I recently sold a story dedicated to Paul Kossoff, the guitarist with the band Free who was felled in his twenties by drugs. The rumor is that Koss had been clean for some time when a fan handed him something without warning. He died of a heart attack a short time later. Since I'm an SF writer, my story doesn't foreground drugs, picking a more contemporary way of Going Down Slow. I can't say more about where it'll appear yet, but stay tuned.
In the meantime, here's a documentary on Peter Green, a similarly astonishing blues guitarist with a depressingly familiar trajectory. In Green's case, he was introduced to LSD early on and appeared to weather that, but was somehow, mysteriously, taken in by some German "aristocrats" or "rich people" who plied him with LSD. In the documentary, at around the hour mark, you'll hear the band discuss how strange this was and how he immediately became seriously mentally ill (schizophrenia). Green, who was still alive at the time and appeared in the doco, doesn't appear to see it that way at all and the disconnect is quite startling. Who were these peculiar Germans - a cult? a religion? - and why did they meet Green at the airport as if by appointment?
We may never know, and I certainly shan't, because I can't tell what everyone is saying. I've lost the ability to understand English accents. :(
Anyway, "The Burn Out," about a teen fan who meets her boy-band idol and gives him a gift, is coming soon to a book store near you.
No comments:
Post a Comment