The end of innocence, with pot and sex
Writer Karen Green, a journalist who spent 10 years writing about the music industry, debuts her first novel with an account of one magical and harrowing summer in the lives of fans (the “Yellow Birds” of the title) fiercely dedicated to a band called the Open Road.
This new book from RE:Books carries readers into the heart of a vanished musical era, and does it with style and panache. Green’s main character, who renames herself Kait, cleverly inserts the collective nouns for animal groups (a “murder of crows” for instance) into her a story so that eventually the music fans following the Open Road become a collective noun too, a tribe — or perhaps a herd — of their own.
With dedication — and lots of pot and sex — these idealists from the age form new families, following in the wake of their musical heroes across America (with forays at the end into Canada). Romantic, wounded, confused, all the characteristics common to youth define our narrator Kait (that “i” is important to her) when she leaves home after high school and takes to the rock ’n’ roll road, entranced by the “most vibrant looking people I had even seen.”
It all starts well. The road beckons and whatever family chaos Kait is escaping seems truly a thousand miles behind her. A pseudo-Old Testament cult, the Pilgrims, attaches itself, harmlessly it seems, to the music fans, giving out water bottles inscribed with biblical verses and song lyrics.
Early on, Kait’s new friend Eartha explains their position in the cosmos as they stargaze in a field in Utah. Both have been “besotted” by the night’s closing song, whose “words and music crashed straight into my heart,” as Kait remembers. “This is the Island of Misfit Toys,” explains Eartha before launching into a rant about hating high school. There is a social and class gulf between these girls (and girls seems the operative word, not women) of which only Kait, disguised by her new name, seems aware.
Yet she’s found a true friend in this utopian world of “perfect impermanence,” when sleeping six in a van, sharing joints with strangers, colourfully wrapping hair for five dollars a pop and listening to music marks each day’s rhythm.
And then comes love, in the person of Horizon a boy whose sparse, neat camper holds more appeal than the messy van for six. Earnest conversations about authenticity and more concerts and more miles take the travellers to the west. Rumours about Horizon’s past float around him but safety, comfort and the nice clean boy he now is prove very attractive.
“I could handle this,” becomes Kait’s mantra, as she blissfully heads toward a menacing beach and a past that inevitably catches her unawares.
What Green gives us is a clear portrait of those times in young lives that really, almost incredibly, do exist. A time when you confessed (to your new love) the secrets you’ve been fleeing — your mother’s hoarding, your father’s desertion, the car accident that left you scarred — as fresh landscapes roll slowly by your car windows.
Green’s portrait of this summer, with its music, love and shocking challenges, leaves us profoundly moved by what was once heralded as an era of innocence and freedom.