The Hellhound Sample

by Charles Shaar Murray

Written by one of rock's most renowned word-slingers, Ralph Gleason Award winner Charles Shaar Murray, The Hellhound Sample is a serious contender for the title of the definitive rock'n'roll novel.

Its focus is on the Moon family, an African-American musical dynasty spanning three generations. At its head sits James "Blue" Moon, legendary blues guitarist from the his daughter, Venetia Moon, is a soul diva, and his grandson, Calvin, a millionaire rapper, producer and mogul. But the Moon clan's seamless influence on pop culture masks a family riven with discord. Venetia hasn't spoken to her dad in years, and has fallen out of love with her music, too, churning out lucrative but vacuous jingles and adverts. Meanwhile her son, Calvin, is living a double-life. By day a paragon of hip-hop machismo, his label specializing in often violent, homophobic and misogynistic recordings, by night Calvin frequents rent-boys and gay clubs. And people are starting to talk - a situation that threatens to endanger both his livelihood and life expectancy.

James Blue himself is having a worse time still, having just been diagnosed with liver cancer. Blue realizes it's time to put his house in order, pull together his dispersed family, and make one final record. Looking to kill both birds with the same stone, he contacts his daughter and grandson and invites them to record with him, opening up a can of worms sealed for decades.

Enter hapless and affable British rock legend Mick Hudson, trailing a string of addictions, divorces and demons as he staggers through his fourth decade of musical stardom.

On top of all this, the troubled troubadours have to deal with murderous homophobic yardies, teenage daughters, imposing managers, an increasingly curious media, their own sizable egos, Robert Johnson (or at least his ghost)... and the Devil. Or whatever entity it was that slipped Mick and James their talents, guitars and fortunes, and is now starting, in their dreams and visions, to get a bit impatient for a certain unspecified recompense.

The Hellhound Sample is a hilarious, reeling distillation of six decades of musical mythology and history, the world of rock'n'roll re-imagined, in peerless prose, by a writer that partied with the Stones, took tea with Miles, and nearly came to blows with the Clash. Funny, warm and vivid, with a cast of genuinely unforgettable characters, The Hellhound Sample is The Corrections of rock.

Genres: Fiction

500 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2011

Reviews

[Graeme Whitton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a big blues fan and in my teens and twenties Charles Shaar Murray, in his time writing for the NME was a brilliant writer so everything was in place for a 5 star review. Except the book just isn't very good. The author freely admits he's taken a lot of the characterisation from real musicians but, for me, that just makes it feel cobbled together.

There are also too many sequences where the characters are 'in dreams' and I found that quite annoying as it's not always clear where the dream sequence has ended and the 'real' narrative has resumed.

If you want to read Charles Shaar Murray at his best (which is very good) check out his books on John Lee Hooker or Jimi Hendrix where he writes with real passion and style.

This was a big disappointment.

[John Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got to keep moving, got to keep moving, blues fallin' down like hail. Got to keep moving, got to keep moving, hellhound on my trail.

For the hell of it! There are some scenes in the book where I could not continue on reading the next sentences because I just cannot. I don't want to face the truth. The constant dread is always there, making me close the book for a solid second everytime I can sense something and saying, "Oh, it's gonna happen," and "No, please don't do it," or "Woah, I hope I'm wrong, tell me it's a wrong assumption." But kabahm!, nevertheless, it still delivered a shock to my system.

Honestly, it's a well-earned 4.5. I was bored at the start. The history of the family was over-detailed, there is too much conflict to be solved and there are too many things happening that I had a hard time motivating myself to pick up the book again and continue. But being the patient reader I am, the book revealed itself halfway. And another thing, I was so enticed with the music from this book. I just don't understand how as if I can hear blues music when I'm reading. Overall, such a nice reading experience.

[Eric Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not much of a book, but our book club had a good time with it. The discussion we had was mostly about the blues, not the book. We learned a good deal about guitars and the blues from the book. The book is a group of cliché characters—which the author admits!—doing unsurprising things.

The book is hard to find in print, so I bought the ebook. It is riddled with errors, runonwordslikethis, broken

paragraphs like this, and poor editing in general. It was written in three months, the author admits, and it reads like it.