In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Linda Dahl’s novel Tiny Vices is a compelling and surprising story of adult siblings.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Siblings take a last-gasp vacation to Mexico in Dahl’s novel….There’s a lot of complexity crammed into this fairly brief story, and the realism is impressive…“
In her own words, here is Linda Dahl’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Tiny Vices:
ROCKABILLY, BEBOP, and CAPTAIN BEEFHEART in Tiny Vices
Music permeates the lives of three characters in Tiny Vices—wildly different kinds of music. Toby Radner and his brother-in-law, Bernard Barris, each married to a Talley sister, write professionally about music, but their tastes couldn’t be more distinct. And then there is Pete Talley…
ROCKABILLY: “Blue Suede Shoes” by Carl Perkins
Toby has parlayed his first love – fairly obscure old folk-rock and especially, rockabilly – into a career as a freelance music and culture journalist, a career that sadly, however, has been as rocky as the music.
Rockabilly is an early style of rock ‘n roll blending Western and rhythm and blues, which is to say White and Black country styles. It features an expressive vocalist, acoustic guitar, a slapping bass, a drummer, often an electric guitar and something called slap-back, a studio effect created by the legendary Sam Philips of Sun Records in Memphis.
Carl Perkins was born to poor White sharecroppers in Tennessee and spent his early life picking cotton and learning some musical moves from Black sharecroppers, as well as the Appalachian sounds around him. Before long he was fashioning his first guitar from found objects and becoming an itinerant musician. As soon as he heard that the then-unknown Elvis Presley had made a record at the new Sun Records studios in Memphis in l953, Perkins hightailed it over to Memphis. Two years later, when Elvis made his debut album, he included his new friend’s composition. “Blue Suede Shoes” was a hit for them both.
In Tiny Vices, Toby Radner’s well-received book, History of Rockabilly, traces the genre from its roots via Elvis, Carl, and including Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley and the Comets and the early Beatles, who were aficionados. Though rockabilly declined in popularity with the growth of rock n roll, there was a revival in the late 1970’s after Elvis died. And rockabilly lives on today as an influence for many bands, such as The Black Keys and White Stripes.
BEBOP: “Koko” by Charlie “Bird” Parker
Bernard Barris, Junior, on the other hand, a Black academic musicologist (married to Kathy Talley), is steeped in jazz, above all in the music of the great Black bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker. Bebop exploded at the end of the swing era in the 1940’s, characterized by virtuosic technique, blisteringly fast tempos and advanced harmonics. Alto sax genius Charlie Parker, known as Bird, was arguably the leading figure in the development of this highly advanced style of jazz. Bird recorded what most consider to be the first bebop piece in 1945, called “Koko” at a blistering tempo (300 bpm), a composed intro and coda and the rest pure improvisation. Bird and other virtuosos of modern jazz liked to interpolate melodies from all over the music universe into their compositions.
Bernard has been laboring for years on a book he needs to burnish his academic credentials – but he can’t seem to finish it. In it, he focuses not only on Bird but also on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, known for his own revolutionary musical ideas and brilliant blasts of improvisation two hundreds before Bird. In Bernard’s argument, the great White European composer from the 1700’s and the great African American jazz innovator, despite their very different cultural and racial backgrounds, share far more than they differ. (Interestingly, both died at only 35).
Bernard’s central idea: both Bird and Wolf, as he calls Mozart, applied their genius to exploring virgin musical territory through on-the-spot improvisation, the European classical tradition having long thrived on spontaneous invention at the keyboard, a.k.a. improvisation, from the Baroque period on through Beethoven, Liszt and so on.
As one example, Bernard cites how Mozart improvised a 30-minute encore at the premiere of his “Prague Symphony.” And he tells the story of Igor Stravinsky, the renowned 20th century Euro-classical composer, who was in New York in circa 1950, where he kept hearing about this amazing Black jazz musician. So, one night he went to hear Bird at the eponymous club, Birdland. As Bird was about to start a set, he spotted the diminutive Russian composer at a table near the bandstand. Setting the usual breakneck tempo to “Koko,” Bird proceeded to interpolate the opening bars of Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite” into his performance. At which point, Igor flung up his arms, overturning the drinks on the table into people’s laps as he shouted in recognition of a fellow musical genius.
AVANT-GARDE ROCK: (Songs from) “Trout Mask Replica” by Captain Beefheart
The third character in Tiny Vices involved with music is Pete Talley, one of the Talley siblings. A decades-long addict who suffers from a myriad of health issues, the impoverished Pete has acquired hot state-of-the-art recording equipment and maintains a tiny studio in his (subsidized) apartment. There, Pete claims to produce original music inspired, above all, by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band.
Pete is exposed to Captain Beefheart in the 1980s, as a teenaged runaway living briefly in LA, where he happens upon a band called the Crowguts in some random bar in Malibu. Pete’s first reaction to their mess of hair-raising sounds is to split, but a combination of chemically induced lethargy and curiosity keeps him on the bar stool. After the set, Pete learns from one of the Crowguts about the California band leader Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band.
Beefheart – his given name was Don Van Vliet – was a working-class sculptor who segued into making music from the mid-60s until 1982 which gave him cult fame, especially the album “Trout Mask Replica,” produced by fellow avant-gardist/crazy possible genius Frank Zappa. Describing Beefheart’s music is a challenge. A few quotes: “audacious audacity,” “trainwreck,” “complete madness,” “comedic lack of caring,” “cosmic goofball.”
The let’s-throw-paint-at-the-wall-and-howl-at-the-moon approach of Captain Beefheart fits Pete Talley to a t. Years later, in Tiny Vices, for the first time in his life he shares a CD of what he claims are his own compositions on a car ride with his brothers-in-law Toby and Bernard as they returns from a family reunion in a Mexican beach town to Tucson. For Toby and Bernard, though, the question remains: is this really Pete’s music, or is it his fantasy, a re-mash of the mishmash that is Trout Mask Replica?
Linda Dahl began writing as a freelancer about two passions, jazz and Latin America, before turning to fiction. She has written ten published books, including the novels Tiny Vices, An Upside-Down Sky, Gringa in a Strange Land, and The Bad Dream Notebook, and the nonfiction works Stormy Weather and Morning Glory. Her books have consistently garnered awards and praise, including a Notable Book of the Year nod from The New York Times Book Review for Morning Glory in 2000 and an IBPA Ben Franklin Awards Finalist in Popular Fiction for The Bad Dream Notebook in 2017. Linda loves reading, swimming, music, and doing volunteer work in her community. She lives in Riverdale, New York. Find her online at lindadahlbooks.com