TANGLEWEED

Swing music yarn of 12th Street, Kansas City, low dives and hot music, whores and cheats and hopheads and bartenders -- and out of it emerging Rusty Warren, young man with a drum. Volatile, erratic, temperamental, Rusty had always moved around in the circuit of awing joints until he meets Ann, and falling in love for the first time, lives with her for a year. But Ann, with her small town standards of respectability and security, eventually leaves him and goes back home. She returns, under pressure, for one week-end, and Rusty realizes that it is all over, but he goes on, burning himself out over Ann on his drums. There's not quite the pull of Young Man with a Norn, but it is for that market and has much of the fascination, the degradation, the intensity of that sort of life as felt by a young writer who was part of it.