Rennie flexes on having a performer’s pass and, for the second time (this was referred to when she got the pass but I didn’t mention it) the writer tells us it identifies Rennie as a member of Lionheart and that Niles Clay didn’t like this. The repetition is getting worse as the series goes along. One would think the writer would trust the reader to remember it from the first time it was mentioned.
And why would Niles be okay with that? He probably has visions in his head of Turk bringing Rennie onstage to play the tambourine or sing backup or whatnot which, considering how enthralled Turk is, doesn’t seem to be off the table.
Anyway, Rennie’s in the wings watching Lionheart get ready to play and Turk is wicked pissed about having to sing. Of course she makes it all about her since she’s the center of the known and unknown universe.
Man, I knew I should have given him something more powerful to wear tonight! That little scarab necklace wasn’t ever going to pack enough mojo to get him through something as big as this…
Here’s another spot where Kennealy-Morrison forgets that Rennie isn’t her. Rennie is thinking like someone who has some background in magic and/or other nontraditional spirituality when she doesn’t. Rennie is not a witch or a Pagan, but seems to be a standard lapsed Catholic, although not so lapsed she isn’t insisting on an annulment for her second marriage to the future Duke of Robinhood. Other than her “road gods,” which might just fall under the heading of idolatry, and her inconsistent knowledge of astrology, she doesn’t seem to have any knowledge of the occult that she hasn’t picked up by hanging out in the Sixties rock music scene, rather like a hippie magpie.
She doesn’t understand why Turk wouldn’t want to sing as he did the lead vocals on the first two albums, even though the writer specifically states on page 192 of the third book that Turk hates listening to himself sing. Maybe he just doesn’t like singing, Rennie. Even if he did like it, he probably hasn’t sung any of the songs on the setlist in quite a while. The last time we hear about him singing anything was in the third book for Rennie’s impromptu birthday party, and I doubt if he performed all the songs they’ll perform at Woodstock there. And he’ll have to concentrate on his guitar work at the same time that he’ll be singing, so at least one of those will be compromised. And, although it’s unlikely, he might also be worried about Niles.
I could see a good storyline coming out of this. Let’s say a drug dealer had come up with a brand-new drug, or just a much stronger version of an existing one, and decided to pass it out at Woodstock, a place with lots and lots of drug users and no police presence, to check its effects. Cory Rivkin gets hold of a dose and it kills him, whether because of the drug itself or a pre-existing health condition. Niles gets hold of another dose and almost dies but manages to pull through due to the efforts of the on-site doctors. Female Jimi Hendrix’s injured arm and Ned Raven’s electrocution have nothing to do with anything. Then Rennie has to determine which drug Cory and Niles took and then track down the dealer. Of course I know this will never happen, since Rennie seems to be quite fond of drugs and largely unwilling to admit they can cause any harm.
Rennie does about half a page of exposition about Turk’s singing, and how surprised would you be to find out that he sang all the songs on the second side of the Pearl Harbor attack day album in the fourth book that were all about Rennie?
Yeah, me neither. And we do find out that album was the one before the failed album. Couldn’t possibly have the album with the songs about Rennie be the one that drops dead, no matter how much of a kick we—and Niles—would have gotten out of it.
Kennealy-Morrison gives us about three pages of Lionheart’s show. They start out with some familiar hits, specifically “Walking Through the Walls,” “Home Before Dark,” and “Lady of the Lake,” which the crowd likes. The second song is the one which ends the book and the last song is the one that opens it, as the writer has the habit of printing songs at the beginning and end of each book. So far, “Home Before Dark” is the only song that might be short enough to get on the radio in the Sixties.
I haven’t been talking about the songs, so I went back to the books for a comprehensive list. Ungrateful Dead is the only book that doesn’t start and end with a song. It starts out with a song called “Knight of Ghosts and Shadows” which is too long for the radio. California Screamin’ starts with a song called “Oar” and ends with a song called “Ozymandias,” which unfortunately isn’t a Watchmen reference. They’re both too long for the radio, as is tradition. Love Him Madly starts with a song called “Sleeping Dogs Lie,” which might be short enough for the radio, and ends with “Clarity Road,” which is too long for the radio but is referenced at multiple points in the series. It’s the title cut for one of the group’s albums, but don’t ask me which one. A Hard Slay’s Night starts out with “Svaha,” which is the Rennieturk’s incredible eleven-minute-long love song which absolutely doesn’t get any radio airplay ever, and ends with “Everything to Me,” (boy was Turk groveling to get her back) which is also—you guessed it—too long for the radio. On the copyright page, all songs are listed as copyrighted for Lizard Queen Music, which was Kennealy-Morrison’s company for the songs she wrote.
The Lionheart plays some songs off the failed Cities of the Plain album, which I knew was a literary reference and thought was from William S. Burroughs, but that turned out to be wrong as the Burroughs novel was called Cities of the Red Night. According to the internet, the reference is to a translated title of Sodome et Gomorrhe by Marcel Proust. That seems to be pretentious enough for the writer. There’s also a novel by Cormac McCarthy with the same title, but that was published nineteen years after Lionheart’s album came out (but fourteen years before Go Ask Malice was published).
The crowd doesn’t like the songs off the failed album, so they switch back to unspecified songs off the earlier albums, and the crowd likes that. I’m getting flashes of that scene from Get Him to the Greek where Aldous is going to play “African Child” and the crowd is disappointed. He sees that, so he decides to play the band’s big hit, “The Clap,” and the crowd is happy. Only this scene in the book isn’t funny.
“Clarity Road” is apparently intended to be Lionheart’s equivalent to “Light My Fire.” The band doesn’t want to play it but it’s what the crowd wants to hear, so they do, and there’s some uninteresting twaddle about their not having anything but “Rardi’s electric organ,” so we know that Rardi is Ray, and Turk plays it on his guitar, which is a Fender Stratocaster. What about the other musicians? Is he just playing a solo version of the song on his guitar? And why did they write a song that includes a piano and not have a piano when they need to play it? Shouldn’t Rardi also be able to play a piano?
And Rardi plays the violin two paragraphs later.
The drummer, Jay-Jay Olvera, the one who was fucking Rennie’s buddy Sarah Jane Parker in the last book, screws up the beat on a song and nobody in the crowd notices. I don’t understand why they’re playing so badly just because Niles isn’t there. There isn’t a hint that they’re been away from touring so long that they’re rusty. Maybe Niles is their good luck charm, Rennie. Did you ever think of that?
The stage managers want them to extend their set, so they do a song called “Cat’s Squirrel” from their first album. This is a real song that was covered by Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and Jethro Tull, in addition to Kennealy-Morrison’s fake Beatles analogue, the Budgies.
Turk plays blues harmonica for this, which Rennie hasn’t seen, and Mick Rouse plays lead guitar. Oh, so he hasn’t quit the band? Then you don’t have “an excellent relationship” with all the band members except Niles. Then Lionheart does some blues songs—not sure how many as the writer doesn’t specify—and the crowd gets back on their side. Rennie snipes at them, the festivalgoers she had exalted as “her people” when she got there, as “hardly the most discriminating audience of all time” and blames the drugs for it. That’s rich, coming from you, Rennie.
After this they do a few more songs, one of their hits, a song off the failed album that Kennealy-Morrison characterizes as “a big fat sucks-to-you to anyone who didn’t like it,” and their epic eleven-minute-long love song “Svaha,” but the crowd won’t let them off the stage, so as an encore Lionheart does a version of “God Save the Queen” that sounds like the version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that Jimi Hendrix does later.
They get off the stage and Rennie tells us the entire band starts going off on Niles in summary, because that’s not a scene that needs writing. It does serve Kennealy-Morrison’s purpose of trashing whoever inspires the Not Frankie Avalon/Danny Marron/Cleve Farris/Niles Clay analogue, but it’s boring and predictable because the reader knows that the writer is settling personal scores in her fiction and so some craft will be sacrificed so that she can satisfy that need.
One thing this whole scene did was establish why Niles isn’t afraid of Rennie. If the entire band is incapable of giving a good performance without him, as they must be as per their just-finished show, there’s no way he will be fired, no matter what the lead guitarist’s girlfriend wants.
So after Turk and the other band guys get through with having their ragegasms over Niles, Turk comes out. He and Rennie decide to go back to the motel to eat and he opines that the fictional bands on the roster didn’t have any business being there because they don’t have the right vibes, which is something Patricia told Jim about the Doors after the festival in her memoir.
A lot of parties are taking place at the start of the next section, and since the Rennieturk is the author self-insert, Lionheart gets eight rooms all together in this jam-packed motel.
Turk lets us know that Niles and Mick are doubling up on a room and implies in a snide manner that they may be fucking each other, which there has never been any indication of anywhere in the series, but Kennealy-Morrison has to get her literary vengeance on the man with curly black hair that she hates. Turk indicates he hasn’t gone to check on Niles and blurts out a speech that sounds exactly like Rennie in its venomousness and near-psychotic threats of violence.
“…when I see him I am going to personally tear him into little small pieces and then personally feed him to the geese.”
Don’t use the same adverb in the same sentence when it isn’t a long sentence. Using both little and small is redundant. And the “feed him to the geese” reference? That’s how one of the avatars of a person who offended Patricia bought it in Blackmantle.
“…the way I’m feeling about Niles just now, I say it serves the little toerag right and I only wish he did have to sleep on the floor. In the open air. Inside a tornado.”
Again, the writer needs to have some distinct speech patterns for different characters, but everyone will always and forever sound like Rennie, the living Queen Emma Peel.
They start kissing (originally I wrote killing there) before she tells him about a party invitation she accepted without telling him. The head of Rainshadow Records is having a bash for a New Zealand folk singer name Amander Evans. Pretty sure that’s an anagram but I’m not doing those anymore. There’s a stupid bit about how the band Bosom Serpent was allowed to be called that (originally I think Kennealy-Morrison had it as Boston Serpent because Mary Prax slept with someone in the band between the third and fourth books) but it’s not fair Lionheart couldn’t use the title Cockchafer for the album Turk wouldn’t let Freddy Bellasca release. Well, let me answer that, Rennie. It’s because bosom has not been a racy word since Queen Victoria died, and cock is still a four-letter word, you disingenuous pseudo-intellectual.
Anyway, Turk wants to get some sleep and she tries to comfort him about the performance and they wind up having off-page sex before the section ends and the scene shifts to the aforementioned party an hour later.
We get a capsule explanation of who Elk Bannerman is and a capsule recap of how he came into his position (the previous president, Pierce Hill, got murdered by a two-night stand of Rennie’s at Monterey Pop and she still takes the opportunity to slag off the dead man for a bit) before we’re introduced to Amander Evans, who Rennie takes an instant dislike to for reasons which will become clear shortly.
In fact, she slops over with contempt for female folk singers in the next couple of paragraphs, including the observations that Amander is
…a cute little folkie…the twee sort of folksinger, unfortunately…
Then she goes on about how Amander has a good voice and is a good guitarist, but she “certainly wasn’t up to playing in the Northern Hemisphere big leagues yet.” And then she starts bitching about “several other guitar-totey floaty-skirt-wearin’ super-sensitive singer-songwriter chicks recently arrived on the scene” and name-checks Melanie, who somehow did something or another to offend Kennealy-Morrison because of her next bitchy observation about the singer.
…the owner of a gargling vibrato said by the unkind—
Or Rennie, as it’s pretty much the same thing.
…to cause seasickness on dry land.
Gee, did she fuck Jim Morrison too? I don’t have any information on that.
And now we get to Joni Mitchell. As far as I know she never slept with Jim Morrison, but she also somehow managed to piss off Kennealy-Morrison.
…a blankly blond Canadian by way of the Village and Laurel Canyon, Joni Mitchell, who had so far bedded half of Crosby Still Nash & Young and who possessed a loopy falsetto that could crack an egg.
The writer sure never does get tired of slut-shaming, does she? Mitchell didn’t go to Woodstock but did write a song about it based on the news coverage that was, according to the writer, “glowing” and “magical.” Maybe it was her talent that pissed off the writer? Who knows now, fifty-four years later.
Turk and Rennie had heard Amander play previously and she’s all starstruck when he talks to her. When she gets over it, Rennie detects flaming panties for Turk when the other woman looks at him and her terror/paranoia/hatred of other women activates just like she said “Shazam!”
Excessive female admiration of her fiancé was something she was slowly learning to live with, but, man, it stung like a bee convention.
There is no way Rennie is doing this of her own free will, as she admits in the very next paragraph when she said she’s reached “a reasonable level of détente with it, chiefly because there was nothing else she could do and Turk would only laugh at her anyway.” I was going to call out the word détente as an anachronism, but it began the year the book is set in.
Rennie spends the next page cutting down Amander Evans because she had the unspeakable gall to look at Turk Wayland Earl of Wallowinthemire with:
…a kind of taunting, flaunting, calculating groupie vibe that needed to be smacked down more than a bit…
So I was right and “groupie” is just Kennealy-Morrison’s preferred term of abuse for women who have sex. I suppose it’s better than “whore,” which really got a workout in Lori Foster’s Servant series.
Amander also, to Rennie, is giving off an air like she thinks she’s Mick Jagger which she hasn’t earned and doesn’t deserve. There’s a free stage at Woodstock where the acts other than the main ones play and she gave a bad performance earlier in the day, but not bad like Lionheart’s performance, oh heavens no! Then there’s most of a long paragraph about how bad a performer this woman is. The paragraph concludes with Rennie reflecting on Monterey Pop and concluding “who now remembered Beverly (sic), or the Paupers, or the Group with No Name?” Well, since one of the members of the Group With No Name was Katey Sagal of Married With Children, Futurama, and Sons of Anarchy, at least one member of the group is remembered.
And—chapter! The reason I don’t want to do another series for a while is because, as with this one, there are no new issues for me to get riled up about, just the same issues from the first book that keep getting amplified with each new tome. Rennie’s a self-important self-insert and unreliable narrator, Turk’s a cardboard Gary Stu, every other woman in the world is a slut who wants to STEAL HER MAN, and Rennie is always right. The only bright spot in the chapter is Niles, but since he’s Rennie’s enemy, he’ll be cut down and reduced to a Rennie-worshipper. And notice she still hasn’t done any questioning of anyone about Cory Rivkin or Female Jimi Hendrix or Ned Raven. I wonder how many chapters we have to go before she starts her half-assed investigating.
Next time, chapter 11, wherein Turk gets poisoned, Amander gets murdered, and the Rennieturk goes back to New York. What, you mean she isn’t even going to finish covering the damn festival that is her job? Kennealy-Morrison can’t have the nerve to do that after what she did with the fourth book. But we’ll see.
Ultrasonic Carousel 