Reviewed by: Guest Reviewer LenaLena

Title: Daron’s Guitar Chronicles: Omnibus Edition: A story of rock and roll, coming out, and coming of age in the 1980s

Series: Daron’s Guitar Chronicles ( 1-3)

Author: Cecilia Tan

Length : 312 pages

Publisher: Cecilia Tan Publishing

Blurb:

DGC tells the story of Daron Marks, a young guitarist trying to make it in the 1980s. It’s a tale of “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” set at the height of AIDS hysteria, the era of “Just Say No (to drugs)”, and when corporations kept a tight rein on musical genres and styles, before the “alternative rock” revolution. Daron is gay and is fighting internalized homophobia as well as resistance from the mainstream. After leaving home on a music scholarship, then leaving music school for the club stages of Boston, can Daron find the acceptance and love he needs, and the fame he wants?

Review:

No matter how much we profess our love for certain characters in our m/m romance, no matter how much we drool over the Tys (or Zanes) or Hsins or Vadims, claiming them as our book boyfriends or whatever, only very rarely do we come across a character that is truly unforgettable. To the point of where you wonder, sometimes several times a day, what this person would think about something you’re experiencing. A character that feels so true to life, you wonder why they aren’t in your phone’s contact list. In my adult life I have only met two such fictional characters and the only one relevant to this genre is Daron Marks from Daron’s Guitar Chronicles.

I feel a kinship with Daron that can be partially explained by the fact that we grew up in the same era. Daron is only two years older than me and both of us came of age in the eighties. The eighties are very much present in these books: the technology, the music, the Cold War, the AIDS scare, the threat of nuclear war, the legwarmers and the Farah Fawcett hairstyles. These things aren’t an integral part of the story, they are just there lending it a rich background. In the eighties no gay men in the entertainment industry were out (if you didn’t count European bands like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Bronski Beat). Elton John was married to a woman, Freddy Mercury was in the closet and my mother in law believes to this day that Liberace was straight.

What I really wanted to ask was what he’d thought of my song, of course. But if the answer was going to be worse than the smoldering silence, I didn’t want to hear it. Why did I think he hadn’t liked it? Why did I think his moods were all my fault? I didn’t bring it up, and when Remo asked me to do it again I said no.

Shortly thereafter the AM station I liked went all talk and John Lennon was killed. All a coincidence, I’m sure.

The mid-eighties is where we find Daron in Volume 1, a short and scrawny 19 year old kid who is scraping by trying to put himself through music school. Nobody knows he’s gay and as far as Daron is concerned nobody will ever know he’s gay, except the occasional back alley anonymous hookup. His childhood was messed up and he’s cut off all contact with his family. He goes on tour with his old mentor Remo and it is not until the end of this volume that Ziggy enters the story and shakes the foundations of Daron’s carefully constructed mental fortress.

It was almost as if there were just the three of us, and yet it was nothing like a rehearsal. Ziggy came to life, howling and leaping off the low stage, then climbing back up like a four-legged spider, and never missed a note. I got so caught up in watching him that I almost missed hitting my footpedal before the solo in our third song. I closed my eyes, then, letting the solo carry me through to the other side where I passed the strand of melody back to his voice. I opened my eyes. He was lying on the floor between my legs, making like the microphone was an ice cream cone. Or something else. I felt my breath go ragged as I closed my eyes again, felt him brush my calf as he crawled away.

Volume 2 is when Daron’s story really sinks its claws in you, as Daron and Ziggy drive each other up the wall, on stage and off. When the inevitable happens, Daron is left reeling. His self-imposed isolation, which served him well while growing up, now leaves him unable to cope with what he’s feeling, but reaching out seems impossible. This is the other part of the kinship I feel with Daron, because I was a lot like that in my late teens and early twenties and his struggles are so very familiar to me.

If you’ve never been so introverted that even though you wanted to say something, needed to say something, yet you couldn’t get your mouth to make the words, you may get impatient with Daron’s inability to connect with the people around him. If you’ve never been with someone who made you feel so completely alive that having them put your heart through the meat grinder every couple of months or so seemed like a reasonable price to pay, you may not understand Daron’s obsession with Ziggy. Thankfully, Daron’s matter-of-fact narration creates just enough emotional distance to make an impact without drowning you in angst.

“Goddammit, Daron, you are seriously fucked up, you know that?” “Yeah, I know that,” I said, my fake calm giving away to a singing tension in my spine. “You should too, since you’re the one who fucked me up.” “Sure, blame it on me, Mister Secret Bullshit Man…..”

Volume 3 sees the band, Moondog 3, on tour with Daron struggling to regain his footing. He can’t figure out how to work with Ziggy, both on a personal level and within their musical partnership, which seems fucked up beyond repair. He needs to start trusting his friends, and being honest about who and what he is. He needs to deal with his father, a two bit con man and a homophobic asshole, who has somehow ended up managing the band.

I felt like I was short of air even thought my breaths were long and deep. Worse, I felt myself rushing the riff, and could feel Christian pumping the kick drum more emphatically, as if sending me the message, here! The beat is here! Get with the program asshole!

I’ve read my share of rock star books and maybe you have as well. By now you’ve probably figured out that Daron is not the typical famous rock star character that populates these books. Another big difference is the role the music plays in these books. That should not be surprising, but it is. Most books I have read are just about the life style, but these aren’t. Check out the chapter “Burning Down the House” to see what I mean.  http://daron.ceciliatan.com/archives/882

Now, if you’re expecting Daron and Ziggy to ride off into the sunset together at some point in this book, and have the rest of the story be like a happy-happy epilogue, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. I don’t want to spoiler anything for you, but be aware that this is more of a bildungsroman where the point of the story is the process of coming-of-age, rather than your typical romance, even though falling in love is part of that process. I don’t want to see you wringing your hands and beating your chest that these two should get together already and buy a Volvo! Whatever you do, don’t take a break at the end of volume 3. Much, much better to keep going, believe me. Cecilia Tan almost never gives the readers what they want, but she gives them something ultimately much more satisfying down the road. Way down the road, in some cases.

If the drive to Cleveland had felt long at almost six hours with two pit stops, imagine this, twenty hours. As I stood pissing in a rest area northwest of San Antonio, I calculated that would be ten pit stops at minimum. I felt like a dog, pissing every so often to mark my trail. Jeezus.

With a story like this, the payoff can be (and is) immense. You get so invested in Daron’s life that everything becomes significant. It is such a layered and well written story that it only gets better on subsequent rereads, when you can get beyond your first emotional knee jerk reactions to it.

Daron’s Guitar Chronicles was originally written in the eighties and nineties. Its slice-of-life, lengthy format was problematic for publication as a ‘regular’ book, so it went into the drawer until times and technology changed and Tan started publishing it as a webserial in 2009, a couple of chapters a week.  http://daron.ceciliatan.com/start-here From there followed the first ebooks (bundling the chapters that were finished publishing on the web) and in 2012 Tan did a successful Kickstarter campaign to publish the first 3 ebooks in a paperback omnibus. That is the book I am reviewing today: the equivalent of ebook Volume 1, 2 & 3. Tomorrow I will talk about Volume 4 and 5 and the second omnibus (which is currently being Kickstarted: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ceciliatan/darons-guitar-chronicles-second-omnibus-paperback). The webserial is still accessible online for those of you who want to peruse it that way and it comes with bonus videos of tracks whose song titles make up the chapter titles.

If you’re thinking about purchasing these books, whether it is the paperback omnibus or the ebooks, now is a good time to do so through the above mentioned kickstarter. There are many reward levels that will give you ebook packages or paperbacks, some of which include the bonus-stories-with-sex, which can only be gotten through donations on the website or here.

Rating:

Buy Links:

Cecilia Tan

Amazon