Book Description

“A passionate, elegiac tale about the excesses of sex, drugs, and rock and roll over a tortured musician’s lifetime” by the O. Henry Award–winning author (Publishers Weekly). Keyboard man Jack Voss spends his evenings in the relative sanctuary of the clubs, playing jazz standards on the piano and occasionally singing some of the songs that made him famous. But when his life of comparative comfort and solitude is rocked by a devastating personal loss, Voss is led back to The Enchanted Pond, the 1974 rock opera that catapulted his band, Vossimilitude, into the stratosphere. The story of an ill-fated love triangle based on the tense relations between Voss, his childhood girlfriend, and Vossimilitude’s dangerous and charismatic bassist, Voss’s masterpiece set him on a path to this day of reckoning. To endure, he must confront the tragic consequences of his self-absorption on the only firm ground left him: the piano. With the sure, unsentimental narrative command of writers like Richard Russo and Jonathan Franzen, John Van Kirk has brought to life in Song for Chance not just a fallen rock god, but—with the help of liner notes, bonus tracks, and the complete Voss discography—the whole sex, drugs, and rock and roll era with an immediacy so recognizable that it feels like yesterday. “Van Kirk raises compelling if age-old questions about the tension between art and life, and about our responsibilities to those we love.” —The New York Times “A generously rendered account of a soul’s journey through an unexpected life . . . The cadenced rhythms of Song for Chance will stay with you long after you’ve finished the book.” —Richard Currey, author of Lost Highway