‘Opal & Nev’ an enthralling music-industry novel
A music journalist with a special connection to her subjects researches a key moment in the past in Dawnie Walton’s inventive and provocative debut novel, “The Final Revival of Opal & Nev.”
In 2015, S. Sunny Shelton is 43, and she’s just been named editor-in-chief of Aural, a venerable rock music magazine that has seen more prosperous days. She’s the first woman and the first African American to hold that position at the magazine.
Brashly, she decides to pursue a project that has been obsessing her for years.
In 1970, when her mother was pregnant with her, her drummer father, Jimmy Curtis, was killed in a racial riot at a concert where was he was playing backup for an up-and-coming duo, Opal & Nev. He was also at the time having an affair with Opal.
The riot essentially broke the duo apart. Now, they’re considering getting together for a reunion concert, and Sunny convinces Aural’s young publisher that she should write an extended oral history of the duo.
Back in the ‘60s, Nev Charles is a “goofy white English boy,” far from the top tier of the British Invasion, traveling around the United States with his producer looking for something that would make him stand out from the musical crowd.
In Detroit, he finds Opal Robinson — who later takes the stage name Opal Jewel — a young Black “singer/screecher/afro-punk ancestor” with no money but a strong sense of herself. They alternately support and antagonize each other, along the way making two albums that some consider radically important and others “semi-okay,” before the fatal concert where they share the stage with a Southern band that likes to parade the Confederate flag.
As Sunny interviews Opal, Nev, and their friends, relatives and associates, she at first maintains a professional detachment and ability to separate herself from the story.
But the further she goes down the rabbit hole, the more disturbing discrepancies she discovers in the stories she hears, and the less impartial she becomes. As she becomes consumed with the story, and particularly with Opal, her work at the magazine starts slipping, and her carefully constructed life threatens to give way.
Walton has a thorough knowledge of the way the music world worked in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the way it works today, and she grounds her fictional characters and events in a real-life matrix, so that on one page, Opal & Nev will be appearing on the “The Dick Cavett Show,” and on another, Quentin Tarantino will be offering up his decidedly quirky opinions of Opal.
Both charming, slippery Nev and feisty, mercurial Opal come thoroughly to life, but so do the many people around them. One of the novel’s many pleasures is eavesdropping on their many voices, including those of Opal’s sister Pearl, a preacher’s wife with a less-than-awestruck attitude toward her sibling; and sharp-tongued, observant Virgil Lafleur, Opal’s best friend and the creator of her most outrageous costumes, who recalls meeting her at a point where “she could have used a toasted oat as a Hula-hoop.”
Readers may note the similarities between this novel and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2017 “Daisy Jones & The Six,” which also uses an oral-history structure and a feminist lens to examine a rock group in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Here, though, race is never far from the surface, and Walton is meticulous in exploring how it shapes the lives of her characters, from the horrifying death of Jimmy Curtis to the conflicts it causes between Nev and Opal, who has no interest in singing a song Nev wrote for her that she considers “musty and sad and old-school Negro.”
Walton handles even the most serious issues with a gloriously light, wise touch, and her novel will enthrall anyone with the slightest interest in the music industry, past and present.
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