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Turner Publishing Company - Sandra Hochman

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226 pages

English

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- ARC distributed to influencers and various trade publications. Large ARC distribution to libraries nation-wide. - Social Media campaign on Facebook and Twitter - Email marketing campaign to over 90,000 Turner Publishing subscribers - Free Book Friday giveaway - Website marketing on TurnerPublishing.com

Turner Publishing is proud to present a new edition of Sandra Hochman's, Playing Tahoe

First published by Wyndham Books in 1981, Hochman's fifth novel is an unsparing and no-holds-barred look at the music business through the eyes of a woman who bets it all.

From the Wyndham edition: At age forty she was Americas greatest pop lyricist. From rock and roll through new wave, Sylvia Lundholm and her composer-partner Nick Dimani made millions while creating the platinum records in which millions found the sound of their own longing and joy.

Set against the background of the rock and roll music business in New York City and the casinos and hotels and ski lifts of Lake Tahoe, Playing Tahoe captures that specific moment in Sylvia Lundholm's life when she recognized that love was the one song she could not write, and that only by breaking with the superhype celebrity of her career might she learn in the hands of her new lover.

Revson Cranwell was the male courtesan every woman wanted. He was cold, well-bred, indifferent. But he made her hot. She had everything else that money could buy. Now she wanted him. He was her song, her lover, her best friend. She would kill for him. But he would make that unnecessary.

In Tahoe, at Harrah’s, where Dimani is performing, Sylvia and Dimani meet to create a last great album that will cover the world with his music. But as the tendrils of Dimani's music threaten to clutch Sylvia back into the world she is so desperate to leave, the clash between her passion for Revson and Dimani's desperation for Sylvia’s poetry erupts into cold-blooded violence.

Playing Tahoe will give you insight into the world of rock and roll and big casinos. But above all it will teach you the games of a woman who, gambling for love, desperately wants to hold on to the richness of her own life.

Sandra Hochman has created a novel that explores the guts of a woman in the midst of a change, who will overturn the American Dream to follow a stranger, Revson, who is a new antihero of modern fiction.

Sujets

Literary

Sandra Hochman

American Dream

Fiction

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Publié par	Turner Publishing Company
Date de parution	02 mai 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781683365273
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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playing tahoe
other books in the sandra hochman collection from turner publishing:
Streams
Endangered Species
Happiness Is Too Much Trouble
Jogging
Playing Tahoe
for children:
The Magic Convention
sandra hochman
playing tahoe
Turner Publishing Company Nashville, Tennessee New York, New York
www.turnerpublishing.com
Playing Tahoe
Copyright 2017, 1981 by Sandra Hochman. All rights reserved.
This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design: Maddie Cothren Book design: Glen M. Edelstein
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hochman, Sandra, author. Title: Playing Tahoe : a novel / by Sandra Hochman. Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Turner, [2017] Identifiers: LCCN 2017002639 | ISBN 9781683365259 (pbk. : alk. paper) Classification: LCC PS3558.O34 P5 2017 | DDC 813/.54--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017002639
9781683365259
Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint certain excerpts from the following publishers:
Excerpt from Howl by Allen Ginsberg, 1956 1959 by Allen Ginsberg. By permission of City Lights Books.
Lyrics from Don Juan by Leiber Stoller, 1961 by Progressive Music Publishing Co., Inc., and Trio Music, Inc. All rights assigned to Chappell Co., Inc. (Intersong Music, Publisher) and Quintet Music, Inc. All rights administered by Chappell Co., Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Lyrics from The Wind Cries Mary, written by Jimi Hendrix, 1967 Six Continents Music Publishing. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Lyrics from Can t Find My Way Home by Steve Winwood, 1969 1970 Island Music Ltd. All rights for the U.S.A. and Canada controlled by Island Music (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Excerpt from Law Like Love , by W. H. Auden 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. From Collected Poems of W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
Excerpt from Collected Earlier Poems by William Carlos Williams (poem 18) copyright 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission.
Lyrics from Love Potion Number 9 (Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller), 1959 by Quintet Music Inc. and Bienstock Publishing Company. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
I wish to thank Irwin Small, Steven Hochman, Chuck Neighbors, Lucia Nevai, Sybil Wong, Richard Hochman, Jo Anne Roberts, the Searby family, Alan Olinger, Gary William Friedman, Jerry Wexler, Arthur and Alexandra Schlesinger, Bill Targ, John Brock, Judith McFarlan, Lanny Myers, Donald Townsend, Alan and Susan Patricof, Dorothy Butler Farrell, Eric Javits, Rene Schwartz, Anna Thornhill, Mark and Susan Strausberg, Judy and David Auchinchloss, Sherry and Jerry Lynn, and my mother, Mae Barnett, for their constant friendship and help while I was writing this book.
And with gratitude to Neal Travis and Teddy and Richard Rosenthal.
for my daughter, ariel. for derby. and for jacqueline kerstens.
Come down off your throne And leave your body alone; Somebody s got to change. You are the reason I ve wasted all these years. Somebody s got to change .
- Steve Winwood, from the blind faith album
playing tahoe
1. Disco Was Dead
Disco was dead. Nick Dimani heard the frippertonics, the new solar sounds, and they frightened him. Nick had made his first comeback with disco. He had been in the business, of course, long before disco was hot. Dimani was no fool. He had legs . He had survived. He had crossed over, like a needle in a weaving loom, from black jive to white jive, back to black jive so many times you would think he d be sure of his survival. But in his business, the music business, there was money and fame but never any assurance of survival. Nick knew you were only as good as your last album. He had hit it big with disco and, before that, rock and roll. Nick had reached the charts again and again. He had played God. An American hero. And like a god, he had inhabited the Elysian fields easily, forgetting what it was like to topple from the pure air and scent of flowers back into the purgatory of boyhood where there was nothing but ghetto smells, ugly billboards, bad vibes. When you are born in emptiness and urine the way Nick Dimani was born on Brighton Beach s dirt streets in Brooklyn, forty-three years ago, when you are able to reach millions of people all over the planet who have your songs in their throats, when everyone looks at you with awe, it is painful to slip down the cragged mountain, falling from the heights of wealth and fame. This had happened to Nick many times during his career. Once he had even been dead in the business. But Nick Dimani had always climbed back up on the charts. Now he was falling again. Now, somewhere inside the chambers of his brain, hidden by his shaggy nineteen-eighties hairdo, inside the dry look he made with his blowdryer was fear. Nick had to make another comeback.
He felt like a hero who had been wounded in the back with an arrow. As a hero, he knew he could bear the pain. That s what heroes are, he told his wife, people who can tolerate terrible suffering. Still, often in his dreams, he was still the kid from beggars and gypsies and addicts and street people. He dreamed of empty kitchens and the smells of rotten food. He knew streets with condoms and cots and screaming radios that hurt your eardrums. He was still, in those dreams, the accordion kid from Brooklyn, hungry and scared. Scared that this time he was really finished. Upon waking, he realized, as he dressed, either he made a new album, the way he wanted to make it, or he d better forget it. Somewhere inside this part-Italian, part-Jewish man in the perfect pure-red silk shirt and custom jeans, this man who walked around the planet earth being recognized , this kid who had it all , in his mother s words, who, in her words, too, lacked for nothing-he was now aware that unless he created a new hit album, it was all over.
His latest song, a single called Roller Queen, was nowhere and slipping. It wasn t number three with a bullet. It was number twenty-five this week according to Cash Box :
All night long I have this dream: I m gonna be a roller queen. Sound inside me Day and night, Rolling me, Rolling me, Rolling me, Out of sight- Keep moving, Keep moving on me, Moving on me .
Outasight.
Outasight, outasight, everyone-all the baboons with golden chains around their necks-said at Mecca Records when he first played it for them. If it was so fucking outasight, how come it was falling on the charts? If it was such a fucking big single, how come when he turned on the box he saw Donna Summer singing somebody else s song? How come he didn t hear it on the radio? How come it was slipping ? Roller Queen was slipping. Dimani was slipping. Disco was slipping.
And so Nick skied obsessively that winter in Lake Tahoe. At night in his bed at Harrah s villa, he was sweating out his nightmares. He was falling from Olympus. He was in a box he couldn t break out of. After all, he wasn t Houdini. His hero, Houdini, had started out life as Ehrich Weiss. He had become the magician whose escapes were legend. Wasn t that what every song was? An escape? Houdini had been born in Budapest, Dimani in Brooklyn. They were both small men. They both had black hair and large dreaming brown eyes. They both had broken out of the straitjackets of their lives. Dimani had been born Nick Dubinsky. He had made himself Dimani the way Weiss had made himself Houdini. According to Patti Smith, Houdini had broken the heart of every locksmith in America. Wasn t Nick able to break out of his pain, out of his box, the way Houdini did?
One more hit. One more escape. That was all Nick Dimani wanted. One more album. Not just a single. But an album. He had six new songs. He wanted to record them on an album he would call Playing Tahoe. Tahoe had a great sound to it. It was an Indian word. Meant Cold Water. Tahoe was America. It was the West. It was freedom. Tahoe was the high Sierras. It was pure air. It was everything that was right for now. He was now writing cool, galactic Sierra melodies that nobody could touch, his own high-tech surf sounds, bird sounds, and beatific nature caws, the new Nick Dimani sound, cooler than The Plastics. It was his best stuff . All he needed was Sylvia to put some new-wave existential lyrics to the music. Her little verbal playlets of alienation. And he would have six killers. Sylvia inside her guts always knew what was right for his songs. Nobody could write lyrics for him the way she did. That s why he needed her. Just for this album. They would hit it again. One more deliverance. One more escape from the inferno of the bottom of the charts. Lundholm was the angel that could lift him from the fire. All he needed was Sylvia Lundholm to come out to Tahoe, create the words for the new album, and then he d be home free. He needed her laments. Her confessions. That was all he needed. But Lundholm didn t need him. Lundholm was now oddly aloof. Lundholm wouldn t write another fucking lament or confession. That was what she told him before Christmas. Could you imagine if Houdini needed a partner? If he had to ask permission to escape? If, in order to get out of the box, he had to ask someone to help him? He couldn t get out of the handcuffs without Sylvia.
The problem with his life, Nick Dimani thought, was that he was always dependent on someone else. In order to create he needed a partner. He needed to depend on Sylvia. It was a need that wa