Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

by Ishmael Reed

"Folks. This here is the story of the Loop Garoo Kid. A cowboy so bad he made a working posse of spells phone in sick. A bullwhacker so unfeeling he left the print of winged mice on hides of crawling women. A desperado so onery he made the Pope cry and the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head to the Executioner's swine." And so begins the HooDoo Western by Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo and one of America's most innovative and celebrated writers. Reed demolishes white American history and folklore as well as Christian myth in this masterful satire of contemporary American life. In addition to the black, satanic Loop Garoo Kid, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down features Drag Gibson (a rich, slovenly cattleman), Mustache Sal (his nymphomaniac mail-order bride), Thomas Jefferson and many others in a hilarious parody of the old Western.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Westerns, African American, Literary Fiction, Literature, American

177 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Ishmael Scott Reed is an American poet, essayist, and novelist. A prominent African-American literary figure, Reed is known for his satirical works challenging American political culture, and highlighting political and cultural oppression.

Reed has been described as one of the most controversial writers. While his work has often sought to represent neglected African and African-American perspectives, his energy and advocacy have centered more broadly on neglected peoples and perspectives irrespective of their cultural origins.

Reviews

[Darwin8u · Rating 5 out of 5]

"All art must be for the end of liberating the masses. A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree."
― Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down



Imagine an acid-trip dream that involves Loop Garoo Kid, a bad-ass black cowboy who is a master of Neohoodooism. Set this dream up as a classic Western, invert and twist it, add various funky characters:

1. Bo Schmo, a part-time autocrat monarchist and guru and his neo-socialist realist gang.
2. A touring circus troupe including a dancing bear, the Juggler, and Zozo the palm reader.
3. Chief Showcase, a paternalist Indian.
4. Drag Gibson, the ranch Boss.
5. Pope Innocent, God's fixer.
6. Mustache Sal, a nymphomaniac mail-order-bride.

And many, many more.

Imagine a story that seems like a mixture of Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, George Saunders, and Richard Brautigan. In the beginning of the book, Loop tells us:

“No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.” Loop, the protagonist is up against the man, struggling against established religious, economic, and cultural oppressions.

The novel's prose riffs and rolls the narrative with some strange, obscene, smokey combination of Jazz and African-American folk magic. I kept hearing the words in my head as if sung by Sly Stone on peyote in the midst of a vision quest. This is a book that needs to be read it one sitting. It is not casual. It is funny, absurd, strange, twisted, obscene, messy, relevant, infinitely quotable, cheeky, irreverent, subversive, rollicking, and completely woke.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Wild West satire predating Blazing Saddles—almost as funny, twice as anarchic. Written in a series of stand-alone paragraph fragments, Reed sends up the genre’s clichés, taking a broader pop at American politics and race relations circa 1968. The proceedings are surreal and outré: from scandalous subversions of Western myths and characters to sudden appearances of presidents and popes. (And questionable sexual politics). I’m sure I missed most of the novel’s references and subtleties, but I had a rootin’ tootin’ darn good two hours all the same. Along similar lines, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Gold Fools.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Okay so how do this chronologically? Second book ; third book by Reed. But I read them the other way around and totally haven’t read the first. So let me say this from my point of view ; Yellow Back Radio Broke Down is a step back from Mumbo Jumbo. But said from Reed’s point of view, the third of his novels is a great funky step forward and up. Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (ween ourselves off of abbrv’s please?) is a cartoon work=up of what comes into cool with Mumbo Jumbo. But it’s all different. And that different thing is what is cool. It’s a cartoon western! And given as I am to quick associations and reading=lists, let’s put it right there where it belongs, alongside of that one from Coover and that one from Hawkes (who else?). But you know it’s almost too easy squeezy, doing the parodic vamp of the western which (right?) almost from the beginning began to self=parody it’s own already parodic bad self?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Lonesome Cowboy Burt’s got a song for you.

[Jordan West · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much of its time but still a lot of fun: a post-negritude fusion of Firesign Theatre, Blazing Saddles, and gnosticism; it would make for a great Adult Swim/PFFR show - Eric Andre was born to play the Loop Garou Kid.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen King sits at his desk tapping a Montblanc against a yellow legal pad. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Twilight Zone : Wild West, Twilight Zone : Wild West, he thinks. Someone, call it a deity, clicks on a light bulb above his head. In a whisk, King's hand snatches at a row of books above his battered desk and comes back with a thin volume. The peculiar name emblazoned on the spine reads, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. "Eureka!" King says.

Across time and space - more space than time - a similar scenario is playing out as K.W. Jeter labors to invent the steampunk genre. The cosmos rattles with the sound of "Eurekas."

The Loop Garoo Kid slashes his mighty whip into the cosmos and wrangles these ideas into one boiling, seething, verbs-that-haven't-been-invented-yet cauldron of HooDoo freakout.

Thomas Jefferson sidles up to the audience, hands behind the back of his white tee with the Circle-A, his pink mohawk catching the overhead lights, his cancan dress swishing, his stiletto heels tapping, and says, "That Ishmael Reed is one fine cat. I'd let him lick the inside of my mouth."

How can you argue with Thomas Jefferson?

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times Ishmael Reed can seem to matter most for his snake-sensitive tongue, felt in flickering personal essays that play across every soft spot in American life, leaving saliva-trails of high-rhetorical toxicity. But he began as a novelist & in YELLOW BACK RADIO BROKE DOWN, his second effort, he best establishes an imaginative & narrative gift beyond that of any cultural critic. These days the book has dated just slightly, as here & there Reed goes out of his way to prove an African-American can claim an intellectual scope second to none. But even at such moments, he never leeches away the scabrous humor of this obscene & speedy revisionist romp through Western-movie cliches. Our hero Loop Garoo relies on a whip in more ways than one, & sometimes it's the reader's spine that seems to get cracked -- delightfully -- by one uproarious take on story or character expectation after another. Case in point: the marvelously berserk & crowded final scene before the gallows, where even the Pope takes a hand, & next thing you know, Loop's out of his noose & cavorting across the open ocean, one part Shine the Signifyin' Monkey & one part Melville's unsinkable Ishmael.

[Zadignose]

It took me 111 pages to get into it, but I got into it. Then I got out of it about fifty pages later. There are definitely good things to recommend the book, it's inventive and audaciously odd, with trademark Ishmael-Reed goofballery and whackadoodleness, plus a heap-big pile of paranoia. It's just, the humor often falls flat, and it's a shaggy dog tale with a green horse subbing in for the dog. I've got a love-hate relationship with Reed when he's at the height of his endearing awkwardness as a novelist. But I still read eagerly for the good bits, and hope to find some echoes of what I found so great in Free-Lance Pallbearers.

If I want to get specifically critical, I was a bit let down by the sort of change of nature of Loop Garoo by the end... and Reed has a habit of getting 'splainy when he oughtn't. That's why I haven't been able to finish Reckless Eyeballing yet despite its having the best title of any book ever. Browsing Flight to Canada, I got the impression that one may be more excellenter, and I look forward to Juice! Meanwhile, I know that part of getting into Ishmael Reed depends on one's willingness and ability to accept him on his own terms. Because he's an onery literary Maverick and remains one-of-a-kind.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ishmael Reed riffs off the western, but it's again all of contemporary America in the crosshairs. Even his old contemporaries back east getting awarded to death. At turns manic and amusing, then bogging down beneath the almost mind-numbing conversations of various old white stuffed shirts. Still, Reed's deft satiric voice and utterly unpredictable narrative capers are always a strange pleasure.

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

The greatness of Reed, to me, is his refusal to see time as a linear continuum, moving from left to right as a fixed, limited quality. The worlds he creates, especially in the early novels, are a circumplex of whatever junkstuff variables he feels like throwing into his stew. Even better, it’s not scalar—it’s all just junkstuff. The technological and artistic offal of human creation as neither more nor less valid, but all pretty fucking stupid when recontextualixed in his absurdist tableau. If New Orleans, the most wonderful and, by leagues, the weirdest goddamn city, were a book, Ishmael Reed would be its author. Hell, given the circumplex, maybe he IS the author of that Hoodoo/Voodoo/CatholicBaptistAnimist cradle of Jazz and The Holy Meters (Ziggy Modeliste isn’t 100% human, right? I mean, that’s zombie levels of funk).

We only celebrate one Armstrong in this house.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another classic from Ishmael Reed.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're like me and you've always wondered what would've happened if William S. Burroughs had written "Blazing Saddles" look no further!
Bloated, idiotic cowpokes blunder through a capitalistic Old West, fucking with kids and everyone's mojo by murdering circuses. Enter the Loop Garoo Kid, or whoever-he-is, whose voodoo cowboy bullshit magic takes on all the forces the hick morons can throw at him. Just weird and hilarious! I've encountered Reed through his poetry, but his fiction is even better, witty, often sparse and just down-home hellz-a-blazin' unrighteousness.

[Rayroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pynchon and Reed are my favorites. End review. (Loop appears in Gravity's Rainbow)

[Vel Veeter]

You're always in for something when you read an Ishmael Reed novel. For example, this book takes place in the "wild west" but also includes Ancient Egyptians (something a LOT of Ishmael Reed novels include) and Thomas Jefferson, and lots of other things.

The experience here is of a timeline that is not a flat circle ala True Detective, but a flattened spiral, so that the various links overlap consistently and always exist in reference to each other.

This is the story of a cowboy called the Loop Garoo Kid and what happens when he finds himself in the dying town of Yellow Back Radio. It's a wild ride.

[Andrew]

I hadn't read Reed in years, and finally got a chance to pick up this early novel, written shortly before Mumbo Jumbo. Some really great portions, which I can only call Pootie Tang in the Wild West. Fun, and thoroughly interesting, but a bit like Pootie Tang, it didn't really come together in the end. Start with Mumbo Jumbo -- it's magnificent -- and then see what you think of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down.

[Graham P · Rating 3 out of 5]

An acid western that reads like Jodorowsky's EL TOPO acted out by the cast of Loony Tunes. This shit isn't for everybody. A cut-up parody using every trope in the western genre and vivaciously cutting into it with a multi-fanged paradoxical battle-axe. Loop Garoo, our Hoodoo hero, gets revenge of Drag Gibson, the purveyor of genocide in the new West. Much hilarity and violence ensues as voodoo clashes with the frontier traditions of the New America. The first half of the book is absolutely wonderful--Reed is on fire and you can tell he's having a blast being joyfully sadistic--but the playful energies collide in the 2nd half, and the parody falters as the narrative tries to break through the 4th wall, only to end abruptly and somewhat rushed. By all means, this is an important novel that breaks boundaries with reckless bomb-blasts, but in the end, the fireworks seem to fizzle as opposed to dazzle.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reed rewrites the conventions of Wild West narrative employing a fragmented text like panels from a comic book with a trickster figure at the center of it, a 1960s Dionysus, who brings dance and intoxication. Sometimes the Loop Garoo Kid is like Prospero, a magician with plots directed against him.

Acquired Jun 17, 2003
Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR

[Brianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

List

1. Writing circuses
2. The Western as fundamentally about the West
3. Tension between social realist and abstract artmaking
4. The fear of black revolutions and black autonomy
5. Cowboys are always sexy
6. God hour
7. Writing out of need vs writing from skill (both)
8. Accumulation/Maximalism/‘Toomuchgoingonism’ as Black tactic

[Chelsea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is set in the western town of Yellow Back Radio, where the kids run anarchy and the adults hide in fear. The main character, Loop Garoo, is a voodoo cowboy who is from the first page made to be a representation of Satan. He spends most of the book taking revenge on Drag Gibson, the white landowner who runs most of Yellow Back and is obsessed with material goods (such as his green horse), sleeping with women, and killing any and everyone he chooses. Loop Garoo soon takes to the mountains and begins to cast a whole spell of trouble on the town of Yellow Back through his voodoo skills and his desire to see Drag suffer (early on in the book, Drag kills the entire circus that Loop was travelling with). What is so amazing about this book, however, is just how much Reed chooses to re-write the Western genre, in addition to a number of American myths. Lewis and Clark show up as violent rapists, Jefferson appears as a raging drunk, and Loop frequently talks about his father (supposedly representing God) as a drunk, violent, philandering man not all that different than Drag Gibson. What Reed does is subtle – if you’re not keeping track of the characters, you may miss some of the lovely subtle things he does with his reworkings – but it’s powerful none the less. I’ve read a number of other Reed books, and they all seem to be shouting the same message from the rooftops – the Western tradition (think dead old white men full of abstract wisdom) is not the only tradition, and the only way of thinking shouldn’t be the Western way of thinking, or everyone is in for a whole world of trouble. The characters speak of the ‘glory of the West’ with sarcasm, and even as he works within one of the most famous and completely American genres he manages to turn everything into a subtle critique of the West’s (especially America’s) tendency to think of and judge everything on our terms and by our standards.

This book is weird. I should probably go ahead and alert the general reading public to that fact. But that weirdness doesn’t keep it from being interesting, and in fact makes the book all that more fun to dig through. It’s probably not for everyone, but I’ve got a couple of history-buff friends who love to read Reed’s work to see if they can place all the historical figures and events that somehow end up wildly different from the reality of the situation. Reed’s two other most famous books, Flight to Canada and Mumbo Jumbo are much harder to read and, in my opinion, not quite as fun, but if you’re more academically minded looking for something to really sink your teeth into, perhaps consider giving Reed a try! If you tend to swing the other way, and would rather read something a bit more politically proactive, you may want to try out Amiri Baraka, another poet contemporary with Reed who participated strongly in the Black Arts movement and wrote some rather violent political poetry. Either way, I would definitely suggest you check out some of Reed’s work, if for no other reason than to introduce yourself to something a bit different

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now with a new introduction by my beloved (and smart af) brother for Dailey Archives Press. 💥

[Karra · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly worst book I've ever read.
Oy

[Kenning JP Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

An avant-garde western like you've never read before.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was a really great one. I can’t remember how i found it but i wish i did so i could read more books recommended by the person or list or whatever that recommended me this one. so clever and so extremely funny, perfectly experimental in form, only a little bit metatextual in a way that was unexpected and biting, manages to be harshly critical of the church but also a little fascinated with it as well. i think i need to read more of Ishmael reed’s work to fully get what he’s doing with the hoodoo stuff, this like reclamation/repurposing of a trickster archetype in service of Black American fiction/specifically Black American satire, and i definitely want to just because of how much of a pleasure and a thinker this one was. it was such a perfectly done satire, like the western archetypes are so recognizable, with enough weirdness and fun to make it interesting. so much weirdness and so much fun! i really loved the blending of time in this, the different politics of white westerners vs white northerners was reflected nicely, i like the weird mentions of modernity, the stupid names, the weird sex writing. so good!!!!

[Sam Oxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would love to reread, this book is apeshit.

It’s truly remarkable how much in common this book shares with Blazing Saddles. Despite having a wildly different plot they each are formally anarchic Anti-Westerns littered with anachronism and thematically focused on race and racism and display racist whites as Looney Tunes-esque buffoons. Hard to believe that nobody on the set of Saddles read this one.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fan fucking tastic. one of the best goddamn books I read this year. loved it! even more than Gary Lutz's shitty book of stories. Shocking! Seriously, a GREAT book...read it!

[Maddie Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would not recommend as a fun wind down book. Would recommend for booky people that like to talk book

[Stewart Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ishmael Reed is quickly becoming a new favorite of mine. One of the most original voices I’ve found.

[Max · Rating 3 out of 5]

One scene is briefly interrupted by a "Japanese semanticist," who I assume is SI Hayakawa? Reed is a genius but his books would hold up better without all these heavily veiled one-off allusions.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ishmael Reed is a tricky figure. From a literary perspective, he is unquestionably one of the great twentieth century American writers. His lyrical voice -- a reckless slangy prose-poetry -- and satirical dream-logic vision has often been imitated (the "Illuminatus!" trilogy is, among other things, a dorky white pedant's effort to do Reed- a Reed epigraph opens the trilogy) but never duplicated. He doesn't get the praise and profile that would earn somebody because he has isolated himself since the 1980s in a cocoon of bitterness, resentment, conspiratorial thinking, and misogyny. I've heard he got in a fight with Alice Walker (among other things, he was one of the first to advance a criticism of the way white audiences eat up black women writing about black men as sexual predators) and she, in short, won. His worthwhile criticisms of the different flavors of chic radicalism with which he was surrounded in the Bay Area conflated with an increasingly rancid conspiratorial sexism, especially directed at black women, against whom he routinely addressed chapter-length rants in his novels. In many respects, his situation echoes that of Louis-Ferdinand Celine- a great prose innovator whose situation brought out the worst in him (and many others), where the real and undeniable motes in the eyes of others justify his decision to keep the beam in his firmly in place.

All that said... "Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down" is early Reed (his second novel), and a triumph. A surrealist "neo-hoo-doo" western, like most of his novels it is less a narrative and more of a conjuring, a pastiche of historical, religious, literary, pop culture, and humor elements meant to immerse the reader in an entirely different way of seeing the world. What first attracted me to Reed was my interest in the way non-historians use history to construct alternate pasts. Reed imagined an alternate America tossed together from bits and pieces of lore, what was at the time new (and sometimes under-researched) history of marginalized peoples, and odds and ends he free-associated. This, he believed, was "real" America, an sort of outlaw tribal America beyond the reach of the forefathers-and-framers vision of American history kids learn in school. It isn't, really, but it's a fascinating use of history.

There's a sacred drama aspect to YBRBD, a sort of allegory of the rise of racialized capitalism in the American west, and the fulfillment of a prophecy of its destruction. The main character, "the Loop Garou Kid," a black cowboy/medicine man and possibly the Devil, avenges the destruction of a colony of children who had liberated themselves (this novel was finished in mid-1968) by raining satirical, mystical destruction on various surreal allegorical figures of mainstream society, thereby creating a new society in the west, a realm for the free play of imagination by diverse "tribes" of liberated freaky-types.

If you want to, you can read Reed's later issues back into his earlier works. He was always a horny writer, which undoubtedly didn't help him survive the literary waters of his time, and never "couth." The Loop Garou Kid may fight for everyone's liberation, but he can trust basically no one (except a helpful Native American) and especially can't trust women unless they die. He pokes fun at a variety of would-be revolutionary types- you can't really blame him, being where was, but it hints towards the way he eventually embraced a sort of postmodern heritage-politics (without ever going fully right-wing) and black capitalism. Still... it is an impressive work, and for me at least, great literature doesn't need to have good politics or be produced by good people. *****

(https://toomuchberard.wordpress.com/2...)

[eli · Rating 4 out of 5]

weird and wonderful. love

[Conor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mean, this is just good ol' fashioned pomo fun.