The list of cringe-inducing novels set in the rock-'n'-roll arena is virtually endless (particularly egregious examples include Laurence Gonzales' Jambeaux, 1979, and Jill Robinson's Dr. Rocksinger and the Age of Longing, 1982). So it is a real pleasure to finally read one that so artfully incorporates the rock milieu. Set in the mid-1980s, this first novel features Grateful Dead fan Jason Burke as he follows the band on tour. All the Deadhead staples are here--spinners, tie-dyed T-shirts, rampant drug use, hardcore fans' disdain for the band's only top-10 hit, "A Touch of Grey"--but they are made to serve as background material to the gritty yet gracefully expressed coming-of-age story that takes center stage. Jason learns the hard way the difference between lust (with the beautiful Jane) and love (with one-armed Melanie) and between users (the ruthless Saul) and friends (the levelheaded Randy). But perhaps the most important road lesson offered here is the way the sometimes-false sense of community engendered by the rock lifestyle often masks serious emotional and substance-abuse problems. Solid gold. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“A gripping and astonishing On-the-Road first novel that in both subject and execution can be compared to the best of both Kerouac and Kesey.”
— George Plimpton
“The Grateful Dead's unique partnership with Dead Heads generated not only devotion but artistic inspiration — and Tiger In A Trance is the finest literary sample of that creativity to date. It is a brilliant novel of life in the world of one subgroup of Dead Heads, documenting the full package that results when the young pursue freedom and are forced to pay the maximum price.”
— Dennis McNally, author of A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead
“The Grateful Dead have been the backdrop of many novels, but Tiger in a Trance is the first one to portray the lives of the Deadheads themselves. The dialogue is fantastic — sharp, economical and authentic. This excellent first novel will certainly last as long as the Dead’s music will.”
— Jim Carroll, author of The Basketball Diaries
"Max Ludington is an obviously accomplished and promising writer. His style is graceful, his characters alive, and he can tell a story. As a generational novel, Tiger in a Trance reminded me of The Sun Also Rises."
— Philip Caputo, author of The Horn of Africa and A Rumor of War
From the Inside Flap
In the tradition of Robert Stone and Denis Johnson, a darkly authentic road novel set in the nomadic world of the Deadheads.
It is 1985, and eighteen-year-old Jason Burke is a full-time Deadhead, following the Grateful Dead around the country and surviving by selling T-shirts. But Jason is about to discover the lucrative ease of selling drugs. He’ll also meet the women who will play key romantic roles in his life: Jane, the tall, green-eyed girlfriend of a drug dealer; and Melanie, a rebellious high school girl, one-armed as the result of a car accident. Jason’s one-night tryst with Melanie sets the stage for their future before Jason takes off for California with the tour.
Jason has a past of his own. He grew up overseas, the son of a journalist, and when he was eleven his father was killed in a Syrian prison, accused of spying. Jason has never dealt directly with his father’s death, and his detachment has estranged him from his mother and his older brother.
In Carmel, Jason stops for the night to see Harry, an old friend of his father. He learns that Harry, a rock-and-roll-loving alcoholic, is dying of emphysema. Eventually, Jason falls into drug dealing in earnest; hits the road with Melanie; is pursued by private detectives; and returns to nurse Harry through his final illness, all the while battling his own increasingly serious heroin addiction. The end of the road is near.
Combining the high spirits of youth with the sometimes jaded wisdom of the counterculture, Tiger in a Trance is a startlingly sure-handed and accomplished debut novel that recalls such generational classics as Less Than Zero and The Beach. It shows how music, drugs, and especially love can be enchanting, and how the most bewitching things can also be the most bedeviling.
From the Back Cover
“A gripping and astonishing On-the-Road first novel that in both subject and execution can be compared to the best of both Kerouac and Kesey.”
— George Plimpton
“The Grateful Dead's unique partnership with Dead Heads generated not only devotion but artistic inspiration — and Tiger In A Trance is the finest literary sample of that creativity to date. It is a brilliant novel of life in the world of one subgroup of Dead Heads, documenting the full package that results when the young pursue freedom and are forced to pay the maximum price.”
— Dennis McNally, author of A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead
“The Grateful Dead have been the backdrop of many novels, but Tiger in a Trance is the first one to portray the lives of the Deadheads themselves. The dialogue is fantastic — sharp, economical and authentic. This excellent first novel will certainly last as long as the Dead’s music will.”
— Jim Carroll, author of The Basketball Diaries
"Max Ludington is an obviously accomplished and promising writer. His style is graceful, his characters alive, and he can tell a story. As a generational novel, Tiger in a Trance reminded me of The Sun Also Rises."
— Philip Caputo, author of The Horn of Africa and A Rumor of War
About the Author
MAX LUDINGTON’s fiction has appeared in such publications as Tin House, Nerve, and Meridian. He received his M.F.A. from Columbia University and now lives in New York. Tiger in a Trance is his first novel.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
With the city of vehicles laid out around it, the Hampton Coliseum became the spot, the place where it was happening. The country was full of these hollow cathedrals, kept useful by hockey and basketball games, Promise-Keeper rallies, golf-equipment expositions. Then we came and filled them up for a night or three, made them shine. I was reading Whitman, and thinking of the whole country as holy: every unfurled prairie and oil-stained filling station and filthy city, every mountain range and strip-malled nowhere had its eidolon; but when we gathered for shows it seemed to focus this quality, and the stadiums shimmered like mirages in the rising excitement. Any show might be one of those nights when the crowd and the band got together and hammered out something powerful, joyous, and deeply, if fleetingly, important. The parking lots teemed with old-timers, fledglings, saints, school kids, crazies, metal-heads, jagged-eyed prophets, punks, junkies, ascetics. Why did so many people congregate around a rock band? Put their lives on hold, or make their lives on tour? To have fun, yes. To party and get high and associate with all manner of freaks, sure. But that couldn’t be the crux of the biscuit, as Zappa put it. There was something the music drew from us, and from the ether, and on those nights we became distilled, purified, drunk on it. The drugs and love and sex and craziness were crucial, but it was this lens-like quality of the music, that gathered and focused the inner numen of the land, which drew us back again and again, and created among us a vortex of expectancy, obsession, and ritual.
In the late afternoon, Melanie and I wandered around the lot looking for tickets. There hadn’t been a fall tour because of Jerry’s diabetic coma, and the Dead hadn’t played the East Coast for eight months, so the crowds were big and starved and tickets were scarce. Though among the faces many were familiar, I didn’t see anyone I knew well. Melanie rode on my back for a while, biting my ears and laughing when I screamed, and I liked the feel of her thighs in my hands. Near the stadium we eventually came across a scalper. I hated buying from them, and avoided it on general principle, but we were flush with cash and I didn’t want to worry about tickets the whole time. I talked him down to forty apiece, which still seemed high, and got tickets for all three nights.
We bought two plates of spicy vegetable stir-fry from a couple with a camp-stove behind their van. The guy, a disheveled kid from North Carolina with a sneaky smile that came and went like a lightning strike on his face, asked me if I needed any buds, and I climbed into the van with him to check them out.
The kid pulled out a pre-weighed quarter-ounce and held it out to me. “Here it is, dude.” His wrist was so pale and thin that the round bone on top protruded like a tumor.
I took the bag and unrolled it. I pulled a long bud out and smelled it. It was good sativa, with very few seeds, but I knew I could do better. “Yeah,” I said, not wanting to hurt his feelings. “This is nice, but I’m looking for some indica. Thanks, though, man.”
“What do you mean? This is some good smoke.”
“I know,” I said. “But it’s not what I’m looking for.” I got out of the van, thanked him and his girlfriend for the stir-fry, and we moved on.
We met Judah, a tall, gaunt West-Coast sadhu with masses of bushy brown hair who wore the shell of a giant sea turtle strapped to his back with his belongings inside, and carried a six-foot didjeridoo as a staff. He played it beautifully too, and I remembered hearing its deep eerie throat-song throbbing and echoing through the streets of Berkeley at night. The sound snaked over the buildings and through the alleys, and you could hear it blocks away. Judah came and went in Berkeley like the weather, his travels mysterious, always solitary.
“Hey there, Judah,” I said.
His smile arrived slowly on his sun-browned face, and ruled it completely.
“Brother,” he said. “How are you?”
“I’m well. How are you?”
“Good. Some fine traveling the past few months. Powerful places. Now I’m trying to be serene on the East Coast.”
“That can be tough.” I returned his smile. “This is Melanie.”
Judah looked at her and gave her a deep bow.
“Nice to meet you,” Melanie said.
“Likewise.” He nodded slowly, keeping eye contact with her. “Your missing arm gives you power, but you need to be careful. The power comes from pain, and has to be converted.”
Melanie’s face became serious. “Okay.”
“Go well,” said Judah, and his long legs carried him past us in great strides. The pale green shell bobbed behind him on its leather straps.
“Wow,” said Melanie. “Where do you know him from?”
“The West Coast. From hanging around Berkeley. He’s more of a wanderer than a Deadhead, but he goes to a lot of shows out west. I’ve never seen him on the East Coast before.”
“Wow,” she said again, shaking her head. “We should get some acid for the show tonight.”
“We don’t need to trip tonight. Let’s just find some buds.”
“No. I want to take acid.”
“You sure you want to? It’s your first show.”
“That’s exactly why I need to. To get the full experience.”
“Tripping at a show is one experience,” I said. “Not necessarily the experience.”
But she wanted to trip and there was no talking her out of it. Over the past couple of years I had wearied of acid. My mind had gotten tired of the work it took to get through a trip, and the places the drug took me became less unpredictable. But I couldn’t let her go it alone. So I bought two hits off a guy in the lot whose face I recognized from past tours. Acid was so plentiful and cheap, and so many people I knew trafficked in it, that a couple of hits was something I could usually get for free. I hadn’t bought single hits in the parking lot for years, and it made me feel taken down a notch, socially. The guy recognized me, though, and only charged me two bucks. That made me feel a little better. He swore it was fresh and clean.
“No shit, man,” he said. “The real deal here. Old school stuff. You could go with half apiece if you wanted to.”
Inside, we went to a spot at the back of the floor where I had danced in years past, and where we’d likely meet with friends. I gave her one of the hits, and put the other on my tongue. She did the same with hers. We stood watching the people file in and mill around, smoking joints and bowls and cloves and cigarettes, finding places to stack up their jackets and bags.
“How long till it starts to work?” Melanie asked.
“About half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes,” I said. Then something hit me: “Is this your first trip?”
“Yeah. I thought you knew that.” Her face contracted; she had heard the surprise in my voice.
“No,” I laughed, taken aback, but I quickly paved over my apprehension. I smiled broadly at her. “Oh, boy, are you in for some fun.” I hugged her and kissed her neck. She pulled me in tighter and buried her face in my chest.
The show opened with Hell in a Bucket, Garcia shredding beautifully on the bluesy intro, and we started to dance. Melanie had been to enough hippie-band shows at clubs like the Wetlands in New York, and heard enough Dead bootlegs, to have the dancing down. The acid kicked in around the middle of the set, during West L.A. Fadeaway. The initial rush was clean and muscular and fast. I could tell right away this wouldn’t be an average one-hit trip: it came up behind me like a comet, and I began dancing more fiercely to keep up with it, to maintain a groove and stay on top of the high. If you let the first rush overtake you, it could leave you blinking and confused in its wake and then drag you around hooked to its thrashing tail for the next six or eight hours. You had to climb on top of it from the start, sink your fists in and ride it unafraid—if not in control of it, then at least grafted to it.
By the time the first set ended with Deal, I was riding it like a pro, bouncing around the room’s rafters, conceiving concentric alternate bodies for myself one after the other and letting them burn off in the fireball of the song’s final jam, throwing myself heedlessly forward and around, the music becoming both fuel and vehicle. When the set was over, I looked around for Melanie and saw her swaying toward me in her white T-shirt and jeans. She smiled back at me. When I looked into her eyes I saw that she was tangled in the comet’s tail.
“You okay, baby?” I asked. My voice felt velvety, liquescent and cool in my chest. It made me want to keep speaking. “This is some way-out stuff,” I said, just to feel the sound spreading through me again.
“Yeah.” She nodded uncertainly. “I think I’m okay.”
“Good,” I said. “How about a soda and a smoke.”
“Sure.”
We went off into the hallway crawling with humanity, where the bright yellowish light dripping from above was like a haze, obscuring rather than illuminating the colorful crowd, the rows of salmon-colored metal doors to the outside, the sour-faced beer-and-pretzel wallahs, the cement columns—all of whose real illumination came from within. Standing in line for concessions, a girl behind us lit a clove cigarette. I smelled it and had to have one.
“Oh, god,” I said to her. “We would be ve...
