Resurrection Blues

by Mike Tanner

The tale of a musician who leaves school for a life on the road. Flynn Robinson is eighteen years old and has just made the most important decision of his life. Excited by an offer to play guitar in a top club band, he's decided to drop out of his last year of high school. Naturally, his parents aren't too thrilled. Neither is his girlfriend, Julianne. But Flynn is driven by his passion for music, and his fear of ending up bored and boring -- a regular guy in a suit and tie. His hero is his uncle and namesake, Ray Flynn, a musician who has defied convention his whole life. Flynn can't bring himself to tell Julianne they're finished. He resents anyone giving him advice, and finds that he's really burned when the bandleader won't let him play his original tunes. When Flynn is offered a hot guitar, he is confronted by the first of his moral dilemmas. Flynn is getting his first look at the world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But a time for deep reflection arrives when Flynn discovers that his idol, Ray, isn't the man he imagined. Tanner reaches into his own experience as a musician to create the authentic universe of a club band. In this novel, written with the adrenaline rush of a live performance, we meet a compelling cast of characters.

Genres: Music

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Mike Tanner was born in 1960 and grew up in Burnaby, B.C. Reading, music, and sports figured heavily in his childhood. Mike read classics, fantasy, and spy stuff, as well as a range of non-fiction. He taught himself guitar at age 15 and was soon performing with bands at high school dances and similar venues. He also took sports seriously, competing at the provincial level in track and field and soccer, and playing several years for the Canadian national men’s field hockey team.

Mike started writing songs in his teens―very badly at first, but gradually improving. When he was about 20, he began recording demo tapes, and by his mid-30s he had made three albums of original music, featuring a number of different bands he’d formed and folded over the years.

Mike began writing prose as a reaction to the restrictions of having to encapsulate an entire subject in a four-minute pop song with rhyming couplets. Mike’s first novel, Acting the Giddy Goat, grew out of those early prose experiments. He enjoys vibrant, muscular writing that’s either very human, like Mordecai Richler’s; intellectually satiric, like Aldous Huxley’s; or pyrotechnically impressive, like Don DeLillo’s.

Resurrection Blues (2005) is inspired by Mike’s first months on the road as a professional musician, when, as he says, he began “seeing things for the first time, growing and maturing into a fully fleshed-out adult with my own view of the world and a sense of who I was.” Mike’s advice for young writers is: “Find what’s strange or idiosyncratic about yourself, your life, your experiences. Exaggerate that, use it, work with it, squeeze it for resonance. We’ve got way too much generic entertainment in the world already.”

Flat-Out Rock: Ten Great Brands of the '60s (2006), is Mike’s second book with Annick Press. Mike puts readers in the front row as he chooses a defining event in the careers of 10 of the greatest rock artists of that error.

On the music front, Mike continues to play regularly with his Toronto band, the Circumstantialists. In addition, he is an English-language instructor and corporate trainer for business communications.

Mike enjoys travel, sports, including hockey (and watching the Leafs), the outdoors, live theatre, and the company of good friends. He is married, with a young son who takes up much enjoyable time. Mike and his family live in Toronto, Ontario.

Reviews

[Allison]

This book,I actually enjoyed.
Its about a younger teen who drops out of school to join a
band with older band members.
but as he's in the band, he struggles with his family, school and his girlfriend. his parents dont really like the fact that hes out of school and dosen't want to attend coolege, he'd tather does what his uncle does and just travels around playing music everywhere.
useally, I like books about horror, and mystery butm this book I just pulled it off the shelf, started reading it, and really liked it. i'll be finding more books.

[Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a musician, I can really appreciate this book in ways that some other people who read it cannot, I found the book hard to put down, and the plot actually made sense, which in some fictional books about musicians do not, I could actually relate to the main character on a personal level, and would recommend it to anyone and everyone who is interested in most music genres, in my opinion Mike Tanner made a gripping, convincing storyline and characters, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, my only complaint is that I can't find any of Mike Tanner's other books in my area.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of a cool book. I would think that older teens who like music would enjoy reading this book.