huh.
It can be true.
You’d think a man who works as a barber might whisper a warning to those he clips and shaves.
“Don’t listen to what I’ve got to play.” He might say that.
Maybe that same man might have printed a word of warning in his printed rag letting everyone know his music is the voice of the Prince of Darkness.
The thing is Bolden is too busy dancing around with his own thoughts, trying to find a way back to a sane plane. When he leaves his saucy, sexy wife, Nora Bass, and disappears for two years, where does he go? He might leave N’Orleans, but N’Orleans doesn’t leave him. Those creatures, wrapped in the musical shadows of his mind, making click clack sounds with their horned toenails, will not be left behind. Even when he makes love to another man’s wife, he can’t escape those harrowing notes. ”The music was so uncertain it was heartbreaking and beautiful. Coming through the walls. The lost anger at her or me or himself. Bullets of music delivered onto the bed we were on.”
When he comes back, he isn’t no better.
Bolden has a friend named Bellocq, a man quite possibly more tortured than himself. He likes to take pictures of whores and pays them the same for a picture as he would for a screw. He wants them on their knees with his Beef Whistle in their mouth, but he is too much a gentleman to ask for that. ”Snap. Lady with a dog. Lady on a sofa half naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. Holding up her arm for the shade.”
Those whores make money any way they can. If a crippled pervert wants a picture, that is the easiest pelf they are going to make all night long. Buddy hauls E. J. around and introduces him to intriguing looking whores. ”He pulled Bellocq up the steps, the camera strapped across his back like a bow. He had seen it so often on his friend that whenever he thought of him his body took on an outline which included the camera and the tripod. It was part of his bone structure. A metal animal grown into his back.”
Those whores will even sell ragged bags of goofer dust or chipped crocks of bend-over oil. Voodoo spells that will offer protection or put a hex on your enemies. Buddy needs to be anointed with some ointment that will settle the demons in his head. Neither the church, nor Voodoo, is any help when the devil is held so close.
”Scratch of suicide at the side of my brain.”
Buddy can only abide the most alluring, the most graceful, the most magnificent. He has no patience for ugliness, unpleasantness, or the unsightly. ”As she leans against me there is the red morning on her face. Everyone who touches me must be beautiful.”
Time is short. The black sand in the hourglass is pooling at the bottom. Can he flip it when the Devil is distracted?
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