Songbird

Songbird, by Ralph Benner
No month stated, 1970  Macfadden Books

This obscure rock novel is courtesy the guy who started TigerBeat, something I wasn’t aware of until after I’d read the novel. Throughout Songbird I kept wondering why the focus was on teenybopper performers and teenybopper fans, with a naiive teenaged protagonist acting as our guide. When I learned the TigerBeat connection it all made sense – not that Macfadden provides any sort of context or bio for our author. Presumably in 1970 more people were aware of who Jack Benner was.

Sadly, Songbird is more Patridge Family than Beatles, even though there’s a clear Beatles analogue in the book. Benner is also another of those “rock authors” who is either unwilling or incabable of actually describing rock music, usually just dropping the names of various groups and informing us of how our teen protagonist gets off on their “driving beat.” It’s more of a “the rock business is depraved and full of jaded freaks” type of novel, and one with a strange, unwieldy vibe, at that; Benner employs the tone of juvenile fiction with his innocent, doe-eyed protagonist, but will often sleaze things up with wild sex or raunchy material. Not that the novel’s very explicit or graphic, though; most of the sleaze occurs off-page.

Anyway the titular character is Linda May Loomis, sixteen years old and living with a single mother in a podunk town in Georgia when we meet her. Actually she’s 19 when we meet her, but Benner clumisly employs a flashback sequence that he never returns to. Linda has had a gift for singing since she was born, and thus acquired the nickname “Songbird.” Benner mostly refers to her as “Bird” throughout the book (luckily it’s written in third-person, as I prefer my trash fiction to be, but unfortunately Benner is a bad POV-hopper, jarringly jumping perspectives between characters with little warning). We’re only told Bird’s voice is deep and husky, and Benner at no point even attempts to describe her singing voice to us.

But then, he’s too busy telling us how ugly and flat-chested she is; the book begins with some of the most humorous character assassination I’ve ever encountered for a main protagonist. “She wasn’t pretty by anyone’s standards,” with “colorless hair,” and taller than most girls but with a spindly nature and not much in the way of breasts. In fact Benner goes to such lengths to fuglify Bird (I just coined the word “fuglify,” btw) that the reader is hard-pressed to understand why all the male rock stars want to bone her – and indeed, treat her with greater respect than their actual, you know, pretty female fans. Apparently Bird has some special quality about her – at one point it’s intimated that her husky voice does her a lot of favors – but again Benner fails to really explain it.

As I say, Benner also employs an unwieldy tone; the book establishes Bird as a rail-thin, sort of fugly sixteen year-old loser, living in a ramshackle house with a deadbeat mom, and she’s doe-eyed obsessive over the teen groups of the day. She’s incredibly naiive and innocent…yet we learn off-handedly that she’s been screwing some local boy for the heck of it. I mean I’m not judging, it’s just so unexpected given the preceding pages of character assasination we’ve witnessed, so you’re surpsised to learn she’s even managed to get lucky. Anyway Bird is particularly obsessed with British group The Red Coats, “the most popular singing group in the world,” aka the Beatles. Only there’s five of them instead of four, and Bird is especially hot for the sensitive drummer, Claude(!). The novel opens with Bird desperate to find a way to Atlanta, where the Redcoats are about to give a concert.

Bird hitches a ride with a good friend, but ends up becoming pals with Eleanor, a sort of reporter-slash-groupie who lives in Atlanta. Here we get our first understanding that Songbird isn’t a “rock novel” per se, as we’re only told of the screaming throngs of teen girls, and how the Redcoats can barely be heard over the din. It’s all more along the lines of the Beatles at Shea Stadium than, say, The Rolling Stones at Altamont – which by the way occurred a year before this novel was published, despite which Songbird exists in a more innocent rock world. I mean the Plaster Casters are presented as the most shocking thing Bird encounters, and in the entirety of the book she takes just a single LSD trip…unwillingly at that.

Eleanor has local connections so gets Bird in line to see the Red Coats as they’re leaving the stadium, and Eric Linden, their hunky young PR guy, starts handing out invitations to all the hot girls for an after party at the hotel. He sees Bird – who we’ll remember has been described as ugly, lanky, and just all-around unappealing from page one – and gives her an invitation. But it turns out Linden wants her for himself; he takes her to his room on the floor below the Red Coats, and tells her quite casually that he enjoys handing out invitations to girls he knows the Red Coats won’t be attracted to! Bird is quite world-wise for all her innocence and realizes she’ll have to screw Eric to get up to the party in the Red Coats’s suite; this she gamely does, Benner as ever not getting too explicit.

However, Bird will find herself developing feelings for Eric; she gets up to the party and finally sees her idols in the flesh, but stunningly Benner doesn’t do much to bring any of them to life, other than Claude – and he even has Bird sort of tuning out while Claude talks to her! I mean what the hell? Here also Claude expresses interest in Bird’s voice, asking if she sings. But the party comes to a quick end, and more time is spent with Eleanor, who turns out to be married, with a two-year old kid to boot. Eleanor is not in danger of winning any mother of the year awards; there are some cringe-worthy moments where she shows total disregard for her son, Jason. Like, “locking him in a car and leaving him there for a few hours” sort of cringe-worthy.

Now that Bird’s gotten her taste of the rock world, she wants more. After her mom catches her screwing herself with the water that pours from the bathtub faucet (really!), Bird decides she’s had it with this place and steals some of her mom’s secret money to get back to Atlanta. She hooks up with Eleanor again, and the pseudo-reporter takes her to a local TV show where a Troggs-esque rock group is giving a show. Again, not much detail on this, and the group is presented as a mangy, disreputable, almost proto-punk lot. They also mock Eleanor, and here Bird sees how pathetic the young girl is…she clearly wants to be a part of the rock world, but is “saddled” with a family she doesn’t really want. Luckily Eleanor soon disappears from the text; she talks Bird into immediately driving to New York to catch the upcoming Red Coats concert, and last we see of Eleanor – until the end of the novel, where we find out she’s left her kid and husband and become a full-time hippie – she’s hanging out in Greenwich Village.

Bird as I say is an unusual character; she sneaks into the hotel the Red Coats are staying in and reluctantly lets the kitchen boy screw her in a closet in exchange for a waitress uniform. This she wears as she takes a tray of tea up to the Red Coats suite. But Bird is quickly outed, however Eric Linden is happy to see her. More importantly we have a Bob Dylan riff here, with a “dwarfish” folk singer with a big mouth who holds court with the Red Coats, mocking them for their pretentions – literary Noel (aka John Lennon) in particular. Benner seems to be heading into a cliched rock orgy party sequence…then has Bird wake up in Eric’s bed next day, not remembering anything! 

Ridiculously, so much plot stuff has happened off-page; Bird, we learn, was dosed with some LSD by Noel, and she ended up acting nuts in the hotel room – and, more importantly, singing. So once again Bird’s displayed her singing talents and our author has denied us from actually witnessing it. However, she’s so impressed Eric that he wants to take Bird back to London with him and manage her…and also keep her on the side as his extramarital nookie. Bird’s even called her mom, again off-page, to tell her she’s leaving the country. And we won’t even see the mom again; throughout the novel Benner sets up all these plot points that demand resolution, but he never returns to any of them. Bird’s relationship with her mother is one of the biggest; it won’t be for a hundred or so pages that we even learn that Bird occasionally writes her mother letters.

Unfortunately Benner squanders even more promise: he picks up a month later and Bird’s basically become a secretary for Red Coats boss Bryce, with no followup on her potential singing career…nor any further information on her association with the Red Coats. The group she idolizes, has managed to meet, and has even followed to London to work for them, and they totally drop from the narrative. Save for Claude, who turns out to be gay…and there’s a goofy bit where a totally-serious Bird innocently asks Claude how gay men have sex(!). This leads to a bonkers bit where Bird goes down on Claude, the event proceeding to full-blown sex…with Claude putting his member in the part of Bird’s anatomy that he’s most familiar with! Bird appears to like it, though…leading to a secret romance between the two that eventually blows up when Claude tells Bryce (who turns out to be his lover) he’s been screwing Bird, and Bryce fires Eric Linden…and Bird’s now without a job.

Soon it becomes clear that Songbird is mostly a picaresque. Rather than a plot that develops and builds – Eric, Claude, and the rest of the Red Coats disappear from the novel at this point, and they don’t return – it’s instead composed of Bird going from one unusual character and situation to the next. So after the Red Coats she ends up with famous black American soul singer Chic Hale; she met him at a concert Eric took her to, but while Chicliked Bird, Bird didn’t like Chic – because he’s black, and she’s from Georgia, and she still has certain sentiments. But now out on the street in a foreign city with no home or paycheck, a girl has to put her discriminations in check, so she heads on over to Chic’s place…and ends up having the best sex of her young life. And by the way, Bird’s still sixteen years old throughout all this.

The stuff with Chic doesn’t last very long; soon enough Bird’s back in America, now hanging out in San Francisco with a Joni Mitchell-esque folk singer named Char Rain, whom she just met in London. This part is incredibly random, and throughout Benner fails to exploit the fact that Bird has become best buds with the rock world glitterati. Seriously, the book implies that all you need to do is sneak into a hotel room to meet your rock idols, and next thing you know you’ll be flying around the world with them. Here, instead of anything having to do with the music biz, Bird instead gets in conversations with Char’s Abbie Hoffman-esque boyfriend, who wants Char to use her “power” to fight war and such, and meanwhile distrusts Bird as an interloper. After the two try to engage Bird in a three-way, our heroine takes off for Los Angeles.

This part has nothing whatsoever to do with anything; Bird hooks up with an old lech named Papa Burl – Chic Hale randomly gave her his name back in London as a guy to look up if she was ever in LA – and rooms with one of his “girls.” This old freak is a former Hollywood photographer or somesuch, and he has a retinue of young girls who flock around him. He throws a party where a fifteen year old girl gives her virginity to some local “stud,” an event which Papa Burl throws whenever he finds willing young virgins. All very unseemly, strange, and most unforgivably arbitrary. What’s worse is that in this part we have an actual rock-type dude: Fuzzy Remo, fantastically-named singer of a local group (I imagined them having a garage punk sound, like The Seeds or something). But he’s only in the book for a couple pages – long enough to take Bird back to his place, drop some acid, and treat her like shit. Bird shows him who’s boss by biting his dick and then taking off.

The final quarter sees Bird finally achieving her dream: becoming a rock figure in her own right. But even here it’s not enough and she’s still unhappy and uncertain about everything. She meets Davey Brillini, a pudgy singer-songwriter in Los Angeles who has been on the cusp of fame for years, but who hasn’t broken through. Bird gets a shot at singing backup for him at a recording, and Davey is so impressed that he rearranges the track and brings Bird in as his co-lead. They cut a few records together, and soon enough they’ve got a pair of greasy managers who go on to position the couple as a sort of hipper, younger Sonny and Cher, with “mod” outfits and such. Inexplicably, all of this stuff is sort of rushed through, and rather than focus on the music and the experience, Benner dwells on how unhappy Bird is, how she finds this sudden fame so soul-crushing.

And what’s worse, rather than wrapping up any of the earlier stuff – like a now-famous Bird meeting Eric Linden or the Red Coats again, or maybe reuniting with her mom, who constantly told Bird she wouldn’t amount to anything – Benner instead introduces a lame eleventh hour subplot where a mainstream writer wants to do a piece on Bird and Davey, and Bird starts falling for the guy. He’s in his thirties, not part of the rock world, yadda yadda, but it’s all just so lame and dumb…I mean we finally got to a “rock novel” sort of plot, but Benner instead turns it into a soapy melodrama about Bird and Davey’s relationship fracturing and Bird looking to this new guy as her latest chance for happiness. Even lamer, it all quickly fizzles in the last few pages and Bird just decides to fake happiness with Davey if she can’t have the real thing. The end!

I went into the usual needless depth because Songbird appears to be pretty scarce. A few years later Manor reprinted the book, but this edition seems to be just as scarce. My advice is to save your money.