Customer Reviews

Evening's Empire: A Novel

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is an intelligent and "important" novel that chronicles the life and times of rock music from the 1960s to the present through the amazing experiences of a band manager and, especially, through the superb mind and writing ability of Bill Flanagan. (Congrats to you, Mr. Flanagan!)

If you want a sweeping epic, filled with drugs, sex, rock and roll -- and incredible story-telling -- laced with what certainly sounds like professional insight, then this will be a page-turning delight. The characters seem genuine, their motivations, actions, and reactions believable, the plot moves along rapidly, and you just want it all to continue.

Once in a while I read what I feel is truly a great book -- this one makes my short list. I think you'll feel lucky to have read it.

I get to read (and write) a lot.

This is the best book for me in several years. I would rank it in the same category as Flicker by Theodore Roszak and Gospel by Wilton Barnhardt. A completely compelling read for people who grew up with Rock 'n' Roll. I grieved mightily at the end of this book. I've read all of Michael Connolly's books, and Flanagan's work here is definitely more of a page turner than anyone of those, save, perhaps, The Poet.

Evening's Empire is the only product outside of specific songs and people that I have ever known Bob Dylan to recommend. If you are at all a member of the 60s, you owe it to yourself to spend at least an hour with this novel.

Evening's Empire is such a wonderfully told, detailed story, you walk away from it's 600+ pages thinking you just followed the history of a real band's rise to fame and fall from glory. Flanagan is a fantastic writer who marries his love of music and excellent writing talent with an inside knowledge of the music business. The result? Fantastic.

Music fans are apt to find some pleasure in Bill Flanagan's novel about the fall and rise of a lawyer turned manager and his biggest band. Readers who love novels will come away disappointed. This book has the flavor of an overextended cover story for Rolling Stone. There's plenty of name dropping and faux insider juice about the famous and near famous, their tours, their lives, their homes, their sexual proclivities, their drugs and their money, but when you peel away the music history lesson the banana inside is a little green and chalky tasting.

This tale follows the fortunes of a 1960s rock band, the Ravons, and its members, through early success through the inevitable break-up, their disparate achievements as solo artists, their inevitable reunion and their confrontations with the vicissitudes of aging. After following the fictional band through forty years of triumph and travail they are tangible enough that you can almost remember having seen them open some show for a bigger name act, or heard a song in the grocery store or glimpsed a clip on MTV. You might even feel a little sorry for real performers who have trapped themselves in a pretty repugnant lifestyle, though your empathy may well fall short of your disgust.

The author is an executive with MTV and a TV commentator, and to read his acknowledgments, very well connected with fabulously successful rockers, so I'm not much surprised that he nabbed a publishing deal with Simon and Schuster. But I don't think he will nab many readers' hearts.

I loved Evenings Empire. I've been a huge music fan since my first show (Aerosmith / Ted Nugent at MSG in 1976). Everything I enjoyed and experienced from the 70s through punk and new wave, the Dead and jam bands, Grunge, MTV, digital music and more is in the book.

While I remember and can relate to it all, the book allowed me to be an insider to the rise of the Ravons a 1960s British band through their ups and downs over 40 years.

The novel has given me a new appreciation of the music I love in a way that rock star biographies haven't been able to match.

I recently reviewed Evening's Empire by Bill Flanagan, for the Historical Novel Society (it's online and in their print publication for May 2010). Here's what I wrote:

With a title nod to Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man, Flanagan's 645-page epic about rock music spans more than four decades in the life of the Ravons (Rave-ons), a fictional band that starts in London and careens like a pinball through the music universe that unhinged the popular consciousness with the arrival of the Beatles. The behind-the-scenes tales are told in the steady, likeable, first-person delivery of the band's manager, Jack Flynn, who starts as a neophyte lawyer who shoulders the management of the Ravons' tours and music contracts from his firm's senior partners. The charismatic star--Emerson Cutler--is being sued for divorce and wants to catch his faithless wife in flagrante in a hotel in Spain (as leverage against his own adultery). Jack is dispatched to do the job because "you are young, Flynn. You are part of this...new vogue." The year is 1967 and Jack's life is forever changed.

The band members have very distinct personalities, and it's quite a ride as the group breaks up, reassembles, suffers reversals, betrayals, marriage, divorce, drugs, alcohol, wealth and poverty. Seen through the pragmatic eyes of Jack--the manager as confessor/father/nursemaid/fixer--the last four decades of the 20th century come alive in small details that give rise to larger, context-setting philosophical musings about how humans respond to the changing culture with fear and love, wit and courage, greed and selfishness. Even if you weren't there, it's fun to revisit the times--except when it's not. The crashes, the greed, the waste of talent and energy, the money-grubbing snobbishness--from Woodstock up to 9/11 and a few years beyond--the last four or five decades have a lot to answer for. The story drags here and there, but at the end, you don't want to leave Jack and his friends behind.

Mary F. Burns, author J-The Woman Who Wrote the Bible

I loved this book. Bill Flanagan combines the history of the Ravons, a fictional minor British rock group, with actual musicians, names and places to create a compelling saga of the popular music business spanning the last forty-five years. I downloaded the book to my Kindle for a European vacation read and could not put it down. Flanagan gets it so right each and every time. Dirty Water by the Standells? The quintessential Boston anthem! Flanagan also has a wise perspective on the past and slips in surprisingly philosophical comments about life, death, and the pursuit and loss of love.

I don't want to be too critical of Bill Flanagan's Evening's Empire. After all, he's written a huge, memoir-style novel here which is probably more than I'll ever achieve in my humdrum life, and that's certainly worthy of praise. Also, it's not that Evening's Empire is a terrible book by any means, in fact it probably sets out and achieves what it was supposed to do, and that's portray the life of a fictional rock band manager from the '60s right through to the modern day. But I can't help feeling it was a missed opportunity in many ways. It reads like a memoir, which may have been the intention, but there's no real story here, no narrative or plot to speak of. I kept waiting for the 'hook' or the event that was going to set it off -- something intriguing, something mysterious perhaps -- but instead it just meanders along with anecdote after anecdote and doesn't really get anywhere.

However, I kept reading. I truly enjoyed some of Bill Flanagan's thoughts here about the music industry. I liked the way that instead of just blindly celebrating the 1960s, he makes it clear how the decade's influence continues to this very day, and how some people never really 'progressed' but just wanted to keep those flames alive forever without every really moving on. It's a journey over 50 years of rock'n'roll music to some extent, and I also really appreciated the later part of the book where manager Jack Flynn shows a little more nostalgia, gets a bit more philosophical, as wanton hedonism gives way to old age and pain. The recounting of the events of September 11, for example, were remarkably poignant I felt.

So what we have here is a book that's full of good ideas, and that is definitely a decent read, but without a real story or sense of narrative to bind it all together, it just kind of falls a little bit flat, despite its intriguing and fascinating subject matter. It's rather like reading a way-too-long Rolling Stone article/essay than a novel, and though I wasn't expecting miracles, I would've loved just a bit more literature and just a bit less MTV.

Couldn't put this down. Bill Flanagan does a great job of weaving this fictional band into the tapestry and folklore of rock'n'roll. I'm not going to pretend that it's the best novel ever written, but it's certainly a very entertaining read, with many dead-on observations about music business, pop culture, and stardom in general. And it's not strictly for music geeks, either: my wife laughed out loud at several passages I read to her. (The video shoot involving a talking "dummy" is priceless.) By the end of the book, you might fool yourself into believing that the Ravons were a real band. I certainly wouldn't mind hearing Mary vs. Mary or The Voodoo Doll. I can almost imagine what these songs sound like...

As you may have read in the liner notes, Bill Flanagan knows what he's talking about and is very witty about it. What I really liked about the book, besides that it's a fictional account of a "Classic Rock" band, is the way Flanagan goes over the aging process of an individual; physically, philosophically, emotionally, and psychologically, told over several decades. His observations are priceless, and he hits the nail on the head every time. Great book, especially if you love the music biz!