It was 25 years ago I read it and haven’t looked at it again since, so my memory needs a little jogging.
I just pulled my copy off the shelf for a reread. Now to select the soundtrack!
I remember loving the book when it was new (30-some years ago). The Nazgul (the band) represent both the good and the bad of the spirit of the 1960s (and early 70s); the villains have recreated “the Hobbit” to reinvigorate the dark side. The hero, having been hired as the press agent for the revived band, has the opportunity to revisit all his old college friends, and find out what’s up with them (which influences his vote on how to deal with the return of the Nazgul in full force).
I read this book when it came out, and didn’t realize who wrote it until very recently. I seem to remember Maggio being on the heavy side, so how about Leslie West of Mountain?
He started out skinny and later got fat.
Then got unhealthily skinny via speed at the last part of the book. As I get older I resonate more and more with that feeling the book portrays so well that there has to have been some definitive turning point in your life that caused everything to go wrong for you and extends that out to a general societal malaise that, although the book itself can feel a bit dated now, still rings very true. Martin hit a nerve with that, I think.
The first time I read this book, it had been loaned to me by a friend who thought it was a good follow-up to watching Amadeus.
Watching *Amadeus *had left me, literally, shaking at the thought of all that talent lost so young, and how having a talent like that could burn through you and overwhelm everything else in life. The final scene of Mozart’s body being dumped into a common grave just devastated me, to think that genius like that could be treated so disparagingly. I simultaneously, fervently, wanted to have a talent like that and was desperately glad that I didn’t have a talent like that.
I’m still not sure why he thought that reading The Rag was something that would help, but it certainly meant that both the movie and the book left an indelible impression.
Oh, and while I have no idea how talented he is/was as a drummer, I always thought the physical description of Gopher John was a close match to Douglas Clifford of CCR at about the time of its founding.
Personally my nerve that was hit was Coventry Boulevard in Cleveland Heights, my beloved old hippie haunts, and even more on the nose was visiting the old girlfriend on the same block where I’d lived in the mid-1980s.