It’s 1985, and metal bands are big. Big attitude, bigger hair and the biggest sound ever blasted out of a bank of truck-sized amplifiers. Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Poison. And in Scarborough author Travis Kennedy’s enormously fun first novel, another band is also on the way to the top.
Davy Bones, lead singer. Buck Sweet, lead guitar. Spencer Dooley on bass. And Rikki Thunder, drums. Ladies and Gentlemen, Whyte Python!
Rikki, the novel’s protagonist, is the new guy, recruited from Qyksand to replace Python’s accident-prone drummer. Auditioning makes Rikki feel like he’s betraying his friends, but his new girlfriend Tawny shoves him through the door. “You got this, babe,” she says. “Bring the thunderstorm.”
“Do you know ‘Till the Bell Rings?” Davy asks. “Definitely.” “All right. Let’s do it.” Rikki clicks his sticks together four times, everyone joins in, and Rikki starts drumming.
“I don’t know, dude, I just kind of…went off. I drilled down on the drums like a machine gun, and I felt my face getting angry for reasons I still don’t totally understand. Everything I felt went into the drumming, just like it always had when I was a scared little kid making my way through foster homes, hiding from my own fear and temper and insecurity inside the rhythm my sore fingers banged out onto any surface in my way.”
The band is blown away. “Welcome to Whyte Python, Rikki Thunder,” Davy says.
I came to this book as someone who couldn’t care less about 1980s metal. But within a few pages I found myself caring a lot — about Rikki, the guys and their music. Sure, they act like jerks and doofuses. Yet beneath the veneer of chaotic rockstar excess, they’re a family, a family of outcasts, brought together by the music.
But stuff is going on in this hare-brained thriller that the band can’t see. To Rikki, Tawny Spice is just a blonde babe working for some LA music magazine. But she’s also Shawna Peppers, metal groupie, and a layer deeper, she’s agent Amanda Price, CIA, the driving force behind Operation Facemelt.
Amanda’s got a plan and the agency has, reluctantly, given her a team of disciplinary cases to help her carry it out. They’re going to find a metal band, feed them a song about revolution, and send them on a tour of the Eastern Bloc. Get the kids all fired up, the scheme imagines, and watch them bring the edifice of communist oppression crashing down. Rikki’s her man in the band, and Whyte Python is the snake that’s going to poison the Soviet Eden.
“Come on,” Amanda’s CIA collaborator protests. “You can’t possibly think it’s a wise idea to program a big chunk of the planet to follow these hairy, reckless idiots.”
“Just give me time,” Amanda answers. “I have a plan.”
What Amanda doesn’t know is that an Eastern European spy agency has its own plan for the band.
A lot about “The Whyte Python World Tour” reminds me of Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One.” Both books offer sympathetic depictions of social outcasts who are looking for the support and companionship they lacked while growing up. Both authors make geeky characters likable, and both have wonderfully mordant senses of humor.
Cline’s gamers are on a quest for hidden treasure while Kennedy’s metal musicians are dupes entangled in a mad game of spy versus spy, but both sets of characters find themselves trying to overthrow repressive political systems.
Can the musicians of Whyte Python achieve their musical destiny while maintaining their sub-culture’s peculiar version of performative integrity? How will Spencer Dooley deal with returning to Maine, where he escaped the torment of high school by playing “in a little dump of a club on Congress Street”? And after the Pythons have snaked triumphantly through Eastern Europe, will the Stasi succeed in sabotaging their final performance in East Berlin’s Stadion der Weltjugend?
Surfing through Travis Kennedy’s finely crafted, splendidly entertaining tale of Whyte Python’s whacked-out world tour is sheer delight.
John Alden’s days of club-hopping and stadium shows may be long past, but he still enjoys reading about them.