More Towels: In Between the Notes

One of the four younger brothers of a gifted and very successful jazz pianist, our less exceptional protagonist begins his peculiar journey of discovery at the age of seventeen, leaving his home in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains to travel with a laughably bad, self-contained show band, "led by Fred Waring Jr., the recovering alcoholic son of a had-been bandleader and blender inventor whose limited celebrity dissolved in the nineteen-fifties even more swiftly than it materialized in the forties." As he travels back and forth across the continent with a series of mostly unremarkable bands-bands with names such as "Love, Peace, and Soul" and "Natural Feelin'"-he encounters a world wherein talent is far less essential than a charming smile and the willingness to wear a ruffled polyester shirt, a world wherein getting laid is far more enjoyable, and a hell of a lot easier than learning to play his instrument or sustaining a meaningful relationship. Beautiful young women and angry husbands litter his voyage; there are violent assaults and hilarious confrontations, and through it all, as he searches desperately for something or someone to believe in, rarely finding anything more than a place to put his "pee-pee, he shares his intensely cynical view of himself and the world around him.Though far more humorous than many memoirs, More Towels is still a serious and often touching coming-of-age story, a story of growth and acceptance and all the battles along the way.