Rock & Roll Retreat Blues

Rock & Roll Retreat Blues, by Douglas Kent Hall
November, 1974  Avon Books

I’ve been meaning to get to this rock novel for a while now, but have been put off by its undue length – 256 pages of small, dense print. But that cover! That back cover! The comment on the copyright page that portions of the novel first appeared in the September 1974 issue of Penthouse! I knew I’d have to get to Rock & Roll Retreat Blues one of these days, and I’m glad I finally did, but be aware that once again we have a “rock novel” that has precious friggin’ little to actually do with rock music. This is a shame, because it features one of the most outrageous openings of any novel I’ve ever read, and promises the reader a sleazy thrill-ride; a promise the narrative ultimately does not keep.

Douglas Kent Hall, who died in 2008, was a photographer, reporter, novelist, what-have-you; it appears he first came to prominence via photos of Jimi Hendrix, so you know the guy was cool. According to the Rolling Stone CD-ROM database Cover To Cover he also submitted two articles to the magazine, both of them in ’74, the same year this novel came out. Strangely Rolling Stone didn’t review this novel, which is surprising given that they’d usually at least give a passing nod to books by “Friends of the Library.” One of Hall’s RS articles is a lengthy account of cattle-rustling and the like, and surprisingly enough this is the sort of thing you encounter more of in Rock & Roll Retreat Blues than rock stuff.

Another thing I don’t dig about the novel is that it’s narrated in first person. This isn’t a kiss of death, though; look at The Tale Of Willy’s Rats, which didn’t suffer for it. I just prefer my trash to be in third-person, I don’t know why. And in fact our narrator is so disassociated from reality and the people he encounters that you could very easily change all the narratorial instances of “I” to “he,” and nothing would seem amiss. Also there are long portions where the narrator just stands around and monitors others and relays what’s happening, and it goes on for pages without him even saying anything or contributing to the proceedings.

Anyway our narrator is Arthur “Artie” Webber, 23 year-old bassist for rock group The Machine. Artie is in the Syd Barrett/Skip Spence realm of out-thereness, friends. He’s so spaced out that even the drug-addled members of his own band think he’s a weirdo. And speaking of the group, Hall provides absolutely zero info on how they sound, how they started, or any of that. The absolute most we get about their sound is in a brief gig very early in the book in which it’s mentioned that guitarist Bob (no last name given, I think) employs a wah-wah pedal. Otherwise that’s it. I mean they could sound like the Monkees for all we know, though I assume they’re more in a Led Zeppelin mold.

This also brings up the question of when the novel takes place. My guess is it’s either intended to be set around the time it was published or slightly earlier; it’s certainly no earlier than 1969, given a few minor details: someone plays Abbey Road, there’s mention of a ’69 Plymouth, and at one point Artie briefly thinks of Altamont. In my mind the novel occurs in that very early ‘70s era that was the twilight of the counterculture movement, when the Aquarian dream was fading away, as evidenced by the spaced-out characters and the vibe of angst and burnout that permeates the text.

Now about that opening sequence. It’s beyond insane – Artie brings us right into the tale with no setup or intro or anything. He’s just hanging out in a hotel room before a concert with Machine drummer Bill, a black guy who gets more narrative time than all the other Machine members. (The only other member I haven’t mentioned yet is Steve, the singer, who is the brother of Bob.) Then a young girl with a star tattoo beneath her eye crawls through their window, having climbed up a few storeys to get here, bloodying her knuckles in the process. She whips out a stiletto and commands both Artie and Bill to strip and double-team her, now! And we’re talking full “d.p.,” friends, with Artie sparing no details as he takes the front and Bill takes the rear. All the while the girl threatens them with the knife. And afterwards Artie realizes the girl is young. Like real young: “Not even thirteen.”

Openings like this don’t come along every day. The problem is there’s no way the rest of the novel can maintain this sort of insanity. Particularly when the novel goes on for another 250+ pages of small, dense print. And sadly Hall doesn’t even try. I’m not saying I expected a novel filled with preteen sleaze, I’m just saying that this sort of crazy shit at the very beginning sets the bar too high. But at least the downshift occurs gradually; we do get that aforementioned brief concert, which takes place immediately after the double penetration of “the knifer,” as Artie will refer to her throughout, followed by some ribald dialog courtesy Bill about this strange experience he and Artie have shared. Meanwhile the knifer has absconded, pissed that she didn’t get to double-team Steve and Bob as well. 

This, we’re to understand, is the plight of the mega-famous rock star. Artie and The Machine have reached such lofty heights that they are wholly separated from the real world. This is especially true of Artie, who is so disassociated from reality that he’s taken to visiting the subway or bus stations in each city they hit on their tour, finding the instant photo booths, and snapping photos of himself. He keeps them in a big photo book he carries around and studies the self-portraits for hidden signs about himself. Usually he has Machine roadie Baby (a guy) chaffeur him around in a limo on the hunt for these stations, passing joints back and forth. He also dreams about Vivaldi and thinks he’s been seeing the same ghostly female face in the audience, city after city.

Meanwhile there’s trouble in The Machine; Artie often tells us he’s afraid the band is on the verge of falling apart, and implies it’s because they’ve come to such mega-fame so soon. In the process they’ve lost their common bond, or something; brothers Steve and Bob don’t even talk to each other, and Steve’s hotstuff girlfriend Faye, apparently a former groupie turned model turned writer, isn’t helping things with her recent commission to write a book on The Machine. Bob, apparently a control freak, is totally against the idea, while Steve expectedly is in support of it.

Not that anything comes of this, friends. Rock & Roll Retreat Blues drops so damn many subplots and characters that you wonder how it even got published without at least some editorial interference. I mean don’t get me wrong. The writing I think is masterful, particularly in the dialog. It’s much more a “literary” sort of novel in its vibe than the average rock novel, that’s for sure. But ultimately Hall seems to fall so in love with his fringe-world characters and their spaced-out dialog that he’s guilty of overlooking the more interesting material he sets up early in the novel.

Faye in a way also invokes the reader’s anger, for she is the one who tells Artie and the others about the “retreat” outside of San Francisco which will ultimately derail Rock & Roll Retreat Blues from being a rock novel into being…I don’t know how the hell you’d categorize it, really. Like a slice of surreal life vignette set in the country, populated by complete freaks who spout endless dialog about random things while engaging in bizarre activities. One could easily imagine Dennis Hopper or Peter Fonda making a film out of it, filled with meandering ad-libbed dialog, long shots of the setting sun, and a soundtrack heavy with echoplexed acoustic guitar.

It’s an old, three-storey house on a farm, and its owned by a guy named Bentley, a bald dude who comes off as straightlaced but who turns out to have like tattoos literally all over his body. He’s a wealthy cartoonist(!) and bought this land years back, living here now with a heavyset gal named Dolores, who takes care of the cooking and whatnot, and a hardbitten farmer-type named Poet. There’s also an attractive young black lady whose “African name” no one can remember or pronounce, so she goes around without being called anything. She’ll have a brief off-page relationship with Bill and then disappear from the text, as so many other characters will. The place has been used by other rockers as a country getaway, Bentley relates: the Dead, the Airplane (“Jack and Jorma especially”), but whereas those rockers came and went, Artie and Bill will, unfortunately for those of us hoping for a rock novel, ultimately decide to live here.

At this point the novel splinters off into various arbitrary storylines; Bill gets a boil on his ass and it must be lanced off, one of the pigs has a runt that the mother will ignore so Dolores raises it, Baby has a water bed brought in and fills it with catfish so he can sit in the darkened room all day and watch them with a flashlight. Occasionally fellow Machine members Steve and Bob will come along, accompanied by Faye, and the band will goof off near a desolate section of the beach, where they encounter such fringe characters as a beach bum who lives off a handful of rice each meal and inspects his own shit every morning for an idea of his health condition. Once in a while we’ll see the band performing in some new city. Here we learn Artie has the hots for Faye. Later, back on the farm, they have sex while Steve is away, but Artie doesn’t go into details and Faye says it’s a one-time-only thing. Oh, Artie also has sex with super-heavy Dolores, so stoned out on various drugs that he doesn’t even remember it afterward.

Speaking of fringe characters, I haven’t even mentioned PJ Tropp, a nutjob who apparently assumes a new carefully-constructed identity a few times a year, or something. He’s one of the people on Bentley’s farm, and while he’s initially set up as an important character he disappears for pretty much the entire novel until the very end; Artie even wonders if the beach bum is another of PJ’s identities. In his intro PJ is accompanied by “the bomber,” as Artie will solely refer to the young woman who here enters the text; she’s a Weather Underground type who blows up buidings and structures and plants poetry in the bombs, sometimes containing snatches of Dylan lyrics or even Machine lyrics. But when we meet her she’s more interested in a poem a famous poet has left on the door to a bathroom at Bentley’s place, and she tears the door off and leaves with it. As I say, it’s a strange book with strange characters.

What exactly attracts Artie to the rural life isn’t much explained; I guess he’s so spaced out that the slow pace of the farm appeals to him. The subtext is that he’s gotten away from all the material pursuits of the world: we learn he has basically nothing in his little room on the third floor. Not that even this is much explored. This is not a novel that exactly develops or resolves any of its subplots. Only occasionally will we get back to the rock stuff, in particular a too-brief sequence focusing on a concert in Chicago. Hall is more focused on Artie’s reunion with Sylvia, ie the dark-haired young beauty who has been following the Machine around the country on their tour.

The ghostly face Artie’s been seeing in the audience, Sylvia first introduces herself by waltzing backstage after a show early in the book and just taking Artie away. They drive along the coast, stop at a KFC, and share a bucket of the Colonel’s chicken and some wine on the beach, talking sparingly and of banalities. All the while Artie pushes himself to at least touch her hair or something, but doesn’t. She tells him he’s exactly like she thought he’d be, then drops him back off at his hotel and leaves! And only then does Artie realize he never even asked what her name was! Honestly friends you could almost get a contact high from Rock & Roll Retreat Blues. Artie’s so out of it that his disassociated narration gradually has a hypnotic effect on the reader.

Well, here in Chicago, much later in the novel, Sylvia shows up again – with the infamous Plaster Casters. Here Artie finally learns her name and also that she’s a child of wealth who is supposed to be in Europe but instead lied to her parents that she left but in reality is following the Machine around the country – actually, following Artie around the country. She joined the Plaster Casters because she thought it would be her best chance of meeting Artie again(?!). Both Artie and Bill have their, uh, casters plastered, and afterwards Artie sleeps with Sylvia, who turns out to be a virgin. There’s clearly a romantic something building here, but next morning Artie finds Sylvia gone and she never returns to the narrative. It’s like that throughout the damn novel, friends – no resolution, no followup. This would be fine if the novel sucked, if the writing was subpar, but that’s not the case.

Instead it’s back to the farm, where the new story now is the Hell’s Angels who have descended on the scene. Just as Hall page-filled with dialog on farm life, now he page-fills with dialog about fixing up motorcycles and the like. Hall is very much one of those writers who has learned a lot about various subjects and by god he wants you to know it. Meanwhile one of the Angels fucks a sheep. Later another of them tries to hit on the bomber, who has returned to the text (and brought the Angels with her), but Dolores comes to the rescue, threatening to cut the dude’s balls off and hang ‘em on a doorknob. Ultimately Dolores becomes a biker mama, and last we see of her she’s busy ripping around the countryside with the Angels. There’s also a lot of arbitrary Jesus-bashing afoot, as Poet’s seldom-scene wife, a “Jesus freak,” returns to the farm and her beliefs get ridiculed by Dolores and others.

Speaking of the bomber, her off-page activities take us into the homestretch. The bombings have become so frequent that the FBI is on the trail, and using a literature professor named Glitz they’ve put together a composite sketch of who they think the bomber is – a young male. Glitz follows The Machine around due to the increasing usage of their lyrics in the bomber’s bombs. Meanwhile PJ Tropp has returned, now dressing like T.S. Eliot and only answering to that name(??), and also the knifer herself, that prepubescent stiletto-wielder from the opening sequence, has come to the farm. Now she calls herself Blue Sky and has taken over the house chores from Dolores.

Rather than following up on his various, more-interesting subplots, Hall instead takes us into the finale with Bentley and the Angels harrassing Professor Glitz, who seems certain PJ Tropp (aka “T.S. Eliot”) might be the bomber. And meanwhile the real bomber has again left the narrative (and won’t return). There’s no big payoff, no big concert scene where The Machine get back together, nothing. Instead, Artie informs Baby that he’s decided to quit the group. When? Why? We’re not told. Meanwhile Bill’s also decided to quit. Not that he and Artie discussed it or anything. Actually Bob and Steve don’t even return to the novel, nor does Faye.

Artie has apparently decided to go the Skip Spence route and do his own album. But we have to go out on a bummer, even if it’s as arbitrary as can be, so Blue Sky (formerly known as “the knifer”) relates a long expository story to Artie about how she killed a guy once, and then she goes upstairs and hangs herself – mostly because she’s given Baby crabs, which she herself got “from one of Joe Cocker’s guys.” I guess a 13 year-old girl hanging from a noose in a spartanly-furnished farmhouse room is Hall’s commentary on the death of the flower power youth movement. Hell, I don’t know. When you’re not given much you’ve gotta reach for something.

Does Artie ever reconnect with Sylvia? Is the bomber caught? Was PJ Tropp helping her all along as Artie supsected? Do Artie and Bill decide to stay in The Machine after all? Does Artie ever finish his solo work, which he tells Vivaldi about in his dreams? Does Faye finish her book? Does Dolores become a full-time motorcycle mama? Absolutely none of these questions are answered. Instead, the novel opens with no setup, spirals along for 256 slow-moving pages of various surrealisms, and then cuts off with no resolution or payoff.

As mentioned Hall is a gifted writer, so perhaps his intention is to convey the isolation of the famous rock star. If so then he has succeeded wildly. However I fear the only readers who could empathize with his freak characters would be…well, famous rock stars who are isolated from reality. In the end, I don’t know how I feel about Rock & Roll Retreat Blues. The lack of plot frustrates me, but at the same time I can’t say I hated reading the novel. In fact I enjoyed my time with it – and it did take a while to finish the book, especially when compared to the average men’s adventure novel I review here on the blog. I’d love to hear from others who have read it.

Here’s the back cover – and this is another of those times where everything described does occur in the text, but not nearly to the exploitative lengths promised: