Fender Benders by Bill Fitzhugh
My Rating: 4/5 Stars
Money turns otherwise rational people into shitheads, and people with more money than sense often turn out to be the biggest shitheads of all. And fame amplifies small idiosyncrasies into major catastrophes, to include drug use, fornication, and anger management issues. These themes run rampant in Bill Fitzhugh’s masterpiece.
Eddie Long, a talented artist looking for his big break, gets it on both ends: Megan Taylor, a newly attached love interest, who is the pitch-perfect gold digger and Big Bill, a record executive with three ex-wives, who’s as unscrupulous as any political fat cat in the DC metropolitan area. Big Bill talks with one hand and shoves every bill he can find down the front of his massive drawers with the other, mostly off of unsuspecting artists too wet-behind-the-ears to notice. And he talks faster than a locomotive without brakes.
As for the best way to describe this book, it’s like Metallica combined with Carrie Underwood and Eminem. For the first part of FENDER BENDERS, I felt like I had wrapped an axle around a tree, but the car was still running, and so I checked my rearview to make sure no one had seen me or the tree, and then I peeled back out onto the highway and kept my eyes on the horizon. Sure, this novel can be discombobulated at times, mostly near the first half of the book, but like my torn up wheels, as long as it helps me reach my final destination, I’m willing to get a bit sidetracked along the way, especially when the payoff makes me glad I took a slight detour. And it all comes together like a 100 piece orchestra reaching the dramatic crescendo.
As for the insights into the music industry, they were refreshing, completely believable (clearly Mr. Fitzhugh has done his homework), and not overdone, at least not any more outlandish than the rest of the novel, which had me in stitches at times. But I ended up getting rather peeved at Nashville, the music industry, and all the ways artists get ripped off in the name of stuffing some fat cat’s bank account. The starving artist never comes out ahead, no sir. Sure, it’s easy to take this novel tongue-in-cheek, but what really caused the air around me to turn hotter than a sauna is that there’s an element of truth, and possibly even more so than just an element, in what this novel brings to light about overzealous pocket stuffing. I mean, when lawyers are showing more morals than record executives clearly there’s a level of corruption proliferating that would make even Enron and WorldCom blush.
If Bill Fitzhugh ever ended up in his own story, he’d be placed in a straightjacket, handcuffed to a bed, and pumped so full of meds, he’d think the world was painted in rainbows with popsicle sticks. So for those of you who like humor, with eccentric characters and eccentric reads being your modus operandi, then you might want to hop in your Mercedes and head on down the highway, where the tea is always sweet, the shrimp are always fried, and your only source of music is country.