Thomas Ransom

an excitable white boy—son of the Jim Crow South, New England prep school and a bourbon-soaked Irish Catholicism—gets swept up in the race-mixing, class-baiting, death-defying world of rock ‘n’ roll, first as a singer, then as editor of Creem, the magazine that invented punk. Along the way, his mother attacks him with a carving knife, a lover’s lover attacks him with a torch, he yo-yos from New York to Detroit and back, before landing, broke, in San Francisco. He loses his hot-rodding brother to cancer and his friend Lester Bangs to OD. He careens through Cleveland in a junker with Bruce, flies on a private jet with Keith, hangs in the studio with the Clash, gets drunk, gets high and hits bottom — before stumbling on a love that transcends fame and fortune and transforms his life. Full of the famous, almost famous and just plain freaky — Just Kids meets Jesus’ Son — Loudmouth is wild, funny and poignant, a novel of growing up while falling down.