Moody Food

Joseph Jones is a reference librarian in the Koerner Library at the
University of British Columbia.

In the fall of 1965, University of Toronto dropout Bill Hansen is
working at a secondhand bookstore and hanging out in Yorkville, where
his girlfriend Christine plays acoustic folk guitar in coffee-houses.
Their lives become entangled with the projects of Thomas Graham, a
charismatic musician from Mississippi.

Bill learns to drum, Christine migrates to bass, and Thomas imports
Arkansas native Slippery Bannister from a Detroit factory to play pedal
steel guitar. Their band tries to keep up with Thomas’s vision of
Interstellar North American Music, “part country, part rock, part
something it was hard to put your finger on.”

Over the next two years, the group works on an album entitled Moody
Food. They progress from a gritty bar on Queen Street East, to a
frenetic road tour across the United States, to a recording contract in
Los Angeles. In the background, rock music evolves from Highway 61
Revisited to Sergeant Pepper, and homage to a constellation of classic
country artists is deftly woven into the story.

Bill follows Thomas through a pharmacopoeia of alcohol, marijuana, LSD,
amphetamines, barbiturates, cocaine, and heroin. These substances fuel
their quest for the ineffable. As Bill puts it toward the end, “If
acid solved the mind–body problem, heroin eliminated the question.”
Meanwhile, Christine becomes more and more involved in protest and
social action as the distance in her relationship with Bill continues to
grow.

Thomas remains enigmatic, even as a series of 13 italicized
intercalations sketch some of his background. The novel’s
acknowledgments cite inspiration from Gram Parsons, a rock musician who
provides the most obvious model for the character of Thomas. Related
allusions permeate the novel without impairing the narrative for an
outsider reader.

This evocation of the 1960s would be admirable for an author who was
there—Robertson was just being born. History is stretched by over two
years in having the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada available
in 1965, and minor linguistic anachronisms like “doobie” and
“whatever” and “I wish” intrude. But the spirit of the story is
bang on.

Narrated 30 years after by Bill, an Etobicoke suburbanite who has ended
up in a Tilbury farmhouse, the novel’s two years shimmer with an
elegiac aura. Exceptional craft is manifested in voice, character,
diction, structure, proportion, and narrative flow.