One Last Hit and The Who

What’s below used to be on a page on my old website. It seems like the kind of thing that I would have done as a blog post, had we blogs when I wrote it. So now it’s a blog post.

What’s with this rock music stuff? What happened to the plants?

I wrote The Cactus Club Killings working on the write-what-you-know principle. I collected succulent plants, I needed a quirky avocation for my protagonist … voilà. I expected Joe would continue to tend his collection (much like Nero Wolfe and his orchids), but I didn’t intend to continue writing about plants—until the publisher bought the book as the first in a series of botanical mysteries. So I gave myself a quick course on orchids and followed up with Death of an Orchid Lover.

I was working on the third Joe book, The Petal Pushers, centering on the Los Angeles Flower Market, when my publisher suddenly and unceremoniously decided to drop most of their series mystery authors. Including me. I put the book aside and worked on other projects for a while, until one day I realized I missed Joe. My friends at UglyTown had already offered to put out the next book in the series, and I took them up on it.

Shortly after I started back in on The Petal Pushers, a new element crept into the story. Joe ran into a couple of guys from a band he was in as a teenager. Shortly after that, I realized I was much more interested in the music story than in the flower market one. So I cut all the old stuff and away I went.

Why rock music? I think it was some of that feeling-one’s-mortality stuff. I suddenly missed the golden days of my youth. Cutting class to buy the White Album the day it came out. Lying on the floor in a friend’s dope-hazed living room, listening to Beggars Banquet. Performing in a fraternity skit on a stage occupied later that evening by the Velvet Underground. Scoring first-three-rows seats at Fillmore East for Jefferson Airplane, the Who, Moby Grape, Procol Harum, Traffic. Walking twelve miles to get to Woodstock, where seeing the Airplane as the sun came up Sunday morning made up for being rooted in one spot for twenty-six hours straight.

As I continued to write, I discovered Joe’s latest adventure had a special connection with the Who.

I wrote The Cactus Club Killings working on the write-what-you-know principle. I collected succulent plants, I needed a quirky avocation for my protagonist … voilà. I expected Joe would continue to tend his collection (much like Nero Wolfe and his orchids), but I didn’t intend to continue writing about plants—until the publisher bought the book as the first in a series of botanical mysteries. So I gave myself a quick course on orchids and followed up with Death of an Orchid Lover.

I was working on the third Joe book, The Petal Pushers, centering on the Los Angeles Flower Market, when my publisher suddenly and unceremoniously decided to drop most of their series mystery authors. Including me. I put the book aside and worked on other projects for a while, until one day I realized I missed Joe. My friends at UglyTown had already offered to put out the next book in the series, and I took them up on it.

Shortly after I started back in on The Petal Pushers, a new element crept into the story. Joe ran into a couple of guys from a band he was in as a teenager. Shortly after that, I realized I was much more interested in the music story than in the flower market one. So I cut all the old stuff and away I went.

Why rock music? I think it was some of that feeling-one's-mortality stuff. I suddenly missed the golden days of my youth. Cutting class to buy the White Album the day it came out. Lying on the floor in a friend's dope-hazed living room, listening to Beggars Banquet. Performing in a fraternity skit on a stage occupied later that evening by the Velvet Underground. Scoring first-three-rows seats at Fillmore East for Jefferson Airplane, the Who, Moby Grape, Procol Harum, Traffic. Walking twelve miles to get to Woodstock, where seeing the Airplane as the sun came up Sunday morning made up for being rooted in one spot for twenty-six hours straight.

As I continued to write, I discovered Joe's latest adventure had a special connection with the Who.

go to main Joe Portugal page >

Experiencing the Who live was one of the joys of my youth. In 1969 alone, I saw them five times—twice at Fillmore East, in Maryland with Led Zeppelin, and the heavenly week that included Tanglewood with Jefferson Airplane and B.B. King, then Woodstock. (Where Pete Townshend swatted Abbie Hoffman off the stage with a Gibson SG similar to the one on One Last Hit's cover.)

Their albums were another pleasure, from the sheer exuberance of The Who Sings My Generation through the landmark Who's Next and beyond.

As I was writing One Last Hit, I discovered that they were Joe Portugal's favorite band when he was a kid. Partly because, like Joe's, Pete Townshend's guitar style is more rhythm- than lead-oriented. (Like mine too; no surprise there.) As a result, there were several references to the group in the first draft.

The day I mailed that draft off to my publisher was the day John Entwistle died. I knew immediately that I had to deal with Joe's reaction to The Ox's passing, which I did in the next version. And within a few days it was clear to me that the book had to be dedicated to John. (The italicized line on the dedication page is from his song “Heaven and Hell.”)

As the final draft was taking shape, the idea of naming the chapters after songs by the band and its members popped into my head. I pulled the appropriate discographies off the Internet and sat down to see if my scheme would work. It did. Some of the choices were obvious; for others I found more subtle connections. There were a couple (“Won't Get Fooled Again,” for instance) that I really wanted to use but couldn't find a place for.

Below is a list of the titles I came up with, along with the songwriter, recording artist, and title and release date of the first album they appeared on. (Non-Who songwriters are in italics.)

If you're reading this on your phone, you may need to turn it 90 degrees to see the whole table.