Loudmouth

A Novel

By: Robert Duncan

Narrated by: Robert Duncan

“Read this book immediately if you like truth, drugs, generation gaps, guitars, and lifelong quests for freedom and kicks.” (Craig Finn, The Hold Steady)

Thomas Ransom, born to a severely dysfunctional Southern family transplanted to New York City, is left to his own devices by neglectful parents and spends his childhood shadowing his criminally inclined half brother and roaming the city with hard-drinking teenage pals. He eventually finds an outlet as the flamboyant singer of a downtown rock band, and later as the young editor of the Detroit-based magazine that invented punk, only to return to New York, at the height of the 1970s bacchanal, and crash. But it isn’t music that saves him. It’s a soft-spoken painter, who turns out to be the most outrageous character of all.

With echoes of Almost Famous and Just Kids, Loudmouth tracks an impassioned musician and writer out among the punks, hippies, and wild geniuses of rock when music was the center of the world. Author Robert Duncan was barely out of his teens when he started writing for the influential music magazine Creem, becoming its managing editor at 22. He went on to write for Rolling Stone, Circus, Life, and dozens of other publications, interviewing hundreds of rock stars at the top of their game. In the process, Duncan became a rock Zelig: He shares tales of his time with a young, scrawny Bruce Springsteen while driving him around Detroit; he introduces The Clash‘s Mick Jones and Joe Strummer to a broken-down piano player of dubious ability, leading to a hilariously disastrous recording session with the band; he works alongside legendary rock critic Lester Bangs, witnesses his tragic spiral, and finally discovers him dead of an OD in the apartment next door. These experiences, and many others, provide the fuel for his debut novel, Loudmouth, making it what Brian Jonestown Massacre's Joel Gion calls “A sonic wail of a tale about the youthful beginnings of one of the Mount Rushmore ‘heads’ of rock ’n’ roll journalism”.

©2020 Robert Duncan (P)2020 Three Rooms Press

Critic reviews

“Holy hell, the 1970s...If you’re too young to have experienced that decade but find yourself curious about its bombed-out cities, the rise of punk rock and the national 'malaise,' you could do much worse than to start with Robert Duncan’s debut novel, Loudmouth.... If the book reads like hyperrealism (and we do mean hyper), that’s because it hews pretty close to the truths of the era, from the freewheeling boorishness to the stop-sign face-plants of so many drug casualties.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

“LOUDMOUTH is, as advertised, a loud and brash trip that takes you through the hellish halls of childhood and adolescence before delivering you to the sweet salvation of rock and roll music and all that rides alongside it. The story is majorly compelling - funny, tender, and very very honest. Read this book immediately if you like truth, drugs, generation gaps, guitars, and lifelong quests for freedom and kicks.” (Craig Finn, singer/songwriter, The Hold Steady)

“This picaresque, coming-of-age novel, about a boy who looks for answers in rock ‘n’ roll, but finds them in the love of an extraordinary woman, is sad, serious, funny and, in the end, ridiculously moving.” (Sylvie Simmons, New York Times best-selling author of Face It: Debbie Harry; Too Weird for Ziggy; and Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes)