At the start of Rockabilly (later reprinted as Spider Kiss) by Harlan Ellison, the rock and roll crooner Stag Preston is finishing a concert. He spots an attractive young girl in the audience and wants to sleep with her. He approaches his public relations agent, Shelly Morgenstern, and demands that he approach her with the message that the famed singer wants to see her backstage. The PR man is not happy about this but goes along with it anyway. So the stage is set for this novel about the relationship between the two men. On one hand, this is the story of Stag Preston’s rise and fall and on the other hand it is about the existential crisis that Shelly Morgenstern has in his relationship with the rock star. The latter theme is actually the more prominent of the two.
Morgenstern is a New Yorker who works for Jack Freeport, a sleazy businessman who sometimes involves himself in the entertainment industry. Shelly Morgenstern overhears Stag Preston playing guitar and singing while sitting in on a poker game in Kentucky. He immediately recognized the talent and takes him to meet Freeport who also realizes that they have something big on their hands.
Stag Preston proves to be truly gifted and becomes a teen idol. He later stars in a movie, furthering his fame and making people realize that he was a natural actor, too good to be in such a schlocky movie. But off stage and off camera he is a complete lout, hard-drinking, violent, obnoxious, irresponsible, and addicted to fast and easy sex with naive groupies.
Shelly Morgenstern’s job as public relations agent is to manage Stag Preston’s image. In reality, this turns out to be little more than a highly-paid babysitting position that involves getting the infantile musician out of all the trouble he makes. Morgenstern gets pushed to the limits of his tolerance after some embarrassing incidents. One is when Stag gets a teenage African-American girl pregnant; FReeport insists on paying for an abortion and a non-disclosure agreement that cost him more money than he wants to pay. But more importantly, Morgenstern is disgusted by the racist comments that Stag Preston makes about her and the sexist way he thinks of her as less than human. Another time, Stag Preston gets all drugged up and allows himself to be filmed for a porn movie with two women. The man who arranged the situation threatens to release the film footage to the public if hush money isn’t paid in regular installments. The worst episode comes when a teenage girl dies because Stag Preston tried to rape her.
While the action of the story is provided by Stag Preston, the moral commentary is personified by Shelly Morgenstern. As the plot progresses, the PR man becomes increasingly morally conflicted about his relation to Stag. He is dependent on the rock star’s career to maintain his comfortable lifestyle but he feels like he is defending the actions of a monster to do so. He feels like he is a leech or a parasite but also knows that Stag Preston does not have the mental capacity to manage his life on his own. Shelly Morgenstern gets severely depressed and his dilemma is whether or not he should continue his relationship with Stag.
Halfway through the book, Shelly compares himself to Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein and Stag Preston to the monster. Notice that the monster was created by the doctor and in parallel, the agent Shelly Morgenstern created the career and image of Stag Preston. Here we can take into consideration that Shelly Morgenstern is obviously modeled on the author, Harlan Ellison. By following this line of reasoning, we can interpret this novel as an examination of the relationship between an artist and their art. It examines the responsibilities a writer has when creating a character. Stag Preston’s public persona is one of being charming and wholesome; this persona was created by Shelly Morgenstern while in reality Stag Preston is an oaf, a loser, and a sorry excuse for a human being. The image does not fit the reality and Shelly Morgenstern is responsible for managing the image. So if Shelly is a stand-in for Harlan Ellison, we get the existential dilemma of the new author standing at the crossroads of his future career. The young and obviously talented Harlan Ellison, knowing that he had potential, could have been considering whether he wanted to follow one path of writing trashy pulp novels at the margins of the noir genre and making some easy money or the other path of using his skills to take a more nuanced and meaningful look at the human condition. The way that Shelly resolves his own conflict in the end says a lot about where Harlan Ellison would be going as a writer in the future.
Rockabilly is an energetic novel but it certainly has its flaws. The trajectory of Stag Preston’s career and artistic development is glossed over and related in a rapid succession that sometimes has the feel of amateurish journalism. The relationship between Stag and Shelly is not always well-drawn either. The two men at several points say that they are good friends and, despite his misgivings, Shelly sometimes claims to admire Stag. But most of the dialogue involving the two is argumentative; they fight all throughout the book. The warmer side of their relationship is never fully realized and it is hard to understand why the two think of each other as friends. A passage or two detailing the affection they have for one another would have given the story a necessary depth and complexity, the absence of which makes the story a little hard to believe at times.
Harlan Ellison would go on to write bigger and better stories but Rockabilly is well worth reading. Its depiction of the celebrity lifestyle and the entertainment industry is brutally frank and at times disgusting. Stag Preston is a rock star archetype and his personality would later show up in real-life characters like Jim Morrison, Keith Moon, and Sid Vicious. Ellison’s foreshadowing of things to come is uncanny. This novel is a truly American story. While that may be a discredit to its characters, it is a credit to Ellison’s talents as a writer, even at such an early point in his career.
Ellison, Harlan. Rockabilly. Gold Medal Books/Fawcett Publications Inc., Greenwich, Connecticut, 1961.
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