SOUNDTRACK: THE PRETTY BOYS-“Midnight to Six Man,” “Don’t Bring me Down,” “Rosalyn.” (1966, 1964, 1964).
The Pretty Boys are referenced a lot in this novel and I realized I never knew them.
According to Classic Rock History, these are t he band’s top three songs.
I guess as a reference point, I can see what Kent was going for. The lead singer sounds like a bit of a wild man, with lots of screams. Each song is a kind of rowdy garage rock. They’ve got a lot of energy, but very mid 60’s energy which really doesn’t appeal to me.
And none of the songs have anything remotely resembling the kind of musical genius that the guitarist in the novel is supposed to have.
So I wasn’t missing anything.
[READ: February 28, 2022] The Unstable Boys
I’m usually a pretty good judge of books when I see them at work. We get a lot of novels that I would never read, but we occasionally get a gem that I’d never see anywhere else.
I looked at The Unstable Boys and thought I had a gem. And it started out as one.
The book is about a fictional band from the 60s called The Unstable Boys.
The opening of the book is clippings from various articles about the band.
They were a mix of personalities with two talented members, an array of drummers and a lead singer called The Boy who was a force of nature. He was, simply, an asshole. But he was charismatic and unpredictable and people were intrigued by him. They had a hit, they were poised to do some big stuff and then their second guitarist died. They were about to go on a major American tour and wanted to postpone. But the label wouldn’t let them. The label threw in some new members for the tour and the band imploded.
Guitarist Ral Coombs was a really talented and sensitive musician. He and The Boy nearly came to blows. They vowed to never reunite or even speak to each other again.
Then the story begins properly. We meet Trevor Bourne. He is recently single and, as a freelance writer, not very successful. He had written a story about The Unstable Boys a while back, but hasn’t had much success lately.
Enter Michael Martindale. He is a very rich and successful fiction writer.
I thought his backstory was easily the best thing about this book. He and his wife met in college. She is an excellent theorist (while he’s not). He grew a little jealous of her and decided to write a story. He showed it to her and she gave him great pointers and he made the book better. And it sold well. Then he came up with a new character, a detective/radio DJ called The Breeze. And it blew up. They made movies and everything. He was massive.
And then he had a crash–the tabloids caught him with another woman and his wife kicked him out. He was supposed to write a new novel, but he couldn’t focus. he was in bad shape and he took solace in the music of his youth: The Unstable Boys.
Martindale calls up Bourne and says he wants to do a story about The Unstable Boys. Martindale will provide the cash and Bourne can do the leg work–tracking down Coombs and The Boy and writing about where they are now. With the hope of getting them to reunite at a big gala.
Bourne thinks it’s a stupid idea (and it is), but he’s willing to take Martindale’s money and travel a bit.
Ral coombs is an interesting guy. Once the band broke up, he kind of dropped off the face of the earth. He had been married but his wife died and then his son was killed and he never really got over the tragedies. People even thought he died.
But then he was spotted in Amsterdam. Bourne went to find him and had a very bad experience there. What happens to Bourne is really really awful, but kind of funny awful and even though he doesn’t deserve it, he is ultimately responsible for his own troubles.
The Boy on the other hand is just a bad person from the get go. His backstory is not interesting–he’s just a jerk with a mum who loved him too much or something. Since the band broke up he pops up in various places, screws over someone or other and then moves on. The last group he screwed over was the Russian mafia. Whoops.
So we follow Ral for a bit while he’s in Amsterdam. He is living in a house swap. The neighbors kind of ignore him. Until one night he sees a woman who is beaten up and he offers to help her. Guess what? She’s a prostitute! Does he have a heart of gold? Well, not exactly. But does she have a child who she can’t find who might also be a prostitute? You bet! Does Ral help her? You bet! Does she help him play music again? Of course she does! So, yes, there’s that.
At least his story was somewhat palatable.
The Boy is such an asshole–so unredeemable awful that it’s hard to read about what he does. He’s a shit to everyone. And of course, he knows people who are into all kinds of bad things. When he hears that Martindale is interested in him, he decides to fleece the writer out of his fortune. So he stops by Martindale’s house. Martindale is thrilled to see The Boy–his childhood hero. Soon enough, The Boy has taken over his house and has the poor old writer hooked on various pills.
It’s possible that no one noticed what was happening to Martindale–but people were checking up on him. So I have a really hard time believing things could get so far.
Perhaps I hated the story so much because i hated The Boy so much. I loved the first third of the book and really had to drag myself to finish the rest. The story ends with some crazy dramatic moments–death seems to be around the corner for just about everyone.
And everything turns out pretty much as you’d expect. Kent was (is) apparently a music writer and apparently knows the era very well. And, heck maybe all of these things happened to real people at some point. But when they all happen in one book, well, it just reads like a VH1 story.
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