Loudmouth
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Read this book immediately if you like truth, drugs, generation gaps, guitars, and lifelong quests for freedom and kicks.” --Craig Finn, The Hold Steady
Thomas Ransom, born to a severely dysfunctional southern family transplanted to New York City, is left to his own devices by neglectful parents, and spends his childhood shadowing his criminally-inclined half-brother and roaming the city with hard-drinking teenage pals. He eventually finds an outlet as the flamboyant singer of a downtown rock band, and later as the young editor of the Detroit-based magazine that invented punk, only to return to New York, at the height of the 1970s bacchanal, and crash. But it isn’t music that saves him. It’s a soft-spoken painter, who turns out to be the most outrageous character of all. With echoes of Almost Famous and Just Kids, LOUDMOUTH tracks an impassioned musician and writer out among the punks, hippies, and wild geniuses of rock when music was the center of the world.
Author Robert Duncan was barely out of his teens when he started writing for the influential music magazine Creem, becoming its managing editor at 22. He went on to write for Rolling Stone, Circus, Life, and dozens of other publications, interviewing hundreds of rock stars at the top of their game. In the process, Duncan became a rock Zelig: he shares tales of his time with a young, scrawny Bruce Springsteen while driving him around Detroit; he introduces The Clash‘s Mick Jones and Joe Strummer to a broken-down piano player of dubious ability, leading to a hilariously disastrous recording session with the band; he works alongside legendary rock critic Lester Bangs, witnesses his tragic spiral, and finally discovers him dead of an OD in the apartment next door.
These experiences, and many others, provide the fuel for his debut novel, LOUDMOUTH, making it what Brian Jonestown Massacre's Joel Gion calls, “A sonic wail of a tale about the youthful beginnings of one of the Mount Rushmore ‘heads’ of rock ’n’ roll journalism.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Duncan, who became the managing editor of Creem magazine at age 22, delivers a colorful but uninspired novel about a man who becomes the managing editor of Creem magazine at age 22. Born to upper-middle-class parents in mid-20th-century Memphis, Tom Ransom is shuffled around the country from one prep school to the next. When his parents move to Manhattan, the city becomes his playground. He loses his virginity to a prostitute at age 14, lets his hair grow long, does every drug he can find, and falls in and out of love with a series of women. Drifting through the New York City music scene of the late '60s, Tom eventually meets Jim Morton, who gives him a job at his Detroit-based rock magazine, Creem, where he learns the trade from legendary rock critic Lester Bangs. In the late '70s, Tom moves back to New York and covers Bruce Springsteen's Darkness Tour, leading to a long profile that earns the Boss's praises and an invitation to join him down the Shore. Duncan handles Tom's navigation of his relationship to the star as subject, not friend, with intelligence and grace. While the litany of names, places, bands, and attitudes falls short of cohering into more than an episodic ramble, Tom's friends are an entertainingly larger-than-life crew of Greenwich Village eccentrics. Still, this rock world odyssey is too one-note.
