CARVED IN ROCK

Novelist/rock musician/West Coast disc-jockey Kihn (Big Rock Beat, 1996, etc.) assembles an anthology of short fiction by fellow rockers.

The sheaf kicks off with Kinky Friedman’s amusing “Don’t Forget,” about rock stars and poets who belonged in wig city (mental hospitals)—and yet actually made the grade, as did the “perfectly sane” narrator. There’s also a winning excerpt from Larry Kirwan’s forthcoming novel about the Beatles-as-if-they’d-never-made-it-as-chart-toppers, Liverpool Fantasy (p. 560). The people upstairs at Parlaphone have no faith in “Please Please Me” and think the Beatles’ first single should be “Till There Was You.” Kihn himself is now working on a Beatles novel, Rubber Soul. His tragic “Mirror Gazing with Brian Jones” tells of accompanying the multitalented Rolling Stones guitarist to Tangiers and into the Rif mountains to record the Master Musicians of Jajouka, whose music is four thousand years old. Country blues guitarist Scott Earle chooses “A Eulogy of Sorts” from his collection Doghouse Roses, about the death of a dope fiend. Ray Manzarek, founding member and keyboardist for the Doors, who’s written a novel as well as his autobiography, Light My Fire, pens “The Lady of the Valley,” telling of a mystical woman who appears to young Estaban during heavy summer heat and shows him how the light of Eden still shines with the first warmth of man in the Napa Valley. Ray Davies, songwriter, guitarist and lead singer for Britain’s the Kinks, who has written three story collections and his autobiography, X-Ray, offers “A Little Bit of Abuse,” from his collection Waterloo Sunset, while Pamela Des Barres, well-reviewed here for her Groupie confessional I’m with the Band, reveals all in “The James Dean Diaries.”

A shaky idea turns out wonderfully well.