Daughter digs into late dad’s rocker past

A broken family, a dark secret, a series of cross-country road trips, decades apart — all propelled by the pulsing rhythm of a bloody red rock ‘n’ roll heart.

Hot Wax, the latest by American author M.L. Rio (Graveyard Shift, If We Were Villains) tells the tale of Suzanne, a 40-year-old woman on the run — from just what, it’s not initially clear, but we learn it stems from one traumatic event in her childhood.

Suzanne’s father, Gil Delgado, was a rock ‘n’ roller on the rise to stardom in the late 1980s. After years of grinding it out on the nightclub scene, Gil and his band the Kills were finally on track to break in a big way. Owing to a series of slapdash circumstances, young Suzanne, not quite 11, was along for the ride.

But for every rocker who makes the big time, a thousand are left in the wake, dreams unfulfilled — or worse. Such is Gil’s fate, though there’s a mystery surrounding it that haunts Suzanne through to the end of the story.

When Gil dies and leaves his worldly possessions to his estranged daughter, Suzanne lights a match on her own domestic life that has kept her feeling increasingly trapped and smothered. She hits the road, trying to piece together just what happened on that lost highway a half-a-life earlier — and to maybe, just maybe, find herself along the way.

Music not only provides for plot points or character traits, it is central to the whole shebang. Not unlike recent novels that bleed rock ‘n’ roll — like John Wray’s Gone to the Wolves, Michael Bettendorf’s Trve Cvlt or Bukowski’s Broken Family Band by local writer A.W. Glen — the text throughout Hot Wax is imbued with deep musical references, so much so that it often moves to its propulsive rhythm. Rio’s background as a music writer shines through, particularly when describing Gil and the Kills’ explosive live performances, or how listening to music alone can be such a personal, transformative and meaningful experience.

“With one last percussive thunderclap, the music stopped, and the crowd went wild. That was the way it happened every night. If they got the exorcism right, then they could do no wrong,” Rio writes.

Gil and the Kills embody a number of musical influences, a mix of underground attitude by way of X, the eclectic cool of the E Street Band and classic rock iconography à la the Glimmer and/or Toxic Twins: “Nobody wore the same thing twice except their shoes. Every night they walked out looking like five overgrown children playing a twisted game of dress-up. One part cowpunk and one part burlesque, all parts unpredictable.”

The band is poised to finally break on through to the other side of fame when they’re pitted to open a brief tour and then co-headline a massive rock festival with the most dangerous group in rock, the fictional Babel Mouth (one part Mötley Crüe, one part Guns N Roses with an L7 chaser). From there, all hell breaks loose.

Rio weaves the two timelines — the 1988 tour and present day — together well, successfully pushing both narratives forwards towards their ultimate conclusion. Occasionally, a snapshot of a particular time in Suzanne’s life is thrown in to provide greater context to the narrative as a whole. However, not unlike an unwieldy but ambitious rock record (particularly, a double album), sometimes the various different angles Rio’s attempting to work into the mix don’t always fit seamlessly.

While the end result is satisfying enough, at times the road to get there isn’t entirely smooth.

Sheldon Birnie is a local writer and reporter and a true believer in the power of rock ‘n’ roll, for good or ill.