cover image Loudmouth

Loudmouth

Robert Duncan. Three Rooms, $15 trade paper (360p) ISBN 978-1-941110-92-8

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. (Oct.)