‘Evening’s Empire’ an entertaining rock novel
The way 2010 has started out, this could be a pretty good year … at least within the cozy confines of my book-reading world.
At first glance, the first book I tackled this year didn’t look too promising. It was a fictional story about some aging baby boomer recalling his life of managing a British rock band in the 1960s and ’70s. I imagined sitting at the dinner table with my parents telling me stories about the ’60s and ’70s, two decades I don’t remember and don’t particularly want to read about. As an avid student of history, I’d rather read about the Romans, Christopher Columbus, the American Revolution, the Civil War and the two great 20th century world wars. I don’t care about counterculture junk and 20 years of lousy fashion and architecture trends.
To my pleasant surprise, “Evening’s Empire” by Bill Flanagan was engaging and entertaining, with dashes of humor and humility. Flanagan, an executive with MTV and an author of the novels "New Bedlam" and "A&R," has a strong command of musical history and makes it relevant to the casual reader. He has a talent for the language and idioms of the industry; the novel felt like I had actually experienced someone’s real-life autobiography.
“Evening’s Empire” follows the journey of Jack Flynn, a young lawyer who got hooked into managing an up-and-coming British rock band called the Ravons in the mid- to late 1960s. By 1970, the band broke up but Flynn continued to manage the lead singer, Emerson Cutler, through the early part of the 21st century. Cutler appears to be a compilation of several music legends, including Paul
McCartney and Robert Plant. Cutler had some great initial success with a band, went solo, struggled and then found newfound fame later in life. Like McCartney and Plant, Cutler's got some staying power. Flynn also helped out the Ravons’ other members, with all sharing in the heavenly highs and lousy lows that a popular rock band typically goes through.
The captivating aspect about Flanagan’s story is that he tells it from the first-person perspective of Flynn, an older and wiser Flynn who
regrets some of the things that he and the band did back in the day. There’s a sobering texture to the entire novel, like a parent telling a
child about some of the dumb mistakes he did when he was growing up. The story starts out with the now-retired Flynn describing himself as “a wealthy old man on top of a mountain in Jamaica and I don‘t understand how I got here.”
About his life in music, Flynn later recalls: “We were young men of talent and potential and the world was laid out before us like a feast.
I remember thinking, this is the best my life will ever be. Five years later I thought that enthusiasm naïve. Forty years later I believe I
was right on the money.”
“Evening’s Empire” also has a lot of fun, laugh-out-loud moments. And for being a rock ’n’ roll story, it’s not too raunchy or salty, as
something written about that world easily could have devolved into. And Flanagan, through Flynn, offers a ton of spot-on observations about rock, the music industry and fame. Not all of them are uplifting.
“I know the poison that infected my life just by its proximity and that ate up many of my comrades,” Flynn says, sounding like Solomon of the Bible. “That poison was the pursuit of fame.”
Weighty issues aside, to me, the book was an education — an enjoyable one at that.
