The Golden Groove

The Golden Groove, by Dale Greggson
August, 1970  Dell Books

Here’s another rock novel I was raring to read, only to discover on the very first page that Billy Blake, megafamous protagonist of The Golden Groove, is actually a folk singer. Friends I was ready to chuck the book right then and there – I mean so much for the “hard driving rock” promise of the cover slugline – but I perservered, and I was glad I did. For the “soft willing flesh” portion of the slugline does not lie; this novel is filled with some raunchy, explicit sex, beyond even what Harold Robbins was turning out at the time.

I know from the Catalog Of Copyright Entries that “Dale Greggson” is a pseudonym, but of whom I don’t know. Perhaps the answer might lie within Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms, but I don’t have a copy at the moment…I try to limit Interlibrary Loan orders of that two-thousand-page behemoth because I always get dirty looks from the librarians who struggle to get it across the checkout counter. My assumption is he was a professional writer churning out a sleazy tale for a quick buck. However his writing is good, doling out soapy soul-plumbing drama along the lines of Burt Hirschfeld mixed with the hardcore shenanigans of Penthouse Letters.

Well anyway, Billy Blake, born Malcolm Lutz, is the “best male folksinger” of his day; he’s 29, with a mop of curly red hair and a wiry, muscular body. He hit the big time ten years ago, when he stormed his way into the office of a music agent and forced him to listen to his protest songs. Despite all odds Blake’s single was a huge hit, and from there on he became, well, basically Bob Dylan, for clearly The Golden Groove is a roman a clef about Dylan, though this is a Dylan who goes through women in such numbers that Wilt Chamberlain would be envious. And that’s not even counting the ones he bangs in the frequent flashbacks.

The novel is also sort of focused on Blake’s struggles with the changing nature of his art. We learn that over the years he gradually moved away from protest folk, and now does songs about women or love or what-have-you, his previous acoustic-only backing replaced by full-blown studio production, courtesy his manager-slash-producer, Max – aka that music agent Blake stormed in on years before. In one of the novel’s sadly-unexplored elements, we’re informed that this guy’s speciality is “Max’s Mix,” in which studio musicians record countless instruments on various tracks – including even tabla and sitar on Blake’s latest – and Max uses the best takes to assemble a Frankenstein sort of creation, angled for total mainstream success. “Electronic gimmickry,” as Blake’s detractors call it. 

And Blake has achieved this fame, his songs instant hits, but it only now dawns on him that he’s suffered as an artist – yep, he’s “sold out,” as the saying goes. And plus his former fans, those ardent protesting hippie college students, deride him as a total sellout. They claim his only fans now are teenagers, and once they get older even they’ll start to mock Blake’s vapid crap. Of course his older stuff is still big with the college crowd, but the problem is Blake no longer feels the drive to sing stuff like it. Eventually we’ll learn all this came about three years ago, upon Blake’s divorce from his Joan Baez-type wife, Carla Montrose, a brunette beauty with big ol’ boobs – just one of Blake’s many conquests in the novel, though this one’s in one of the flashbacks.

We don’t get a single glimpse of Blake in the studio; the novel opens with he and Max discussing Blake’s latest track, which has been given the Max Mix treatment. But Blake feels unsettled…not that this stops him from picking up the first of several chicks. This one’s a top-heavy babe named Betty he meets in a Manhattan club, and he takes her back to his posh, three-floor brownstone. He bangs her silly over several pages and it must be stated again that Greggson isn’t shy about all the juicy details. And yet the novel is written with a sort of flair – I don’t want to say it’s literary, because that implies pretension, and the novel’s certainly not that. It’s all very direct and easily-digested, the very definition of pop fiction, so to speak, yet the author manages to turn in hardcore material that doesn’t come off like grimy sleaze. That being said, there’s actually a flashforward to Robbins’s The Betsy; when Blake takes a leak, Betty insists on holding his dick and aiming the stream into the toilet bowl! 

But while Blake may be the darling of the left-leaning protest punks of his day, his treatment of women would not win him many friends these days – he’s very much a screw ‘em and forget ‘em type. For example Betty is thought of as “dumb as a cow” the next morning, Blake giving her a very obvious cold shoulder so she’ll get out of his house. He even lets his assistant, an employee of Max’s named Audrey, escort her off the premises. Audrey, a small-breasted beauty, is of course another of Blake’s conquests; she started handling Blake’s concerts and appearances several years ago. We learn that he literally raped her early in their relationship – of course she ended up enjoying it, leading into a casual sex thing that’s chilled in recent years, as Blake’s lost interest in her.

As if in spite of this Blake proceeds to have sex with Audrey that very morning, but it’s awkward and unsatisfying for both. After this they ride in heavy silence upstate for a folk convention Blake’s scheduled to attend, where he’ll speak on folk music and give a concert along with a few other top folk artists of the day. Only here does Audrey inform him that Carla Montrose is a last-second replacement for one of the singers who was scheduled to attend. Blake decides to go on, after all – it’s clear he still has feelings for his ex-wife, and we’ve already had an XXX-rated flashback to his first meeting with the busty beauty, in which she threw herself upon him and they did it right by a lake. And once again we get all the juicy details, baby. Speaking of hardcore action-via flashback, we also have a somewhat arbitrary bit where we see how teenaged “Malcolm” lost his cherry to the married lady who was giving him guitar lessons.

Now as for his marriage to Carla, it didn’t last too long, because even then Blake couldn’t keep other women out of his bed. The last straw was when Carla came back early from a gig to find Blake in their bed, performing a 69 with a busty Italian beauty (one with incredible oral skills). Humorously, Carla storms out and Blake is quickly drawn back into the mood by the Italian babe’s mouth skills, though surprisingly this is like the one sex scene in the novel Greggson doesn’t fully describe. But that was three years ago, and Blake still carries a torch for Carla, even though he won’t admit it…however Greggson doesn’t sap up their reunion at the upstate college too much. We do learn that Carla has been through a few men herself in the past three years, and is now considering marriage to one, but needs to determine if she still has feelings for ol’ Billy.

Meanwhile Blake is already close to getting into the pants of another busty beauty – young Ruth, who is part of the college’s folk department, along with her boyfriend Gary. There’s also hotstuff rock reporter Cindy afoot; she trades sparks with Blake early in the novel, interviewing him during a photo shoot in a Manhattan studio. This is one of the too-few scenes which actually provide a glimpse into the rock world, for really the majority of the book is Blake screwing various women while worrying that he’s sold out. Cindy becomes Blake’s third conquest in the main storyline; after throwing himself at Carla that night in her room and being rejected, Blake heads back to his own room, finds that Cindy is next door, and forces himself on her.

As feared Blake is pilloried by the college punks during the conference portion of the folk festival, called a sellout and whatnot. Surprisingly Carla comes to his defense (she’s still regularly arrested for various acts of protest, so her underground cred is unsullied). A worked-up Blake experiences a sort of catharsis that night, finally confronting his womanizing and slipping artistic values through the form of young student Ruth, who throws herself at Blake at a party. Her boyfriend takes offense and the two men have a brutal brawl, Blake implementing some of the dirty fighting he learned in order to survive back when he lived on the streets – he grabs poor Gary’s balls and squeezes. Not to worry, though, as Audrey sends Cindy off to screw Gary that very night, to make up for all the trouble she put him through.

At this point everyone’s sick of Blake, probably like everyone’s sick of this endless review; everyone except for Carla, who has decided she wants to be with Blake again. His concert’s the next day and it starts well, the audience reacting favorably to his old stuff, but when he plays new material he’s actually booed. But the previous night Blake started writing a new pair of songs, ones this time straight from his core, and he breaks them out to massive cheers. At least Greggson cuts the treacle with a triumphant Blake giving his audience the finger before leaving the stage. In the meantime he’s decided he might just quit being “Billy Blake” and is going to give it another shot with Carla, staying monogamous this time…

What I wish there’d been more of was a look into the rock world, or at least some topical details about the era in which this occurs. Other than the opening in swinging Manhattan, the novel takes place either in flashbacks to the early ‘60s or in the rural upstate college (which is fictional, and I’ve already forgotten its name). I also would’ve enjoyed seeing more of Blake in the studio, particularly the psychedelic concoctions Max brews up for him. But Greggson really just uses Blake’s muse as the subplot, with the main plot focused on all that “soft willing flesh” Blake so often enjoys in full-on explicit detail.