The Armageddon Rag

The Armageddon Rag, by George R.R. Martin
January, 1985  Pocket Books
(original hardcover edition 1983)

This is still the only George R.R. Martin novel I’ve ever read, and I’ve read it twice now. I first read The Armageddon Rag a little over twenty years ago. I can’t recall how I discovered this obscure novel, but I figure I was probably just searching the internet for rock novels. Something, sadly, I still do to this day. I got the original hardcover from the Dallas public library and enjoyed it, other that is than a few reservations.

Anyway long preamble short, re-reading the book brought those reservations back home. Similar to Glimpses, this is a great concept that is given a poor protagonist and a sometimes-muddled execution, with an author apparently uncertain what type of novel he wants to write. Perhaps tellingly, “Lew Shiner” is thanked as one of Martin’s rock researchers, which really brings home the similarties between the two books – not the least that they’re both by authors known for genre work who were attempting to go mainstream. Something another genre author, Norman Spinrad, did years before either of them in Passing Through The Flame.

On his website, Martin states that The Armageddon Rag was his lowest selling novel by a country mile. I’ve seen other reports that its failure led him to give up novel wrting for over a decade, branching out into TV scriptwriting before returning to books in the mid ‘90s with the sequence of fantasy novels commonly referred to as A Game Of Thrones (which I admit to knowing absolutely nothing about). The closest comparison I could think of to Martin’s style would be Stephen King – who, again perhaps tellingly, graced the novel with a glowing cover blurb.

So far as Martin’s comment that the book sold poorly goes, my assumption is it was just too soon for this particular novel. Characters here act like the ‘60s was decades ago, whereas the big events were slightly more than a decade before – the novel hinges on the aftermath of 1971. Perhaps if the novel had been published just a few years later, maybe in ’89 to coincide with Woodstock’s 20th anniversary, it might’ve fared better. Or perhaps the problem is the book is just too bloated and uncertain of itself; it veers everywhere from murder mystery to Big Chill “what happened to us?” bullshit to a somewhat-trashy rock novel, before finally shaping itself into straight-up horror fiction for the finale. One suspects that Martin should’ve chosen one genre and stuck with it.

Which is to say Martin’s writing is fine, and he brings to life his characters and various fantastical sequences, but the problem is the book is so incredibly fat. It could stand to lose a good hundred pages and still come off as too overstuffed for its own good. This is especially bothersome because much of what Martin writes about is uninteresting at best – that is, unless you want to read about a bunch of thirty-something navel-gazers moaning about how the ‘60s ended, taking with it all their youthful dreams.

In this regard our protagonist is perfect for the job – he’s a cynical, self-obsessed, entitled asshole…pretty much the same as the protagonist of Glimpses. But whereas Ray of that later novel at least loved rock music and partook of the occasional drug, the hero of this book, Sander “Sandy” Blair, doesn’t even seem to even much like rock ‘n’ roll. And the most he does in the book is drink the occasional beer. We learn that even in the ‘60s he shied from LSD, even though all his college pals were into it. But it’s the rock stuff that most makes you wonder why Sandy is the hero of this particular tale; it’s a couple hundred pages before he even does any serious music-listening.

Back in the late ‘60s into the very early ‘70s, Sandy was a roving reporter for Groundhog magazine, an underground rag not to be confused with Rolling Stone – which in true roman a clef fashion is mentioned once or twice in the novel, so we don’t assume it and The Groundhog are one and the same. But Sandy lost the faith in ’71 and eventually turned his hand to writing novels. Now he’s 37, moderately successful, lives in a New York brownstone, and drives a brand new Mazda RX-7, the capitalistic sellout. But seriously, Sandy will be chastised for this, as will his other freak-flagging pals who have gone straight – the novel wants us to understand it’s a bad thing not to be a dirty hippie. 

The year ’71 is central to the novel because that’s when the ‘60s dream died – September 20th, 1971, to be precise. For that was the day Pat Hobbins, albino lead singer of the mega-popular group The Nazgul, was assassinated while singing on stage at a massive midnight outdoor festival in West Mesa, Arizona. (Curiously, the sniper was never apprehended, but the various reveals of the climax seem to imply who pulled the trigger.) Hobbins was the fourth and final of the big four rockers to die –  Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and then Hobbins; for the Nazgul, we are informed, was the defining rock group of this alternate reality, more important than even the Beatles. This is a bit humorous, given that Martin describes their sound as something like Sir Lord Baltimore mixed with Blue Oyster Cult: hard-driving proto-metal mixed with occult (or at least geeky) lyrics. A group like this would be cult at best in reality.

Sandy’s called up by old Hog boss Jared Patterson, as blatant a Jann Wenner clone as possible, who informs Sandy that infamous Nazgul manager Jamie Lynch has been murdered. Jared wants to do a story on it and figures Sandy would be great for it, despite the fact that he fired Sandy from the mag years before, even though Sandy started the Hog with him in the ‘60s. This is just one of the many, many sources of anger and frustration for Sandy throughout the novel; he is very much an unlikable protagonist. Sandy is drawn to the story, mostly as a way to get out of struggling more on his latest novel, which is overdue; his wife isn’t thrilled with the idea, and we have here another mirror of Glimpses in that Sandy’s shrew of a wife just doesn’t get it, man.

Sandy heads off in his new Mazda, on up to Maine where Lynch was murdered. He discovers this was a ritual sacrifice; the Nazgul was blaring while Lynch’s heart was cut out, his body later wrapped in a Nazgul poster. Sandy works with a local cop who occasionally feeds him info, but this subplot sort of fizzles out. Instead the narrative here becomes more focused on Sandy hitting the road in his Mazda and reconnecting with all his old college pals, passing judgement on them and bemoaning what has happened to the world. At least he gets laid, hooking up with an old girlfriend in Chicago, and here Martin proves that, while his prose might be similar to Stephen King’s, he’s a lot more sexually explicit than prudish King ever was.

This Big Chill stuff is the most grating element of the novel and would be the first thing I’d cut. But basically Sandy hooks up with an old girlfriend, visits a former freak-flagger who is now a successful advertising executive, and hangs out with another old female pal who now lives on a commune, a lady who rails against the sexism and racism of the western world. (These godamn people would be lost without their “isms.”) This sadly is a motif of the novel, so she isn’t alone in her complaining, but Sandy’s happy to note that, despite the careful emasculation of the commune, the little boys still play cowboys and Indians when their parents aren’t around. Another old friend is now a college professor who complains that the kids of today are too docile and not radical enough; one wonders how proud he would be of Antifa, or those leftist college thugs of today who burn books that run counter to their agenda, completely oblivious of the fact that the Nazis did the very same thing.

There’s also a completely arbitrary part where Sandy visits his former best friend, who now lives a virtual prisoner in the mansion of his bestselling novelist of a dad, a Hemingway type who writes, you guessed it, sexist and racist action novels that sell bujillions of copies, much to Sandy’s dismay. This whole part exists so Martin can rail against the previous generation, with Sandy defending his old buddy for his heroism in dodging the draft and not taking the “easy way out” and going to Vietnam. I’m not sure too many vets would agree with Sandy’s sentiments, but if nothing Sandy is a man of his deluded convictions. There’s also a random freak-out part where Sandy walks the streets of Chicago and flashes back to when the cops beat him unmerciful in ’68, when he was here as part of the Democrat convention…this part at least factors into the supernatural element of the novel, eventually.

Mingled in with all this padding we occasionally get a return to the main plot, such as it is; Sandy visits each surviving member of the Nazgul, all of whom have moved on since 1971, the band breaking up when their lead singer’s brains were blown out. First up is the drummer, Gopher John, now remodeled as a slick bar owner, where he gives new rock bands their chance; that is, until a fire breaks out at the place while Gopher’s having dinner with Sandy, and 75 young people die in it. Next up is Maggio, the guitarist (the equal of Hendrix and Clapton, we’re told), now an obese psychopath who lords it over the underlings of his new bar band, bullying and beating his latest jailbait girlfriend. Finally there’s Peter Faxon, the bassist-songwriter, who has a wife and kids now but misses the music biz. There’s a nice part where he takes Sandy up in a hot air baloon over Arizona, Faxon now living not far from West Mesa.

Along the way Sandy gets wind of a mysterious individual named Edan Morse, a supposed rock promoter looking to get the Nazgul back together. Here Sandy sees motive, as with former producer Lynch dead, there’d be no one to get in the way of this reunion. During the interminable “commune” section Sandy finds out that Morse is just one name used by a nigh-mythical ‘60s radical who was behind a lot of bombings, hippie terrorist movements, and the like, but who eventually got into black magic and the like. This of course all ties in with the occult elements of the Nazgul. And all these sequences have their own subplots, making the book even fatter; there’s even the typical rock novel cliché stuff, with a go-nowhere Brian Jones sort of riff, with Faxon being the guy who started the Nazgul and wrote all their songs, but slowly feeling the focus slipping over to Pat Hobbins, much to his dismay.

Things pick up when Morse enters the narrative, mostly due to his henchwoman, an ultra-sexy brunette named Ananda who promptly comes on to Sandy and takes him to bed. Pretty much the ideal ‘60s babe, Ananda’s kept the flame burning despite being in her 30s, plus she’s into occult stuff too. There’s also a monosyllabic henchman named Gort who seems to have walked out of a fantasy novel, which is likely the intention; the novel is filled with Tolkein references, some subtle and some overt. Both serve Edan Morse, an otherwise ordinary-looking dude who occasionally goes into delusional spiels about the supernatural and cuts his palms so that his blood can fuel visions.

At this point the novel is firmly in Stephen King territory, but then the Nazgul do in fact get back together and it abruptly changes tack into “rock novel” territory. For reasons neither Sandy nor Martin himself can explain, Sandy takes up Edan’s offer to be the PR man for the reformed group – even though Morse has taken the ghoulish approach of recreating dead Pat Hobbins in the form of a kid named Larry who looked sort of like Hobbins, but Morse paid to have cosmetic surgery so he’s now an exact duplicate of the murdered Nazgul singer. Only problem is, as Sandy discovers when he watches them practice in Chicago, the kid can’t sing worth a damn, and has none of Hobbins’s pint-sized menace.

We get a fullblown rundown of their first gig, playing to a packed auditorium who have come out to see the finally-reunited Nazgul. While things start off well, soon the audience is downright hostile. They resent the new songs and they mock Larry’s attempts at mimicking Pat Hobbins. It goes on and on, but Martin does a good job of describing the various songs to the point that you’d like to hear them – though again it’s pure “cult band” stuff, again sounding along the lines of Sir Lord Baltimore’s material on Kingdom Come mixed with a little early Blue Oyster Cult. Then Faxon finally relents and the Nazgul do an old number at the end, and it’s as if a completely different band is on the stage – and a different singer. For it very much appears that Pat Hobbins lives again, having taken over poor Larry’s body.

What’s funny is, Martin proceeds to write the exact same sequence over and over again. Sandy follows the group around the country and we get more rundowns of ensuing shows, all of them following the same path – lousy on the new numbers, the old group and singer reborn on the old numbers. Despite all the repetition the plot develops into a magical realism deal, with the hippies of old being reborn through the power of the Nazgul. True to Edan Morse’s proclamations, the old days are coming back, and it’s becoming more like 1971 than 1983…cool stuff here with the Nazgul being seen as dangerous, and cops blocking off areas from roving reborn hippies and radicals and the like. There is an aura of menace and danger that has been lacking from rock for over a decade, and Sandy’s at the center of it. So it’s funny to think of all this going down in the era of Tears For Fears. 

Also as Morse predicted, the future is becoming the past in that the Nazgul’s tour will culminate in a massive midnight outdoor festival in West Mesa, on the exact anniversary of the disastrous one in ’71. Along the way they’ve become more the Nazgul of old, only doing the old songs now, and Pat Hobbins himself walking the stage, to be replaced by an increasingly confused and scared Larry when they’re offstage. And meanwhile Sandy has lots of sex with Ananda, who proves to be more instrumental to the plot than initially suspected, to the point that the various reveals and turnarounds in the climax aren’t as hard to believe as might be imagined.

But still it’s as if we are reading a completely different novel in the homestretch; indeed, it’s as if we’re reading the novel the opening chapters promised us, before we took that looong detour into The Big Chill territory. It’s all reborn ghosts and Orc-like roadies and the supernatural spirit of evil about to take over the Earth, with a drugged and betrayed Sandy set up as a modern-day Lee Harvey Oswald or somesuch. However the Nazgul’s show sounds fantastic, sort of capping off the prematurely-ended ‘60s, complete with cameos from the ghosts of Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison! This entire sequence is very well done, and one suspects if the majority of the previous 300+ pages had been whittled down Martin would’ve had a hit on his hands.

All that being said, the novel kept my attention – save that is for some of the “visit my old pals and complain about today” bullshit. Some of that got tiresome and I’ll admit I skimmed over it. And the stuff with the Nazgul performing was cool, but suffered from too much repetition. I also feel the supernatural element could’ve been more properly explained; Martin tries to keep it all as a mystery, something Sandy can’t quite comprehend, which again makes the reader wonder why Edan Morse puts so much importance on him – one of the biggest fails of the novel is that it’s never satisfactorily stated why Sandy is so important to the various characters. He’s disagreeable at best, plus he’s not even the best representative of his generation: as mentioned the dude was never into drugs and really doesn’t even seem to like rock, let alone live for it, like the dude in Glimpses did. 

But still, I have read The Armageddon Rag twice now, which must at least be an indication of its quality. I’d recommend it for anyone looking for a fairly good rock novel, but it’s certainly no Death Rock or even Passing Through The Flame.

Panama Red

Panama Red, by Stephen Diamond
October, 1979  Avon Books

Now here’s one of those fat ‘70s paperback originals I basically yanked off the shelf upon discovering it many years ago in a used bookstore. That cover! That back cover! A tale of a ‘70s dope dealer with exploitative front and back cover copy, including a mention of “outer space weed!” It got pretty much the same reaction from me that Cindy On Fire would a few years later – I was on my way to the checkout line within seconds.

But after that the book sat in a box for like 13 years before I finally got around to reading it…in fact, I’m sure I tried to read Panama Red at least once over the past years, but dropped it, as sadly this is yet another instance in which the actual book does not live up to the cover art, the cover copy, or even to its own potential. For reasons that must forever be lost to us, Stephen Diamond having passed away years ago, our author has taken a story of a pimped-out pot dealer and turned in a slooow-moving tale in the James Michener manner. According to the copyright page, portions of Panama Red had previously been published in 1977, in some underground paper or something, so my guess is this stuff – ie the good stuff that we don’t even get to until the final hundred pages of this 400-page behemoth – was Diamond’s original tale and Avon or some editor asked him to flesh it out to “blockbuster paperback” proportions.

Another red flag, at least for me, is that Panama Red is presented as an “autobiography,” the first-person recounting of Jacob “Panama Red” Light, a German-Panamanian who moves to New York in the early ‘60s, becomes a dope dealer by chance, and over the next several years finds himself a veritable kingpin of hash, initiated into a hippie mafia clearly modeled after real-life group the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Only those last hundred pages drop the first-person schtick and move into a much-preferable third-person. I say much preferable because Jacob Light speaks to us in a stuffy, convoluted diction that would be more at home in Proust or something – I mean there’s absolutely nothing hip or cool about the guy, and he comes off more like a bore than a dealer pushing “outer space weed.”

So we must endure a grueling opening hundred pages(!) in which Jacob Light recounts to us his history, starting with how his father Solomon Licht, a German Jew born in 1915, escaped Nazi Germany in the early ‘30s and ended up in Panama. After much dithering on this guy’s backstory and all that jazz, including getting married to a native gal, Jacob is born in ’46. On and on it goes, basically a slow-moving novella about hardscrabble life in the slums of Panama after Jacob’s dad dies and eventually Jacob is taken on as a houseboy at a wealthy man’s home, and zzzzz….. Sorry, I dozed off. This goes on for a hundred pages. Of small, dense print – the book is incredibly overwritten. 

Humorously, when “Book II” starts up, it’s 1963 and Jacob has moved to New York – and it’s as if the novel has started anew. We learn that hardly any of the preceding hundred pages was necessary – if something comes up about Jacob’s Panamanian past, he’ll just remind us of what happened, meaning we could’ve skipped that deadweight of an opening “Book.” Oh and I forgot to mention, part of that opening was so Jacob could inform us that, due to his mixed heritage, he has the red hair and beard of a German but the dark skin of a Panamanian, all belabored setup for the lame payoff of his eventual nickname, Panama Red – the same name, nudge-nudge, as a famous strain of pot. (Which as I recall even got a shout-out in Apocalypse Now!)

Anyway Jacob gets a job at a bar run by John “The Hat” Trusdale, and after a few boring escapades he’s hired to live in the loft in which Trusdale keeps all the pot for his lucrative side business. Through happenstance Jacob ended up doing a delivery for him, to Trusdale’s sister; here Jacob also met Hannah, a good-lookin’ babe who happens to be a rock journalist. After some off-page good-lovin’ (our author is never very explicit, though he gets a bit more so in the later, third-person section), Jacob’s high as a kite and in love and soon enough he’s like the guardian of the Hat’s stash, doing deliveries and running the business. He also becomes fond of grass, though Diamond leaves the drug stuff less frequent than you might expect; I did get a laugh out of how pot improves the clarity of Jacob’s vision. I must’ve missed that; it just made me tired and unable to follow conversations. 

This stuff is what we came here for, but it’s a bit too little, too late; Jacob Light is still much too stuffy of a narrator, and there’s none of the feel of the times. Even as the early ‘60s become the late ‘60s and he’s banging a hippie terrorist-type chick, you more get the feeling you’re reading some bland 19th century novel, thanks to the stodgy prose. It’s not helped by the lack of action – both of the bump and grind kind and the regular kind. There’s a part where Jacob and Trusdale are ripped off, Jacob coming back to his place to find some guys he knows prepared to take his cash, but there’s no tension, no drama…Jacob doesn’t even realize until later that he’s even been in danger. As I say, the character is much too naïve for the book. 

Occasionally we see mention of The Royal Road, a near-mythical psychedelic cult that’s sort of a global hippie mafia; again, it’s clearly patterend after the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which you can learn more about in the great recent documentary Orange Sunshine. But Jacob just dangles this carrot, promising that he’ll get to it eventually. In the meantime we must endure yet another trip to Panama, Jacob reconnecting with his South American past and yadda yadda; honestly folks, a whole swath of Panama Red has zilch to do with the drug trade and just comes off like soapy melodrama. It’s all very puzzling, and I’m certain it’s editorial tinkering, Diamond being instructed to expand his novel and not being sure how to do it. But we get lots of shit about Jacob and his love for Larissa, a Panamanian girl he had a crush on years ago who has now become a Joan Baez-type singer.

So let’s just jump to the last hundred pages, because here Panama Red becomes fairly interesting – and, as mentioned, moves to third-person, though Diamond aribitrarily refers to his protagonist as “Jacob” or “Panama Red,” which is a bit sloppy. The Royal Road, we learn, was founded by Crowley-like mage Robin Rothschild, and is made up of a global network of drug-types who have been initiated into a sort of Thelema-like cult. Oh, and Rothschild has a magic chess set, which we get to see at work at the climax, where it starts glowing and flying around. This last quarter is so much better than the previous three hundred pages, making the reader wish the entirety of the novel was up to this caliber. The plot here becomes Jacob’s quest to legalize marijuana, using the resources and connections of the Royal Road to make it a possibility.

The Royal Road initiation is our first taste of the psychedelic; Jacob smokes some of Rothschild’s strange gold dust and next thing you know the beared mage is shooting bolts of power out of his fingertips. But this touch is soon lost and we’re more into the humdrum business end of legalizing dope in a few countries, Jacob becoming the point man for the whole Panama deal. Diamond also works in a paranoid conspiracy vibe with the cops clueing in to Jacob and figuring he’s the head of this international smuggling ring, setting him up for a huge bust. But we get back to the psychedelic stuff in a bizarro finale in which the elite of the Royal Road, including Jacob, go on an astral trip, leaving their bodies and voyaging into the cosmos – plus we get to see that damn chess set flying around.

It's all weird, wild stuff, but comes off as so separate from the previous 300 pages of tedium we’ve just endured. Even the finale maintains the surreal edge; Diamond has us believing we’re headed for a ‘70s-approved bummer ending, with the CIA poised to blow Jacob’s brains out just as he’s heading off to put the final touches on his international legal marijuana pact…but the driver turns out to be his old pal and thus only pretended he’d take the hit job the CIA offered him, and then apropos of nothing Jacob and Larissa are enjoying a picnic when a friggin’ UFO flies over them and disappears…and that’s it! A weird finale for sure, along the lines of Once Is Not Enough in how out of left field it is.  But, like that Jacqueline Susann novel, at least it leaves an impression.

Anyway, this is one of those novels that just could’ve been so much more. But as mentioned the cover art is great. Here’s a photo of the back cover – the crazy thing is, everything depicted in the painting happens in the novel, but it’s all just so boring.

Woodstock (one*more*time*)

Woodstock (one*more*time*), by Richard Hubbard
No month stated, 1971  Award Books

Back in my review of the Nick Carter: Killmaster novel Target: Doomsday Island, which was the sole contribution to the series by a writer named Richard Hubbard, I mentioned that I had another of Hubbard’s novels, also published by Award, which was about Woodstock. Well (and you’ve probably already figured out where I’m going with this), this is that novel! And I have to say, it’s pretty much everything I wanted The Rock Nations to be.

Whereas that earlier novel ranged all over the “rockfests” of the day, this one focuses on just a sole festival – The 72-Hour Woodstock Bash, to be held even closer to the actual Woodstock this time. This allows Hubbard to dwell on one location, focusing on the scene and the setting. And more importantly, Hubbard’s novel is written in a much-preferable third-person, so the novel doesn’t come off like the assholic first-person diatribe that The Rock Nations did; we get to meet a larger and more diverse group of characters.

Strangely though, Woodstock (one*more*time*) comes off as too short, at just a little over 150 pages. This makes me wonder if it was a contractual affair for Hubbard, Award trying to tap into the hippie craze with an appropriately-exploitative cover. As it is, we really don’t get enough of an idea of how – or why – this second Woodstock “Bash” was set up (even though the back cover copy implies that this is exactly what the main plot will be), or what the acts appearing in it are like. And while there are many colorful characters, in some ways there are too many of them and Hubbard is often guilty of ignoring the more interesting ones to focus on the boring ones.

The novel opens with the new Woodstock coming up within the next few days – again, despite the back cover copy there’s no detail on its planning or the business end of it – and a character named Jeanie Revere, who has just broken up with her latest boyfriend, decides to go check it out. Jeanie’s a 19 year-old college dropout, sleeping around in Manhattan, and in a hazy backstory we learn she was briefly married to an abusive wanna-be rocker who OD’d after the couple divorced. Jeanie is practically our main character but she’s kind of dull. She’s got a lot of hangups, too, coming off as alternately needy and dismissive, particularly to the male characters.

Meanwhile other characters are heading to Woodstock, like Farley Jordan, a narcissistic rich kid who rides around in a psychedelic Day-Glo “land cruiser,” sitting in the opulent, shag-lined interior and strumming his guitar while gals give him blowjobs and partake of the free drugs. His driver is Billy Blue, so named due to his “blue-black” skin. With his traveling psychedelic freakshow, Farley cries out to be the central character of the novel, but sadly he’s quicky shunted off to a supporting role, only appearing in several pages total.

Instead, it’s more of those boring characters who take the limelight: like newly married couple Chet and Harriet Rogers. Chet is concerned he’s “old” now that he’s 30, but he’s growing his hair long and he even got a peace symbol medallion to look young and hip. Harriet meanwhile is nine months pregnant and wonders why Chet is taking a “shortcut” through rural New York; belatedly she realizes Chet’s planned this all along, to go see this new Woodstock thing. Folks, the last goddamn place I would’ve taken my wife when she was nine months pregnant was to an outdoor festival in the middle of summer with no indoor plumbing or etc.

But then, Chet’s an asshole of the first order – a running plot is his narcissitic concern over his age and studliness, hoping these hippie chicks see him for the virile stud he is…but on top of that, he also plans to sneak away from Harriet and bang as many hippie gals as he can!! The cro-mangnonry of it all is almost absurd, not the least because Chet gets away with it, not once but with three different hippie chicks! Meanwhile Harriet has her own, uh, encounter, but that one’s more weird than sleazy. Anyway these two characters also take most of the spotlight, particularly given that Jeanie Revere is an old flame of Chet’s – not to mention she’s one of the hippie babes he bangs on the sly here at the second Woodstock.

Other, more minor characters would include Buckrogers, a bald-headed drug peddler with stainless steel teeth; Hungry, a pretty hippie chick who plans to fuck a hundred guys over the course of the weekend; Dave, a mellow black guy who just wants to enjoy the scene but becomes the target of a sadistic sheriff; Buster, the sheriff in question, a benched pro footballer who doesn’t consider himself racist but decides to “monitor” Dave and eventually sets him up on phony charges; and finally Mickey, a dude who comes to Woodstock with Jeanie and manages a no-name rock group, who tries to take advantage of the sudden cancellation of the festival in a subplot that ultimately goes nowhere. We also have one or two sequences featuring the four young men who organized the festival: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Irving!

In addition there are the various performers, but sadly Hubbard doesn’t focus on them much; in this regard, there’s only slightly more “rock” content than in The Rock Nations. But unlike that novel, here Hubbard creates all new groups; there’s Harley Thrug, who is famous for an 87-minute song; a hard rock group whose name I was too lazy to jot down; Kinzua Sockeye(!), a waifish American Indian who sings “Me and Bobby McGee” in honor of the recently-departed Janis Joplin, dedicating it to the also-recently-departed Jimi Hendrix; and finally Rob Zimmer, who plays a zither(!), and who clearly is intended to be an analog of Robert “Bob Dylan” Zimmerman. Honestly it sounds like a pretty terrible lineup.

Hubbard ranges around this cast of characters – though he always keeps the performers at a distance, so that we never see anything from their perspective – and brings to life the colorful scene. Cops are everywhere, but per the rather reasonable sheriff, they’ve been ordered not to bust anyone doing drugs – or even selling drugs – but just to make sure no one gets hurt. As mentioned though Buster doesn’t like this and decides to, uh, bust Dave on a phony heroin charge, bullying Buckrogers into planting the evidence. This eventually leads to Chet, a lawyer, becoming a momentary hero of the hippies as he gets the kid out of jail.

Chet as mentioned is a total dick but one must admire the brazen nature of his plan. He basically just abandons Harriet when they get to the festival, runs into Jeanie – here we learn the two were in love but it broke off when Chet met Harriet – and he promptly takes her back behind some shrubs and has some quick sex with her. Hubbard is fairly explicit in these scenes, especially in an earlier one in which we see Hungry the nympho at work. But Hungry is another of Hubbard’s disappearing subplots; she’s introduced as sort of an important character, insofar as we’re introduced to her and whatnot, but she then disappears, only to show up late in the game to fuck Chet – by which point she’s screwed 69 guys and Chet feels as if he’s pronging “oozing red meat.” One of the more gag-inducing sex scenes you’ll ever read, folks, down there with the sick-o sleaze in The Illusionist.

It seemed to me that Hubbard was almost doing a Burt Hirschfeld thing in that he took this big cast of characters, put them against a colorful backdrop, and then just let them simmer for a while. Also in that, despite the colorful backdrop, it eventually boils down to the soap opera dynamic between a few main characters. But Woodstock (one*more*time*) is a helluva lot more streamlined than Hirschfeld, to the point where you wish Hubbard had given himself at least a couple more pages to flesh things out. But he does follow the same template, with all the Woodstock stuff gradually getting less prominence so he can focus on the “who cares?” triangle of Chet, Harriet, and Jeanie.

I say who cares because none of these characters are interesting, or even likable. Chet’s an ass, Jeanie is so uncertain and confused that she comes off as dumb as a box of rocks, and Harriet is too reserved and conservative for the setting. So again we have that confusing conundrum where an author has given us characters wholly inappropriate for the plot; basically just like The Rock Nations, which demanded a superfreak hippie hero but instead gave us an entitled asshole.

But this is the plot, so far as Hubbard is concerned: Chet ranges around the festival, scoring when he can, trying to figure out why Jeanie’s alternately hot or cold, and meanwhile Harriet smokes some hash and ends up getting screwed doggy-style by Farley, who has a thing for pregnant chicks. And of course Chet comes in on the land cruiser right while it’s happening, and storms off – despite the fact that he himself has screwed two different gals in the past several hours, not to mention that he promptly has unsatisfying sex with Hungry. Frustratingly, more interesting subplots play out in almost backstory – like Buckrogers, whose fate is rendered in dialog. Farley is also delivered an ignoble, harried fate, throwing a tantrum when his free show is met with jeers and going ballistic in his land cruiser.

I forgot to mention, the Woodstock Bash is cancelled not even a day in, because a farmer whose property borders the site sees a bunch of shit in the lake – yep, those damn hippies are relieving themselves right in Mother Nature, not willing to stand in line for the port-a-potties. So the crotchety farmer gets the festival cancelled, which is again frustrating because you wanna read a book about a friggin’ rock festival, not about a bunch of people stumbling around in the woods and refusing to leave. But the show does eventually go on, mostly due to that reasonable sheriff, who argues quite reasonably that these kids will leave once they see the performers they paid to see.

Anyway I mention the shitty lake because in the finale Harriet, in a sort of drug-induced suicide trip (mostly due to Chet having seen her screw Farley), wades out into the lake and, we learn once again via dialog, is found literally eating shit(!). Well she pukes a bunch but is otherwise okay, and around here Chet realizes he’s being a prick so maybe should check on his nine-months pregnant wife. Plus Jeanie’s told him “so long,” deciding after all that she’s in love with Mickey, and none of these other hippie girls are too interested in him. So the happy couple climbs back into their car and heads on back to the city for a veritable happily ever after.

Hubbard’s writing is good, though, skirting a literary vibe but never becoming pretentious. He’s guilty of rampant POV-hopping, though. He also seems to understand the Woodstock Nation, but at the same time hasn’t exactly given us notable representatives of it. So all in all, a quick but worthwhile read. But I wouldn’t say this is the great counterculture/rock novel of the era – that honor would still have to go to Death Rock.

J.R. Young & The Review As Fiction

The Rolling Stone Record Review, by The Editors Of Rolling Stone
August, 1971  Pocket Books

In my review of Death Rock I mentioned obscure early Rolling Stone contributor J.R. Young, who introduced the novel concept of writing short stories instead of straight reviews. Inspired by Fabe’s novel I decided to give the Young stories another read, so got out my copy of The Rolling Stone Record Review and my Rolling Stone Cover To Cover CD-ROM.

According to the CD-ROM, Young contributed 26 articles, most of them reviews, between February 1970 and December 1973. But as noted below, this number is suspect, as per The Rolling Stone Record Review Young had pieces in the April and November 1969 issues, which would make it 28 total – that is, if there aren’t more in addition to those two. I’ll have to figure this out someday. Anyway, Young was doing short stories from the beginning, and it was my assumption that he only eventually moved to regular reviews due to editorial/reader pressure or because he’d gotten burned out on the short story format. But in fact he was also doing regular reviews from the beginning; of the 28 (known) pieces he contributed to Rolling Stone, only eleven of them were short stories, all contributed between April 1969 and January 1971. And I’m not sure about any editorial pressure; The Rolling Stone Record Review features an entire section devoted to Young, titled “The Review As Fiction,” and has an intro perhaps written by RS honcho Jann Wenner that enthuses over his work:

The problem of communicating one’s thoughts about an album by writing a story rather than directly dealing with bass lines, influences, production flaws, and the like, is nearly insurmountable. Perhaps the only reviewer to come to terms with this exacting form has been J.R. Young, a mild-mannered young man who lives on a lush 15-acre farm in a tiny town in Oregon “where we have a nice garden, but we also have these funny little bugs in the cold water.” Don’t let his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Oregon or his two years’ teaching experience at the State University of New York fool you – the man’s a good writer.

This brief intro is all that’s really known about the mysterious J.R. Young, whose first name it appears was “Jeff.” Several years ago I started a thread about Young at the Steve Hoffman forum, and in 2015 a woman who was briefly Young’s sister-in-law, in the early ‘60s, kindly filled in some details about him. We know from it that he was into the blues, that he lived in Oregon for a time (one of his early Rolling Stone contributions is a short feature about an Oregon co-op), and that he moved to California – and apparently slipped into the aether, as there’s no other info about him I can find. Some have claimed that he did his short story reviews for Creem after leaving Rolling Stone, but I’ve never owned a copy of Creem so can’t attest to that. I’d love to hear from anyone out there who knows, though.

Young’s “reviews” perfectly capture the vibe of the era, and for the most part his protagonists are dopesmoking hippies – kids, really, with the majority of them barely into their teens. Only one or two stories feature adult characters. But somehow Young was able to tap into the hazed zeitgeist of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s; while his stories rarely ever feature anything having to do with music other than the characters occasionally listening to it, he still manages to convey the spirit of rock.

So here is a rundown of the short stories Young wrote for Rolling Stone, in order of publication date. I’ll follow the Rolling Stone naming method – artist name, album name, and date of the issue in which it appeared. An asterisk denotes that the story was included in The Rolling Stone Record Review.

The G.T.O.s, Permanent Damage (4/16/69)* – This short tale was apparently Young’s first; it isn’t listed when you sort by “Contributor” in the Rolling Stone Cover To Cover CD-ROM; the earliest listed result is the Live/Dead review, below, which wasn’t published until February 1970, almost a whole year later. Fortunately the review is included in The Rolling Stone Record Review, but not in the “Review As Fiction” section; instead, it’s buried in the “Los Angeles, Southern California, and Other Extremities” section. The mass market paperback equivalent of an Easter Egg, I guess. But if this truly was Young’s first story for the magazine, he came in with a bang – it’s a crazy tale about a proto-punk kid who takes speed, berates his mother for her old-fashioned music tastes, beats her up, then pranks her with the gift of a new record, the joke being that the G.T.O.s were an all-female group (“Girls Together Outrageously”) under the direction of Frank Zappa, and their LP was all about screwing famous rock stars. This one’s weird and wild.

Ten Years After, Ssssh (11/1/69)* – This is another one that doesn’t appear in the “Contributor” filter under “J.R. Young” in the Cover To Cover CD-ROM, it but does appear in The Rolling Stone Record Review. Anyway, the tale introduces us to the “Very Wise Kid,” a teenager who is shopping in an antique store for an instrument – anything other than a guitar. As he explains to the kindly old proprietor, it’s all been done with the guitar, and there’s nothing someone else couldn’t do “ten years after” the Kid himself has done it. This phrase puts him on the topic of Ten Years After, in particular their new LP, Ssssh, which the Kid says is a new sort of thing; indeed, “I think perhaps Alvin Lee is God.” He then leaves the store, going out to preach the Word to others, fated to return in another Ten Years After review.

The Grateful Dead, Live/Dead (2/7/70)* – This is the earliest listed entry when you sort by “J.R. Young” in the Rolling Stone Cover To Cover CD-ROM, which makes me wonder if there are even more Young reviews before it that just didn’t get tagged – if I ever get a lot of free time, it might be worth hunting through the review section of each issue to find out. The fact that the Permanent Damage and Ssssh reviews don’t come up in the results makes me suspect that there might be more Young stories that just didn’t get tagged by the CD-ROM creators.

Anyway, According to The Rolling Stone Record Review, this was Young’s most popular story, and I saw one online claim that some editions of this album came with a slip proclaiming, “Put on the Dead and spread!” This memorable tagline features throughout the story, which is a short one about a trio of young girls named Marsha, Starglow, and Sheila, who when we meet them are “four joints to the cosmos” on “very potent dope.” Sheila’s telling the other two about her latest boyfriend, Real George, who every day after work likes to come home and immediately “ball,” screaming “Put on the Dead, and spread!” This is because, “Real George likes nothing better than to fuck to the Grateful Dead.” Soon enough this very thing happens, Real George ripping off his clothes as he tears into the house, bellowing, “Put on the Dead, and spread, ‘cause I’m loaded and ready to go!” Sheila sheds her own clothes (“She was naked in a jiffy”), puts on a tape of Live/Dead, then rushes into the bedroom with him. The story is goofy and has that fuzzy-freaky vibe I love so much, but it’s pretty short and it’s mostly centered around the tagline, which is repeated several times.

The Guess Who, American Woman (3/7/70) – “Teddy had spent the warm January afternoon at Sugar Marlow’s place rolling finger-sized joints out back in the rec room where Sugar’s dad sometimes played pool and had executive parties.” With yet another effective opening line J.R. Young brings us into the world of Teddy, a dopesmoking Long Beach “blues freak” teen who likes to get ripped and play all the latest heavy blues stuff with his buddy on his KLH portable (a turntable Young mentions a few times in his stories, leading me to believe it’s the one he himself perhaps used). When Teddy goes home and finds his kid sister and her “weird fuckin’ cunt” of a friend listening to the usual “bubble gum” type music, he pokes fun at her for listening to such shit. But the joke’s on Teddy, because they’re playing The Guess Who, and the music gets stuck in his head, and that night he slips into his sister’s room and borrows the LP – lighting another fat joint as “the half-gram [turntable] arm drop[s] onto the album.”

B.B. King, The Thrill Is Gone (4/2/70)* – One of Young’s very best stories, and you often find it mentioned by those who remember his work. Opening with an explanation that it’s inspired by the recent B.B. King single, this wonderful little short story, so good that it should’ve gotten out of the rock magazine world and into a “Best Short Stories of 1970” anthology, concerns a guy named Bud as he drives through rural Oregon, reflecting on how he used to make the same run with his frat brother Phil back in ’64. Phil was a “card” who was known for telling tall tales; in particular he once told Bud a good one about how Phil was driving through a desolate area just like this and his radio picked up an actual broadcast from 1949, like a beam from the past. Phil’s theory was that, since sound travels as waves, it only stood to reason that at some point the waves pass outside of human comprehension but are still out there, and somehow his car radio just picked that particular wave up. But then Phil always was talking about strange shit, as we see in this ultra-weird aside:

Phil once told Bud that someone had pictures, almost a film, of Christ on Calvary. The pictures had been discovered buried, wrapped in a parchment tube. What it was, so Phil’s story went, was a series of rabbit retinas. Someone had lined up a row of rabbits facing the cross and then chopped their heads off in quick succession. The final retinal imprint was somehow made permanent in each eye, and thus, when all the retinas were lined up, there was a pictorial study of Calvary. The story had bothered Bud for a long time.

I love that this little story is buried within the main story, and it’s an indication that by this point Jann Wenner (or whoever edited the reviews section) was letting Young do whatever he wanted. But anyway here Bud is driving on the same stretch of road, almost ten years later, and he turns on the radio, and he hears this ghostly voice coming over the waves. The song sounds old and antiquated, the signal is weak and fading fast, and Bud wonders if he is experiencing the same thing that Phil did all those years ago. That here is another of those old sound beams experiencing a “pause in its second stellar flight.” But the signal’s fading away and Bud cranks it up – only to be blasted almost out of his seat by Wolfman Jack, announcing that he just played B.B. King’s latest single, “The Thrill Is Gone.” This is an effective little piece, alternately poignant and eerie, and very memorable.

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Déjà Vu (4/30/70)* – I’d say this one is Young’s masterpiece, if for no other reason than it’s a full-fledged short story, taking up 5 ½ double-columned pages in The Rolling Stone Record Review. The intro to “The Review As Fiction” states that this story “almost found itself onto the Big Screen, and is known to have frightened ‘hip’ record store owners from Secaucus to Sacramento.” This is because the crux of the story revolves around a small group of dopesmoking would-be terrorists who are radicalized by the real thing – a Weather Underground type who moves into the complex they all share in Eugene, Oregon and who ultimately gets them to blow up a record store. As ever Young brings the whole fuzzy-freaky era to life, with its fuzzy-freaky characters; in addition to Dave, who works in a record store and designs his own bomb blueprints, we have:

[Dave’s] old lady was something else, too, because her scene, as she so candidly admitted, was a “mixed bag,” anything from “politico-revolutionary theatre” to blue ribbon winner at the Lane County Fair for her apricot conserve. She said “Sorry ‘bout that” more than three times a day, and talked on endlessly about good karma. 

Clipper, the cat who lived next door to them, thought “her act was nowhere” privately, although he still would have loved to ball her. He was an older cat, and presumed he was terrifically sexual, and was into all kinds of “villes,” such as “I’m in Turned-onsville,” or “He’s from Hostilesville.” He had a freaky girlfriend who always wore a peasant blouse and jiggled her tits on purpose. 

“Nipplesville,” Clipper often laughed as he made a grab for the big ones. 

They were all heavy record freaks and well into dope, always dropping “pure Owsley” and tripping at the beach, stashing joints, and things like that, and always to the big beat of the sounds that Dave brought home from the record store. Music and dope went hand in hand in their households – whether fucking in the shower, eating dinner, talking revolution, reading Mao, answering the door, whatever, they were wacked.

Into this fold comes the mysterious Jordan Rover (hmmm…“J.R.”), who moves into their complex and keeps to himself. He seems to be on the run and the others try to bring him into their fold to find out about him. But he refuses their friendship and even, believe it or not, their dope. Instead he rails at them for their laziness, how all they do is talk about revolution, while their energy is really devoted to the next big record that comes out. As far as Jordan’s concerned, they all should hope that CSNY’s upcoming album – which is so hotly anticipated that it will come off like an atom bomb in the current blasé rock scene – turns out to be bad. That way they can channel that energy back into fighting in the streets and causing societal upheaval.

I wonder if this is yet more commentary buried within the story, as this particular issue of Rolling Stone carried a separate review of Déjà Vu, ie a “real” review, and it was very negative, bitching about how polished it sounded and etc. But anyway our heroes get serious about all that hippie-terrorizing and before you know it Dave’s blown up the record store he works in – after closing hours, when no one’s there, fortunately. The group is so radicalized that they don’t even realize Déjà Vu has finally come out – they’ve tossed out all their albums and their apartments are now spartanly-furnished centers from which they plan more guerrilla warfare. Then one night they hear some good music coming from down the hall – and there’s Jordan Rover, naked and smashed on a fat joint, blasting Déjà Vu on a portable KLH turntable.

Ten Years After, Cricklewood Green (6/11/70)* – A sequel to the Ssssh review, this one’s framed as an interview with the Very Wise Kid himself. The unnamed reviewer, who claims to have read that earlier review and realized at once that the “Kid” was “a very old and dear friend” he knew back in Junior High, three years ago(!), decides to track the Kid down and ask him if he really thinks Alvin Lee is God. The Very Wise Kid defends his claim, but does admit that the new Ten Years After album Cricklewood Green isn’t as good, and comes off like Alvin Lee searching for a top ten hit. This one ranges everywhere from comparing the new record to Chinese food to claiming “Sometimes even God shows off” when it’s argued that Lee’s guitar playing is unnecessarily fast. It occurred to me that this review is likely a parody of the long, often pretentious interviews Rolling Stone was known for, with rock stars elaborting at length on all and sundry topics and the interviewers asking long, probing questions; the tone and style are the same here, though of course it’s done in a fraction of the space. 

Various Artists, Woodstock (7/9/70)* – Per the intro to “The Review As Fiction” in The Rolling Stone Record Review, this and the Déjà Vu review are Young’s two “masterpieces.” I like some of the others better than this one, but it is an effective tale, basically an indictment against the hipsterism that was already rearing its head in the hippie underground. For once we move out of Oregon: it’s Pittsburgh, PA, where we meet 18 year-old Bill, who was “too drunk” to drive over to Woodstock when the festival was going on. But he got bitten by the Woodstock bug afterward, and has become a walking encyclopedia of everything that happened there – he knows the album by heart, has seen the movie multiple times (even getting some of the fabled “brown acid” so he could experience bad vibes during his second viewing), and further has started to lie that he was at Woodstock.

Such is Dave’s fame that others on campus now come to him with Woodstock questions – like at the party in which the story takes pace, where a girl asks if it’s true everyone was naked, “like cocks and cunts and all that.” (Always throws me for a loop how profane Rolling Stone could get in its early days!) But there’s another kid at the party, someone new on campus, memorably described as “a hairy ragamuffin of hipdom,” and he’s sitting there listening to Bill with a strange look on his face. Of course, this kid was really at Woodstock, and with just a few simple questions he outs Bill as a liar. But it’s not a good victory for this kid, as he himself is later shamed by a “girl” (Young has a habit of never naming his female characters), who tells him, “You are Woodstock Nation, and if it’s come down to this, then that’s sad. That’s why there will never really be a Woodstock Nation. You won’t let anybody live on your land.”

Free, Free (7/23/70) – “Our number one rave record reviewer” gets the new Free album in his latest batch of LPs to review, and takes it home where it becomes the butt of a few lame “Is that so and so?” jokes. It seems that with this review Young was attempting to meld his short fiction approach with a regular sort of review, so that we understand Free is imitative of more famous acts, and not very good at all, but it’s relayed in the format of a short story. It doesn’t really work as well as the straight-up stories, though.

Neil Young, After The Gold Rush (10/15/70) – Young’s last major piece of fiction is one of his best, and surely the only reason it wasn’t included in The Rolling Stone Record Review was because it was submitted too late for inclusion; otherwise this one is a masterful character study that surpasses the poignance of the B.B. King review. I was really caught up in it, and it’s nearly as long as the Déjà Vu review. It’s about young Steven, a “good boy,” who has only recently decided to look into rock music; he owns a mere two records, both by Neil Young, whose voice he likes. But Steven is more into sitting on his bed every night in total silence and straining to hear his father in the den beneath him; Steven’s nights are filled with the sounds of the den’s TV, from the Carson show to the late movie, until he finally drifts off to sleep. But his father never makes a sound down there, sitting in total silence, and when Steven asks him about “that movie last night,” his dad just shrugs.

The story is very much the antithesis of the Permanent Damage review, as it’s about a son desperate for his father’s attention and love. The two never talk, but every night Steven goes to bed earlier and earlier, just so he can sit in silence in his bedroom and listen for the sound of his father down in the den. It goes on for a while – and despite the lack of anything “happening” it’s more enthralling than many thrillers I’ve read, such is the power of Young’s prose and characterization. Finally it comes to a head, and late one night Steven’s dad abruptly switches off the TV and yells for Steven, saying he knows he’s up there.

Father and son bond in an all-night session of laughing and talking, and all seems well, even on into breakfast the next day. But when Steven asks his dad about “all those movies” he used to watch in the den, his dad bottles up again and that’s all she wrote for the father-son bonding. That day Steven goes downtown all day and comes home with “Neil Young’s newest record,” and “he was with it for a long time afterwards.” Once again Young has delivered a tale that has no bearing on the actual record under “review,” but he’s managed to capture the desolation and alienation that is central to Neil Young’s work. This is a good story, another indication that J.R. Young should’ve been known beyond the Rolling Stone readership, but it was the last such story he was to contribute.

“A Tale Of Christmas Present” (1/7/71) – Young’s last piece of fiction (at least according to the Cover To Cover CD-ROM) isn’t even a review – I mean, even less of one than his other “reviews” were – but it is buried in the “Reviews” section of this issue. It tells the Yuletide tale of two 14-year-old kids getting ripped on dope and shoplifting at the local mall: “Sammy Snapper and his lamb, Cynthia Swellhead, that lovely little liberated libido herself, had arrived after three at the Valley Creek Shopping Center, and by three-thirty had declared it was theirs for the asking.” The short tale has the duo hitting the discount record store, where Cynthia does her thieving in the Opera section. A “house dick” disguised as Santa nearly catches her, but Cynthia knees him and the two make their escape, after which Cynthia figures she might stop stealing. It’s a fun story, with that same fuzzy-freaky vibe, and I wonder if it was written as a “review” for one of the records mentioned in Cynthia’s stealing spree but just excised and put here on its own.

And with this short tale Young’s fiction contributions ended; unless as mentioned there are indeed more Young stories that just aren’t populating in the Rolling Stone Cover To Cover CD-ROM search results due to some technical snafu. Young did contribute the occasional review and feature to the magazine until December ’73, but after a feature piece on a “Singing Cowboy” he dropped out – and apparently vanished from the scene. The veritable D.B. Cooper of rock journalism. As stated above, it’s possible he did more short story-style reviews for Creem, but I have no confirmation. It’s a shame Young didn’t branch out into fiction, as juding from the tone and quality of these stories he could’ve written the novel of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s counterculture, or at least a pretty damn cool paperback cash-in of it.

The Rock Nations

The Rock Nations, by George William Rae
June, 1971  Paperback Library

Well, Death Rock appears to have sent me back into the spiral of late ‘60s/early ‘70s counterculture, and The Rock Nations is another paperback original cashing in on the era. But unlike Death Rock this one didn’t appear to get much traction anywhere. It is similar to Maxene Fabe’s superior novel though in that it isn’t as much of a “rock novel” as you’d expect, especially given the back cover hype (below).

This turns out to be one of the more uninentionally funny things about the novel, as the whole friggin’ thing’s supposedly about some hippie driving around the country and going to all the rock festivals of the day!! So naturally the reader would assume the novel would be filled with furry freak brothers and sisters passing the peace pipe and dropping the sugar cubes and soaking up the vibes of Hendrix, the Airplane, the Dead and whatnot. But nope – what we instead get is a lot of speechifying and preaching and sermonizing on this or that, not to mention whole heaping helpings of bitching about practically everything. The novel is basically a 224-page diatribe narrated by a self-involved asshole.

The common perception of the hippies in today’s world is the “peace and love, man!” cliché familiar from movies and TV shows; the actors on the late ‘80s Freedom Rock commercial pretty much represented all hippies to the kids of my generation. But years ago when I started reading all the hippie lit of the era itself, I was surprised to discover that the hippies were pissed. About what? Everything!! Most of those hippie novels, written by scrawny-chested guys and bra-burning gals, were screeds against the establishment, filled with hate and anger about everything, even their own movement. But then, the Left is filled with hate, and if anything it’s only gotten worse.

So this novel follows suit, and George William Rae captures the same angry voice. Strange then, as the only author I can find by this name was a pulp writer in the ‘50s and ‘60s who also turned out a book on the Boston Strangler in the late ‘60s. Surely this guy could not have been a hippie, as the narrator of the novel, a twenty-something Boston hippie named “Skin” Sherman, is too authentic…I know good writers can capture any voice, but it would really be assuming a lot that Rae, likely in his forties or beyond, could do so well. Sure, an author of that age could do it today, but today such an author would’ve grown up in the post-rock world. I asked James Reasoner if he knew anything about Rae, and he confirmed the author seemed to mostly operate in the ‘50s and ‘60s; James brought up a great point, though – perhaps this was actually Geroge William Rae, Junior, but left that tag off the end of his name?

At any rate, the novel is copyright Coronet Communications, owner of Paperback Library, so it’s possible this was written by some other author entirely, and “Rae” was just a house name, but given that it’s such a specific name, that’s hard to buy. Regardless of all the mystery, the novel is pretty well written, faithfully and exactly capturing the voice of other examples of this short-lived subgenre, and Skin Sherman seems like such a real person that I’d be shocked as hell to learn the book was really written by an older pulp author. The acid test comes in the fact that, by novel’s end, you are sick as hell of Skin and his endless bitching and self-obsession – just like the real hippies, he burns himself out and by book’s end you just want him to shut up and go away forever.

Skin drives an International Van with “Busy Being Born” painted on the side; when we meet him it’s June 1969 and he’s on his way to Atlanta, to catch the Atlanta International Pop Festival, which actually isn’t named – we’re just told it’s a festival on the Raceway. Skin is quite ashamed of the fact that he is, “dig it!,” rich, thanks to a wealthy grandfather who insisted Skin take some money when he became an adult. So Skin bought up an actual house in Boston’s trendy hippie district, so ashamed that he’s actually a “capitalist” that he hides the fact from everyone, even his (temporary) “true love” Mary Faulkner, an “ultrabuilt” blonde in pink granny glasses Skin picks up on his way to Atlanta. That’s her on the cover, right alongside Skin; the cover artist clearly read the character descriptions. 

Mary, who turns out to be from Boston, too, is hitchhiking with “fat Times,” aka a heavyset girl who comes from the Haight and who escaped the place due to the “bad scene” developing there, with hippies turning on one another. This theme becomes apparent in The Rock Nations as well, so the author was clearly aware of the direction things were heading – one should not go to this novel looking for doe-eyed reflections on the Woodstock Nation or the peaceful ways of the hippies in general. And one certainly shouldn’t look to it for frontline reporting on those rock gods and goddesses at the height of their powers; hell, even Jimi Hendrix gets the brush-off from our eternally-pissed narrator.

Nope, what you’ll get from The Rock Nations is a lot of senseless entitlement and an irreperable hate which permeates through the pages…again, not much different than what you’ll find today, though at least the hippies smoked dope and took acid and knew how to relax every once in a while. Along the way Skin also encounters Janie, a well-bred aristocratic type who has gone, naturally, full-bore hippie terrorist, dedicated to bombing capitalist institutions and often trying to hijack “rockfests” to spread Leftist propaganda against the establishment. Yawn.

One thing though that also bears similarity to those other hippie novels of the era – there’s rampant cursing (“fuck” appears several times a page, at least) and a fair helping of sleaze; Skin gives us all the details on the various “hairy situations” he gets into with “earth-mother” Mary and “incredible fuck” Janie – and folks, we’re talking 1969-1970 here. It’s real hairy. And let’s not forget the typical uncleanliness of the hippies in general…they’re sleeping in mud at these rockfests, using broken porta-potties, standing out in the rain all day…and occasionally runing into muddy ponds for a “bath.”

As mentioned the “rock” material is scant, at best; Skin takes us along to the major rockfests between June 1969 and August 1970, but we more so get the intermittent bitching about the ever-present rain, the lack of food and water, and the general “bad vibes” that descend on each place. Music content is relegated to something like, “Jimi Hendrix was hamming up the Star-Spangled Banner” or somesuch; perhaps the most mentioned performer is Grace Slick, about whom Skin fantasizes over (“That chick really does something to me”), but otherwise there just isn’t much, folks. It’s a head-scratcher for sure. Hell, even the Grateful Dead gets like a single mention, and that in passing. The author does though often quote rock lyrics – with no credits on the copyright page – but even here it’s in a demeaning light, like when Skin informs us how they all get to singing a “dumb song” by The Who on the way to one of the festivals.

The back cover, below, outlines all the rockfests Skin attends over the timeframe of the novel. They’re the big ones, of course. But in each case he has to be convinced to go – Mary having moved in with him and begging him to go to Woodstock, or Altamont, or whatnot – and we’ll really just get a rundown on how traffic was bad, what the turnout was like…and then instead of rockfest stuff we’ll get stuff like Skin having to leave to go broker a “skag” deal for heroin junkie/eternal annoyance Dubinsky, another of the hitchhikers he’s picked up along the way. Woodstock is given the most text, naturally, and here we see that Skin actually likes one of the groups – Santana(!!). Altamont is almost as featured, but as expected it’s all the heavy stuff…the sadistic Angels beating up the crowd (and even the Airplane singer), killing a guy, etc.

As for the less-famous rockfests…ironically, Powder Ridge also takes up a lot of the text, and the kicker here is that there wasn’t any music at that festival, due to an injunction by the town leaders. So of course this is the one Rae spends a lot of time on, as the “rock tribes” that make up the “rock nation” have come here to Connecticut anyway, and it starts off idyllic before it too descends into Altamont-esque violence and madness. Kickapoo Creek is so vague that Skin tells us he can’t recall the name of a single band that performed there, which is one of the things that makes me suspect this novel really was written by a contract author who just did some serious research, as Kickapoo Creek, held in Illinois in May 1970, is one of the lesser-hyped (and lesser-remembered) festivals of the era. 

Skin actually hops over the pond for the big finale at the Isle of Wight; Mary has left him, given his penchant for screwing random women (even hippie girls have standards, it appears), and she’s gone off with the crew to the big festival over in England. So Skin follows, hires an air balloon to find her, spots her in the massive crowd right before taking off, and, in an actual memorable and touching scene, they end up riding the balloon over the freak throng and feeling all warm and sunny. Hell, even Hendrix gets a positive mention here, Skin telling us that they of course had no idea at the time that Jimi “would soon leave us.” But then Mary says so long, she’s going off to France with some other guy, and Skin’s right where he was at the start of the novel: all alone. “Were any of us being born?” he wonders, finally ending his miserable tale of self-pity.

The Rock Nations is recommended more as a period piece, but it’s got nothing on Death Rock, or for that matter even on Passing Through The Flame. It is at least a little easier to find than Death Rock, but personally I thought the best thing about it was the cover art, which also appears on the back cover along with some great copy – copy that promises a much better novel than what we get:

Death Rock

Death Rock, by Maxene Fabe
No month stated, 1972  Popular Library

Several years ago I was on this late ‘60s/early ‘70s counterculture kick, reading a bunch of “hippie lit”-type novels of the day. I was also into early ’70s issues of Rolling Stone, or “The Rolling Stone” as it was then known, back in the days when it was a newspaper and hadn’t devolved into the glossy celebrity rag of the ‘80s and beyond. In its early years it was practically The Communist Manifesto with a record review section.

So I was very happy when in the fall of 2007 the CD-Rom boxset Rolling Stone Cover To Cover was released: a digital archive of every page of every issue of the magazine from its first issue to the latest one from 2007. You could search, scan, filter articles and reviews by contributor, etc. Very cool. Unfortunately though, the proprietary software the CDs are encoded with has stopped working on many operating systems these days; I recently put CD 1 in my home laptop for the first time (it’s been many, many years since I was into this stuff) and had to download a “patch” to get the damn thing to work – and even then it was faulty.

Anyway somehow after searching through reams of old Rolling Stone articles and reviews on the CDs back in late 2007, I landed on a 1977 feature by Greil Marcus in which he discussed how most “rock novels” were just plain bad, in particular Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street. But Marcus said there was in fact one good rock novel: Death Rock, by Maxene Fabe. In the article Marcus mentioned that Death Rock was long out of print; by 2007 the book was completely off the radar. I could find zero info about it; it wasn’t mentioned (and still isn’t mentioned) in any “great rock novel” lists. At that time I was only able to find two copies for sale at Abebooks; the cheapest one cost me $15. (More about the other copy later.) Today it doesn’t look like Death Rock is available anywhere. It’s as if the book never even existed.

I’ve sort of been on a late ‘60s/early ‘70s rock kick lately – so happy I bought such records back in the ‘90s, before they went up to the insane prices of today (I mean I spent three bucks for a copy of Abbey Road at a Half Prices Bookstore in ’97; today they sell that record for at least $40) – so I decided to give my treasured copy of Death Rock another read. I have to say, I enjoyed it just as much on this second read, even though I’ve long since moved past all that hippie lit stuff I was once into. But author Maxene Fabe doesn’t really write a hippie lit type of novel – in fact the closest comparison I could think of would be the fuzzy-freaky parables early Rolling Stone contributor JR Young once passed off as “reviews.”*

Like Young, Fabe wholly captures the vibe of the era; hers is a story of dopesmoking, LSD-dropping countercultural types who let their freak flags fly high. Like Passing Through The Flame, Death Rock takes place in the early ‘70s and is concerned with the death-throes of the counterculture, but unlike Spinrad’s later tome this one is still fueled with the energy of the era. While Fabe understands the rock era has a short lifespan – she even mocks Mick Jagger for being old (in 1972!!) – there’s still a wide-eyed sort of innocence to it, with Commie symp hippie terrorists who truly believe they’re about to bring about a new social order.

But make no mistake, Fabe mocks these idiots soundly. Actually as I re-read the novel I realized that subheading Death Rock as “A Rock Novel” was a bit misleading, as Fabe is more concerned with the countercultural revolutionary spirit of the day. (Of course, only a fine line really separated the two at the time.) It’s not so much a novel about a rock group giving concerts and going through all the cliched stopping points of your average rock novel. Indeed the rock star who brings all these counterculture characters together, Sissy Ripper – a sort of amalgamation of Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, and Sly Stone, plus others besides – stays peripheral to the plot for most of the narrative, and only appears a few times.

Another point of reference to Fabe’s style would be another rock reviewer, this one a bit more famous (or perhaps infamous): Lester Bangs. Fabe capably captures the same sort of amphetimine-fueled, coked-up narrative drive as Bangs at his best; Death Rock is told in this sort of rambling, omniscient tone very similar to what one might find in the diatribes-cum-reviews found in Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung. Another similarity would be the hazily omniscient tone Wilson and Shea used for Illuminatus!. Actually the two books are very similar (Illuminatus!, despite being published as three paperbacks, actually having been written as one book), both in tone and in plot; they both even climax at a massive rock festival.

Anyway, psycho superstar Sissy Ripper sets off the proceedings; in vague backstory spun throughout the novel, Sissy’s been a reculse for the past two years, after some wildness happened with his girlfriend, Alicia Dubrow (who herself went missing). Sissy we learn is from Africa, basically the Jimi Hendrix of the harmonica(!), but whereas Jimi was the most mellow cat to ever walk the face of the friggin’ earth, Sissy is a wild child who feeds off “dark energy.” Sort of that dark god image Mick Jagger appropriated up toward Altamont (and channeled in Performance). But Sissy means it, man. And whereas the Altamont disaster had Jagger promptly changing his image, Sissy needs the evil vibe of a crowd to keep going.

But he’s been gone two years now, and the novel opens with Sissy making his first appearance since his seclusion – incongruously enough, on the Ed Sullivan show! After running through his new hit, “I Wanna Rip You Up The Middle,” Sissy announces that in two months, ie late August, he will be holding a tryout concert in Lebanon, Kansas, aka the center of America. He invites all the freaks in the audience to head on to Lebanon and show off their skills for the chance at being Sissy’s new backup band. This rallying call sets off the activities of the handful of characters who star in the novel; Sissy himself thereafter disappears in the narrative, only popping up now and again. 

Instead, the brunt of the narrative is given over to the antics of these characters:

Venceremos (aka “Vence”): A devoted revolutionary who quotes Chairman Mao and preaches about the post-revolution society, as expected completely oblivious to the fact that he’s a fascist. (The more things change….“Hey, let’s put on masks and outnumber our enemies and then beat them up, and we’ll call ourselves Antifa! You know, like Anti-Fascists!” “Great Idea!...You think your mom could give us a ride?”) Having come from the big city to Kansas University, Vence has found his Commie preachings falling on deaf ears; the local corn-fed jocks could care less. But Vence sees Sissy’s imminent arrival in Kansas of all places as a divine gift – he could use the superstar to spur the masses to revolution. But first Sissy must be converted! To accomplish this Vence puts together a rock group, heedless of the fact that he has no musical skills, hoping to win the audition and gain Sissy’s ear.

Ruby: A 15 year-old blonde beauty from Lebanon, Kansas who sees Sissy on TV and vows to have sex with him. First though she’ll have to get rid of her pesky virginity. To this end she runs away from home and begins a pilgrimage which will see her sharing the bed of several famous rock stars of the era, Fabe taking the opportunity to skewer everyone from Joe Cocker to Bob Dylan.

Angel: Another Kansas U. character, but one that’s been expelled for having dynamited a teacher’s office so as to impress a radical chick. Angel is a “cocksman” as the saying goes, and has slept with an untold number of college girls, all of whom look up to the wild-haired anarchist. The fact that he makes his own LSD and gives it out for free doesn’t hurt matters. He sees Sissy on TV (while tripping on acid and having sex) and can’t believe the dark energy that floods out of the screen; Angel vows to “save” Sissy.

Alicia Dubrow: Sissy’s old flame; a rail-thin, redheaded beauty who shaved off her hair two years ago after a horrific night in which Sissy, riding those dark energies, savagely whipped her until her back was scarred. Now she goes around the country as a “mystery woman,” uniting all the females in various universites under the banner of women’s liberation – women’s lib of a very sadistic sort. She also rails against rock music, claiming it is misogynist. (Honestly this novel predicts so much nonsense that has become commonplace today that it’s almost scary.) While Angel wants to save Sissy, Alicia wants to kill him, hopefully at the concert in Lebanon. It’s through Alicia’s sections that we see the most of Sissy Ripper, usually in flashbacks to the good times.

These four characters guide us through Death Rock, each of them interracting in unexpected ways – like Vence being the guy Ruby decides to give her virginity to, having come upon him practicing with his new rock band (another funny scene that skewers Vence’s know-nothing know-it-all firebrand arrogance) and assuming he’s a rock singer. Angel and Vence already know one another; former best friends, they’re now enemies, all over that girl Angel tried to impress by dynamiting a teacher’s office. Alicia ends up trying to use both Vence and Angel for her own violent whims, though she has much more success with Vence, as one might expect.

Ruby probably gets the most narrative spotlight, given that through her Fabe parodies the early ‘70s rock scene. Ruby makes her way through a host of rock singers, none of them named, but all of them easily spotted – there’s Mick Jagger (desperate now that he’s “old” to strike up some heat from his audience), there’s Crosby, Stills and Nash (awfully singing together in their live shows, as they were roundly criticized for back in the day), there’s Bob Dylan (who wants Ruby to pay him a thousand bucks for sex – but he’ll settle for fifty), there’s Pete Townshend (who so scares Ruby with his on-stage chaos that all she can do is ask for his autograph). There are others besides; we know from a throwaway line that “Jimi” is one of Ruby’s many conquests, and there’s an eerie bit that foreshadows reality where “Jimi” threatens to kill himself, and Ruby mutters that he’s always making such threats. But then again maybe Fabe wrote this after Hendrix’s death, and made this line intentional. 

One thing sort of becomes clear, though…Maxene Fabe doesn’t much like rock and roll. At least that’s the impression one gets from reading the novel. The superstars are all fakers, their glory years at least ten years behind them (and keep in mind it’s only the early ‘70s!!), and their fans are loyal dupes with chemically-fogged brains. In fact, hardly any of the rockers come off well in the book, though I did note that the one band to escape criticism was the Beatles. This is as it should be, though. I wonder if Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs (another Death Rock fan, per the below) also got this feeling from the novel.

Sissy comes and goes in the text – we learn he came to prominence in mid-‘60s London, like Jimi Hendrix, and there he picked up Alicia as his consort. From there to mega fame, his rock hits becoming wilder and wilder. Given that he also did a few songs promoting social revolution – a la Beggar’s Banquet Stones – Sissy’s not only beloved by the regular rock freaks but by the hippie terrorists too. So they all come out to Lebanon, blitzing the midwest in a vast unwashed throng. However the climactic concert isn’t given as much narrative space as you might expect; we read about a few bands auditioning for Sissy, but then Vence’s group takes the stage and Alicia’s stashed a bomb in the drum kit and the novel is heading for a conclusion before we know it. Ruby and Angel also take the stage, these two having become “married” via LSD.

The finale is bizarre, and again harkens to Altamont, with Sissy and Vence inflamed by that evil energy from the crowd and setting to on a cowering Angel. Meanwhile that bomb blows up in unexpected fashion. Greil Marcus in his brief mention of Death Rock got the end wrong; per Marcus, Sissy Ripper was sacrificially killed in the finale. Rather, Sissy lives, but another character is killed in front of the audience – a clear bit of metaphor, given that this particular character represents the peace and love ethic of the ‘60s, torn apart by the nihilsm of the ‘70s. Fabe clearly saw which way the wind was blowing. As for Sissy, his sendoff is just as fitting; when Ruby finally has her chance for sex with him, she instead realizes Sissy Ripper is a piece of filth and whips him! 

Suprisingly, Maxene Fabe never published another novel; the only other book I can find by her is a guide to TV gameshows, published in 1979 (Greil Marcus reviewed it in Rolling Stone, too). In early January 2008 when I first read Death Rock I contacted Fabe and told her how much I enjoyed her novel. She sent me this nice response:

What a great email to get out of the blue. It particularly got my 25-year-old film-maker son all revved up; he's talking screenplay. It also got me to haul out my 1 remaining copy and start scanning it so i can indeed get it online. I also ordered another copy from Abe. You spent $15? You're lucky; mine is costing me $25. =)

I believe the Creem review of Death Rock appeared in October, 1973. I have a copy of it somewhere in a box in my storage room under a bunch of other boxes, otherwise I'd resurrect it. As an interesting footnote, Lester Bangs called me shortly thereafter asking me to write for the magazine, so, for a time, sporadically thru 1974 and into 1975, I was Creem's TV critic and had a column called “Prime Time.”

That’s how scarce Death Rock is, friends – even the author herself had to shell out twenty-five bucks for a copy! Unfortunately it doesn’t look like she ever did “get it online,” as I don’t see an eBook for it. I contacted her again before writing this review (she now goes by Maxene Fabe-Milford, and runs a college essay consultancy called Uniquely U.); I actually went on Facebook to write her, and folks I hate Facebook like some people hate [insert the name of your least favorite politician]. When I went back on there I saw a note that said “Maxene Fabe-Mulford has accepted your request,” so I assume that to mean she was saying it was okay if I quoted the letter she wrote me back in 2008.

Anyway, I really enjoyed Death Rock, probably even more this second time around. But this puts me in the same unfortunate situation as when I raved about Shark Fighter; I’m raving about a book no one will be able to find. Actually that changed with Shark Fighter, which is now back in print; hopefully someday Death Rock will be too.

Finally, I end the review with a question – I know the cover of Death Rock was used on a jazz LP from the early ‘70s. I have a couple hundred such records but not that one, though I’ve seen it before. For the life of me I can’t remember the artist or title, so if anyone knows what record has the same cover as this book, please let me know!

*JR Young is almost wholly forgotten today, with scant info known about him, but the line “Put on the Dead, and spread!” from his Live Dead review was legendary in the early ‘70s underground. Back in 2007 I started a thread about him at the Steve Hoffman forum, but it doesn’t look like much more info has surfaced. Maybe one of these days I’ll do a post on his various reviews, though per the Rolling Stone Cover To Cover set, he only published around 25 reviews in the magazine, all between 1970 and 1973.

Massage Parlor Part II

Massage Parlor Part II, by Jennifer Sills
July, 1974  Ace Books

It took me a few years, but I’ve finally gotten back to the sleazy trilogy begun with Massage Parlor, that Ace Books cash-in on Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker which did so well it actually sold a million or so copies. “Jennfier Sills” once again blithely tells us all about her whoring; this book, which follows the same template as the last (namely, each chapter is basically just a sex scene) has Jennifer moving shop to Los Angeles and opening a massage parlor for the elite.

As mentioned in my review of the previous volume, it seems to have been an open secret that “Jennifer Sills” was really an author named Stephen Lewis. He turned out a plethora of sex books for Ace, as well as a few trashy potboilers; the back of Massage Parlor Part II even has an ad for Lewis’s books right beneath the listing for the two Massage Parlor novels. I’ve found a contemporary interview with Lewis about the Sills books here, carried out while Lewis was writing this book (which we’re told was yet to be titled – looks like Lewis didn’t strain the imagination too hard coming up with it!). According to Hawks’s Authors Pseudonyms, Lewis died very young, the years of his life stated as being 1946-1981. It’s impolite to speculate, but I wonder if he was an early victim of AIDS.

Because there is a sudden focus on kinky sex in Massage Parlor Part II, not to mention lots of stuff about gay or bi guys; I mean, you’ll read these puke-out parts where there’s an explicit sex scene between a man and a woman, and then “Jennifer” will mention that one of the dudes licks up the, uh, effluvia of the men. Per the above link Lewis was a single guy living in Manhattan who was clearly quite familiar with the underground world of sex for sale, so I can’t help but wonder if his own life mirrored his books.

Anyway it’s a couple months after the first volume and Jennifer opens this book with her having sex with some dude she met at Kennedy Airport, right before her flight here to LA. Jennifer reveals that she broke off her relationship with cop boyfriend Tom, who wanted to marry her; she also sold off her Massagarama parlor, mostly due to all the massage parlor busts that were going on in New York. Most importantly, Jennifer reveals that her book, Massage Parlor, sold so well that she has become almost a celebrity – the novel occurs in this almost metafictional realm, in which fictional Jennifer’s real book has made fictional Jennifer famous in her fictional world.

In fact this latest lay is a dude she spotted grabbing Massage Parlor off the spinner rack at Kennedy; Jennifer arranged to sit beside him and kept spying on him during the flight as he read it, to see if he got hot and bothered; Jennifer informs us she received many letters from people claiming that they got so turned on by her first book that they had to masturbate posthaste, etc. This guy is named Don, he’s a wealthy lawyer, and he and Jennifer hit it off well – soon enough she’s nude at his place, listening to “the latest Led Zeppelin album” while checking out a closeup of her own nether region on the closed circuit TV Don has in his room. “Don began to eat me out like a madman,” Jennifer casually informs us, and off we go into Massage Parlor Part II.

Jennifer and Don also hit it off business-wise; Don convinces Jennifer to open a new parlor here in Los Angeles, and he will co-manage it, using his connections with famous and wealthy people to make it the top sex spot. Jennifer comes up with the idea to call it The Body Club, and after a screening of a porn director’s latest flick, she also decides to hire a bunch of its performers. This sequence is the first evidence of the kinky bent which will drive this volume; there are few straight-up sex scenes this time around, with more focus on oddball stuff. As evidence, Jennifer notes that, after the actors in the movie have sex, they piss on each other. Hmmm….

But one new element this time is that Jennifer actually massages people; whereas the previous book was all about the sex, this one Jennifer keeps reminding us that she gives bona fide rubdowns, and good ones, too; here she proves herself to the porn actors with a bit of zone therapy, making massively-hung actor Geraldo (likely a Harry Reems stand-in) “shoot his load” with some masterful massaging. But Jennifer has her own limits; when an orgy threatens to break out, she says no thanks – and then changes her mind after a little amyl nitrate from an inhaler.

The Body Club is set up in the rundown mansion of an old ‘30s director, who died years ago. Jennifer and Don pay exorbitantly to fix it up, complete with three sex rooms that have different themes and also closed circuit TVs in them. Don also comes up with Jennifer’s price list, which shocks our narrator: it’s a thousand dollars to join the club, and Jennifer’s “services” cost a whopping five hundred bucks…and that’s in 1974 money! Don’s argument is that it’s all about “flash” in Hollywood, and the higher the price tag the more people will covet whatever it is your selling; he also informs Jennifer that they need to capitalize on the fame her book has given her. Now that she’s seen as an expert on sex, she should be paid accordingly.

But Jennifer rarely has just normal sex with any of her clients; at least, Lewis doesn’t focus on those. Instead we get a dude on “a baby trip,” who likes to wear diapers and be rubbed down and spanked and baby-talked to, the climax coming when he breastfeeds off Jennifer. Then there’s the football star who only gets excited when Jennifer slips a finger into his ass – he bridles at the insinuation that he might be gay – and royally gets off when Jennifer puts a pair of her panties on him. And then there’s the guy who hires Jennifer and another massuese, jams sausages and fruits and whatnot in all their passages, and starts to eat them! The “subuman look” in the man’s eyes scares even grizzled Jennifer. 

Indeed, Jennifer gets burned out with all the kinky shit, and wonders “what’s going on with sex?” She complains to Don that no one just wants to screw anymore, that it’s all about the latest weird and freaky scene. I would say this is Dean Koontz’z dictum, from Writing Popular Fiction, being proven once again – that the author of sleaze will eventually reach burnout. And Jennifer does periodically throughout the novel, which turns out to be Lewis developing his escape route; late in the game Jennifer tells us that this volume “finishes” her story, which began in the first book (despite which another one came out, two years later, via Fawcett Books: Jennifer’s Boys).

During a weekend getaway with Don – who doesn’t achieve the narrative importance that Tom did – Jennifer meets an older, “World’s Most Interesting Man”-type Latino dude named Giorgio who seems very interested in her, and vice versa, but Don won’t give Jennifer the chance to talk with him, as the dude is mega-wealthy and Don wants to take advantage of that. Occasionally in the novel Jennifer will muse about Giorgio, wondering if she should take him up on his invitation to visit one day; Giorgio does not know Jennifer is a massage parlor girl/whore.

More johns ensue, from a married couple who get off on jet sprays in the Body Club pool before having sex with each other, to an actor Jennifer names “Dick” who is about to appear nude in a women’s magazine centerfold but is afraid his equipment’s too small. Clearly inspired by Burt Reynolds’s Playgirl appearance, this part has Jennifer using everything from a “penis vacuum” to some pubic trimming to convince “Dick” that his equipment isn’t small at all – capped off with the joke finale that the magazine uses a photo of him with a hand over his crotch. Then there’s the Howard Hughes stand-in, whom Jennifer calls “The Bashful Billionaire;” he rents out the club for an entire night and watches in the darkness as Jennifer and employees carry out a prepared script and screw. The Hughes stand-in plays “pocket pool” and then bids them adieu.

But Jennifer is getting more burned out; it’s been months and she’s had at least two men a day, despite her outrageous fees. Also she fights more and more with Don, though Lewis doesn’t do much with this subplot, not even giving a final confrontation between the two. Instead Jennifer, inspired by a famous diplomat whom she gives a handjob (while spouting awful, punny “policy” dialog), tosses a coin and decides to hell with it – it’s off to Giorgio’s to announce who she is.

For Jennifer spent a weekend with him previous to this, concerned that Giorgio never made any advances on her, just wanted to get to know her. At first Jennifer wondered if Giorgio was gay, before it hit her that he was merely courting her! In the finale though Giorgio admits that he’s known who Jennifer was all along, and about the Body Club as well, but could care less about her past.

The novel ends six months later and Jennifer is now married to Giorgio, living with him in Rome: “Instead of being a happy hooker, I’m a happy woman.” She tells us her story has now come to its close, her massage parlor life behind her, but as mentioned Lewis delivered another novel as “Jennifer Sills” two years later. I’ll get to it eventually.