Barry Wightman

I read this book a few years ago as I am interested in Wisconsin authors. I enjoyed it. In fact, I have recently reread it. Unlike many other books, its magic withstood a second reading. I still found the story interesting and the characters engaging.

Wightman's writing flows at a great pace- he creates powerful imagery and mood without over doing it. In the second reading I found myself pausing the story to have a look around in his setting. Buildings in Chicago, some cafe's, the open road, and even the Playboy Club in the early 70's.

Set in the early 70s, One of the main characters sees the Internet before it was a thing. She sees it as a great equalizer, a way to change the world. In my second read, I saw how in some ways the Internet has brought people together. It has helped marginalized people. Of course, it has also been a way to control people and to manipulate them. Now this is a minor thing about the book. But it is worth the read to look back and remind ourselves how it began. Don't read the book for that though. Read it for the musical (and lyrical) ride of the rock n' roller that wants to change the world.

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PEPPERLAND is Barry Wightman's insightful and imaginative look back at the music of the seventies, the last years and simmering aftermath of the divisive and unpopular Vietnam war, as well as the birth of the personal computer, a development that will move the world from an analog to a digital basis, an "epoch-making paradigm shift, that ... will change the world."

That's a mouthful, I know. But it works in this page-turning rock and roll love story narrated by Martin "Pepper" Porter, a Chicago kid who studied computer science at U of M in Ann Arbor, where he met Susan (Sooz) Frommer, an ahead-of-her-time computer whiz in a field dominated by men. Following a passionate affair between the two at a summer camp, Sooz disappears, becoming part of the notorious Weather Underground, on the run and under cover. She reappears a few years later when Pepper, having rejected employment offers from IBM and other major firms, is just hitting it big with his quirky rock band, Pepperland (which features an insurance-selling accordion player a la Weird Al), co-founded with his brother, Dave. It is 1974, the year of Watergate.

But, putting PCs, politics and protests aside, PEPPERLAND is, perhaps more than anything else, about magic. And not the Lovin' Spoonful kind (although that's in there too), but a more mysterious kind of magic involving unexplained coincidences, a Dark Stranger, an Epsteinian manager named Cool Papa Creach, and a guitar. That guitar - a Felix the Cat model - seemed to have magical qualities of its own. I was reminded of Roy Hobbs's bat, Wonderboy, in Malamud's THE NATURAL, with all of its dark Faustian intimations. And I wondered too if Creach's musical nickname 'Cool Papa' might have been a subtle nod to the famous Negro league pitcher, Cool Papa Bell. Because Wightman adds touches of abundant authenticity to his tale everywhere you look. The small record company that Creach manages, Checkers Records, is obviously a nod to Chess Records, a Chicago Blues scene institution (think Chuck Berry), which actually did have an even smaller subsidiary named Checker Records, whose biggest act was Little Walter, who gets a brief mention. And the bands Pepperland opens for, some coming up, some on the way down, are real ones you might remember: Mott the Hoople, Pavlov's Dog, and even that Houston funk band, Archie Bell and the Drells, who taught us all, back in 1968, how to do the "Tighten Up."

Wightman obviously knows the seventies music scene inside and out, with numerous references to the blander pop acts of the era, with gentle jabs at Tony Orlando, The Archies, Don McLean, and America, and reveals the music of the Carpenters as a secret guilty pleasure of even hip types like Pepper and Sooz, who sing lustily along with "Top of the World" on the car radio.

Chicago in the seventies figures prominently in the plot too. Wightman uses it, wending us through its suburban streets and various downtown places like the Playboy Club, the Quiet Knight saloon, the Martha Washington Apartments for Women, the diners, delis and pizza joints.

PEPPERLAND has nothing to do with the Beatles, but I couldn't help but think of them - the Sergeant Pepper album, the Magical Mystery Tour, and Yellow Submarine (which soundtrack even featured a George Martin orchestral piece called "Pepperland"). And I think Wightman intended us to remember all those things. Because this is a book so rich in reference, so dense in details that you may often find yourself drifting off in memories of your own, memories often triggered by a word, a phrase, a song lyric. And that's not a bad thing. It's good. Good books will do that, you know. They make you think. They make you remember. PEPPERLAND is one of those books. I loved it. Highly recommended.… (plus d'informations)