McLean, Duncan

Lone Star Swing: On the Trail of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys

Average customer rating:

Quite a ride
Laugh-out-loud travelogue . . .
Texas! Music!
All you get is an empty trail!
Entertaining, Though Seriously Flawed

Lone Star Swing: On the Trail of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys
Duncan McLean
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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San Antonio Rose: THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF BOB WILLS (Music in American Life)
Bob Wills: Hubbin It

ASIN: 0393317560

Amazon.com

Duncan McLean has a dilemma. He's head over heels for a music that's not only going out of style, but is found most prevalently in Texas--a long way from his home in the Orkney Islands of Scotland. After exhausting Scotland's supply of western swing, in 1995 McLean travels to America, rents a Chevy Cavalier, and heads west to explore the birthplace, meet the makers, and dig up the roots of the sounds with which he's fallen in love. As he describes it:

"This is the hottering chili-pot of New Orleans Jazz, old country fiddling, big-band swing, ragtime, blues, pop, mariachi and conjunto that dominated Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and beyond--all the way to San Francisco in the west, Memphis in the east--from the mid-Thirties till mid-Elvis. This is western swing."

Lone Star Swing is both musical pilgrimage and witty travelogue. As McLean trails his favorite music over the back roads of Texas, his adventures make for interesting reading. He has a way of making you feel you're riding along in the passenger seat as he finds the top 10 things to do in Turkey, Texas, on Bob Wills Day (Bob is McLean's western-swing hero), learns how to nibble an onion cooked up sunflower style at the Presidio Onion Festival, gets lectured for cussing in front of ladies after his Chevy gets its doors rehung by a hit-and-run driver, and suffers the wrath of Gulf Coast prawns eaten too far from their home waters. And although he's far away from the Orkney Islands, McLean has a way of making himself at home in just about every place the music takes him.

Book Description

High Fidelity meets Blue Highways in this gloriously offbeat quest for the true roots of Texas Swing. Using the prize money from his Somerset Maugham Award, Duncan McLean traveled from Orkney, Scotland, to Texas in search of the extraordinary mix of jazz, blues, country, and mariachi that is Western Swing. This account of his travels takes in barbed-wire museums, onion festivals, hoe-downs, ghost-towns, dead dogs, and ten thousand miles of driving through the Lone Star State. A constant soundtrack of vintage music from bands like the Texas Top Hands, The Lightcrust Doughboys, and the Modern Mountaineers cheers McLean as he tries, with great difficulty, to track down any trace of his greatest heroes: Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Both a quest for a musical grail and a wildly funny travelogue, Lone Star Swing captures the singular wonders of Texas and its maverick inhabitants, its staggering 100-in-the-shade heat, its mouth-blistering chilies. . . . Above all it captures the spirit of the glorious mongrel music--once incredibly popular, now all but forgotten--that he crossed the world to hear.

Customer Reviews:

Quite a ride.......2007-01-12

One of the funnest books I've read in a long time, and educational too. I was drawn to this book because of the Bob Wills kick I've been on because of a boxed CD set and biography of him, but this book let me know how much more this is to Western Swing music than Bob Wills, so now I'm encouraged to further pursue this music thanks to the author.
I'm also amazed at how these people who write great travel books seem to have such great travel experiences along the way, when I'm usually bored to tears when I hit the road. Maybe I'm just not trying hard enough and don't have the proper attitude, but I think another thing you can take out of this book is how enriching the travel experience can be if you're in the proper frame of mind.

Laugh-out-loud travelogue . . ........2005-06-01

This is a five-star book for readers who enjoy fish-out-of-water accounts of travel, where the writer's eye (ear, nose and throat, for that matter) seems to encounter only the completely incongruous and absurd. The jokes go both ways, of course - on the inhabitants of the place traveled through as well as the credulous author, whose expectations are wildly different. Paul Theroux does this in (to me) a cranky and irritating way ("Kingdom by the Sea"), but Duncan McLean, a Scotsman from little Orkney, plays it for belly laughs, and there's a lot of fun to be had along the way.

A caveat or two. Texans may find his jaundiced view of Texas grating, and lovers of Bob Wills and western swing may find the book something of a hodgepodge on those two subjects. Onion festivals, scary encounters with border patrol, and his opinion of Rush Limbaugh will seem beside the point. Likewise, readers not into western swing will find his enthusiasms, knowledge of music trivia, and references to musicians and songs a bit of a yawn.

But if you've read Charles Townsend's biography of Bob Wills and love the music, this slaphappy mix of travel writing and musicology can put a big smile on your face. Also, McLean's difficulties in finding and interviewing the old-timers who once played with Wills will give you an appreciation for the monumental effort of research that went into the writing of the biography. Best advice: Read Townsend first, then pick up McLean and be prepared to laugh.

Texas! Music!.......2004-11-07

McLean, a Scottish writer, discovered an old, scratchy LP of Bob Wills and was instantly became a fanatic for western swing, a music that dominated popular radio in the '30s and '40s and is now close to forgotten. After winning the Somerset Maugham Prize for his book of short stories, he decides to spend the money on a tour of Texas tracking down the surviving musicians who played western swing. On his journeys, he finds the Texas Wills and his associates sang about (in small towns) and a Texas overwhelmed by newer Trends (Austin, Fort Worth, etc.). An interesting tale of another guy obsessed with music.

All you get is an empty trail!.......2004-07-06

A poorly planned book about a poorly planned trip through Texas. The writer has a great love for Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, but comes up empty on his search and in his book. I read everything I can find on Bob and His Texas Playboys, and this book was the most disappointing.

The only two great books are: San Antonio Rose (by Charles Townsend) and My Years With Bob Wills (by that ol' piano pounder, Al Stricklin)

Skip this one. Save your money for the Bear Records box set.

Entertaining, Though Seriously Flawed.......2003-07-21

"Lone Star Swing" is an entertaining and occasionally funny read, though not very enlightening about the subject at hand (western swing music). McLean made the mistaken assumption that he could breeze through Texas with little planning beforehand and produce a compelling book within the 30 days his money allowed him. As a result he stumbles around, trying to find interesting people and experiences on the fly, but often coming up empty. An in-depth interview with Adolph Hofner would have been great, but McLean didn't bother to plan it in advance and blows the opportunity. He praises people like Billy Briggs and Smokey Woods but makes no attempt to track down people who can shed light on their personalities or music. Thus most of McLean's comments come across as witty fodder for a fanzine, but not much else. His hyper-enthusiasm for Bob Wills is a little disturbing, since the most interesting people he talks about in the book had very little contact with Wills, and actually played with other groups. The story ends with the author attending a rather tepid "Playboys reunion" that features guys who played with Wills in the '50s and '60s -- far removed from the 1930s era band that McLean is so enthused about in the rest of the book. Not much of a climax, but McLean is such a "fan" that he doesn't notice this discrepancy.

Book Description

This book is part of a new and exciting photography series in which Scotland's finest photographers have sought out the quirky, the curious, and the unknown as they capture the country's most beautiful scenery. Moberg's collection on Orkney reflects these ideals, and her photography gets to the heart of both landscape and its human component.

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A Norwegian masterpiece

Hunger
Knut Hamsun
Manufacturer: Canongate Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Customer Reviews:

A Norwegian masterpiece.......2006-10-07

This book is one of Norway's best pieces of literature. It's written by Knut Hamsun, the world-famous author of so many great works. It centres on a young artist; a writer, and his struggle to uphold himself in every way. The book is largely autobiographical from what I can deduce, although we never learn the protagonist's name, and it mirrors the challenges Hamsun himself had as a young author in Norway's capitol. As most of Hamsun's books, it has a lot of bizarre episodes and dialogues, but contrary to what many people seem to think, it's also hilarious. It made me laugh out loud several times, when the main character invents all these surreal ideas and thoughts in his head. As the book progress his hunger takes more and more control over him, and in an unforgettable situation he tries to eat his own finger. He is in a steady decline throughout the book, but I won't reveal much more than that. I love the book, and the fact that it's written by a "right-wing" anti-modern conservative, makes it even better in my view. Hamsun got the Nobel Prize for his later work "The growth of the soil", but this is almost alongside that book in quality. Great, just great!

(I read a different edition of the book)

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Duncan McLean Plays: 1
Duncan McLean
Manufacturer: Methuen Publishing, Ltd.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Performing Arts | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

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Book Description

Best known for his fiction and non-fiction, the Scottish writer Duncan McLean also writes plays which have been produced throughout Scotland.

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LONE STAR SWING
Duncan McLean
Manufacturer: Jonathan Cape
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0224041800

Average customer rating:

Solid shorts
Perfect Introduction to McLean's Range
well written if underwhelming
Snippets of misery...
delightful

BUCKET OF TONGUES
DUNCAN MCLEAN
Manufacturer: VINTAGE
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0749397632

Amazon.com

Nobody can accuse writer Duncan McLean of having a limited range. His first novel, Bunker Man, was a horrific saga of violence and madness played out against a bleak coastal community in Scotland. But just when you thought it was safe to classify McLean with those other Scottish enfants terribles Irvine Welsh and James Kelman, he turned around and produced the charming Lone Star Swing, a fey and fascinating travelogue through the Texas country-music scene. Now he's back with a collection of short stories that veer off in yet another direction, one that mixes savage humor and the occasional tender moment into the endlessly brutal business of living that occupies most of his on-the-fringe characters.

Sporting titles such as "A/deen Soccer Thugs Kill All Visiting Fans," "Loaves and Fishes, Nah," or "The Druids Shite It, Fail to Show," McLean's stories range from a few paragraphs to many pages. What they all share is a bleak outlook, a ferocious rage, and language that would make a longshoreman blush. In "Bod Is Dead," for example, McLean gives us Buzby, described as "a hot-and-cold cunt" who's "quick to rouse, quick to freeze, he'd punch some bugger's lights out or give them a fucking hug depending on his mood, how his feelings felt that day, that minute, and all for nothing at all." In this particular instance, Buzby feels homicidal after watching his drunken mother seduce his buddy right in front of him. Butchers, workers on North Sea oil rigs, unemployed and underemployed alcoholics, drug addicts, and losers--these are the people who populate the world of Duncan McLean's making, and readers of Bucket of Tongues had better have the stomach to face them. --Alix Wilber

Book Description

From the author of Lone Star Swing, this winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, is "lean, maggoty writing. More: it's subversively funny" (Janice Galloway). In this extraordinary collection of short stories, Duncan McLean shows us real life --and real death --in all its many guises. Equally adept at black farce, brutal rants, or tender epiphanies, McLean plunges us headlong into the lives of his characters: partying, and all it entails, with soccer enthusiasts; shivering inside the butcher's man-sized fridge; stumbling bloody-footed along the cliff-top path at midnight, lost in a liver'n'onions-fueled fantasy of sex and violence. The men and women in these stories are mostly unemployed or in dead-end jobs, often on the edge of madness or destruction; but just as often they are on the brink of simply leaving: walking away from relationships, responsibilities, and the reassurance of alcohol and aggression. Told with enormous skill, fierce humor, and a dark emotional drive, these stories are as various as the characters themselves. Their commonality derives from a merciless realism, and an almost fanatical adherence to the rhythms and cadences of spoken language.

Customer Reviews:

Solid shorts.......2001-07-01

Good, solid, slice-of-life type of stories. Reads quickly.

Perfect Introduction to McLean's Range.......2001-04-04

From the author of the totally creepy Bunker Man and the deftly delightful Blackden comes this collection of 23 short stories ranging in length from a half-page to 42 pages. McLean's voice and fine writing is as evident in these short works as in his two novels. If one placed each of his novels at the end of a spectrum of creepiness and wholesomeness, the stories in this collection would fill the gap between them. Indeed, the longest story, "Hours of Darkness" shares many of the creepy and ultimately nasty characteristics of Bunker Man, while others such as "Tongue" or "The Druids S***e It and Fail To Show" hearken to Blackden. As a whole, the collection is a great example of the new Scottish writing, and a perfect introduction to McLean.

well written if underwhelming.......2000-09-13

These stories describe the antics of contemporary Scottish pond life. But they do so in a flat, affectless voice. The experience is akin to half watching other people whilst waiting in a bus station. Only slightly more diverting than watching dry leaves being blown about on a crisp autumn day.

Snippets of misery..........2000-05-06

Although I enjoyed reading this book, I wouldn't say there was anything truly ground-breaking or special about it. Just small slices of ordinary Scottish lives told, mainly, in the local tongue. Enjoyable, sometimes nasty, decent read.

delightful.......2000-03-03

The painful truths told by McLean are bearable because of the humor that they are told with. If you liked the movie trainspotting, you will love this book, as I did.

AHEAD OF ITS TIME: A CLOCKTOWER PRESS ANTHOLOGY

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Gud Stuff

AHEAD OF ITS TIME: A CLOCKTOWER PRESS ANTHOLOGY
DUNCAN MCLEAN (EDITOR)
Manufacturer: VINTAGE
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Anthologies | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0099268485

Customer Reviews:

Gud Stuff.......2002-08-23

Clocktower Press should enter the annals of literature as one of the foremost incubators of new Scottish literature. Under the stewardship of Duncan McLean, the semi-collective published ten booklets from 1990-96. All but one were 16-20 pages long and the print runs were 300-500. While many of the writers who appeared in the booklets are now well-known, including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, James Meek, Gordon Legge, and editor McLean, Clocktower published them when they were still struggling to find their own voice and language. This anthology is broken into two halves, the first contains material that appeared in the ten booklets and has mostly not appeared elsewhere, and the second contains newer material both by past Clocktower contributors and those McLean hasn't been able to present until now. If you've never encountered modern Scottish literature, it's an OK place to test the waters, but a bit more haphazard than something like Children of Albion Rovers or parts of The Vintage Book of Contemporary Scottish Fiction. The pieces here tend to be much briefer then one is used to, many are the half page little sketches that seem to be so popular with the modern Scots.

In the first half Meek, McLean, Legge, and Warner provide high-quality pieces ranging from the aforementioned half-pagers, which Legge in particular is fond of, to McLean's 20 page story, "The Druids Shite It and Fail to Show" (which appears in his collection Bucket of Tongues). Brent Hodgson and John Aberdein were new to me, and to be honest didn't do much for me, nor did the except from Janice Galloway's novel Foreign Parts. Alison Kermack's poetry, on the other hand, managed to captivate this poetry-hater with its fierce humor. The same can be said of Alison Flett's poetry in the second section, which shared many of the same qualities. Meek, Welsh, McLean, and James Kelman all have solid contributions in the second part. Ali Smith and Leila Aboulela's pieces I could take or leave, but Shug Hanlan's poetry and short stories were excellent and will have me tracking down his debut, Hi Bonnybrig. So, if you already know the major Scots writers, this won't show you anything new about them, but it's a good way to check out some of their lesser-known peers.

Blackden
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There is no place like home

Another Great Piece of Scottish Fiction

A Wonderfully Engaging Voice

Blackden
Duncan McLean
Manufacturer: Secker & Warburg
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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The Trick Is to Keep Breathing: A Novel

Bunker Man

Our Fathers

ASIN: 0436276321

Amazon.com

As part of the wave of new Scottish writing, Duncan McLean made a splash in the literary world with Bucket of Tongues and Bunker Man. His second novel, Blackden, is full of humor and beauty, a true find. It is the story of a weekend in the life of an 18-year-old. Paddy Hunter's mom is out of town, his mates are getting drunk, and all he can think about is girls, girls, girls. Paddy wants out of Blackden, the tiny highland village where he has lived his entire life, but sometimes the idea seems like a pipe dream. He's poor, his dad is dead, and his grandparents need him to deliver their dinner, as well as to make sure the heat has not gone out in their tiny shack. Dropping by on Friday night, Paddy hopes to get away quickly and get drunk, but instead his grandfather sits him down and tells him about the day a German plane crashed into the nearby hillside during the war: <blockquote> A big red hand of fire reaching up into the darkness, that's what it looked like. And then it came down. The hand came reaching down towards us, the fingers of the fire stretching out over the woods in all directions towards Ballogie, and setting the timber ablaze wherever it touched.... And nearer it came, nearer, the hand was closing in about us, your granny and me, it was closing its fingers tighter, tighter. </blockquote> The quality of his listening even as he dreams of beer is part of what redeems Paddy, what makes him stand out from the guys around him, a creepy bunch who like to make jokes about having sex with sheep and raping girls. Throughout the book, women respond to him in an almost maternal way, offering him rides, giving him free food at the pub. Through these gestures of kindness, we come to understand him from the outside, even as the novel is written solely (and masterfully) in his chattery, contagious first person. Infatuated with Shona, who is in love with her abusive boyfriend, Paddy rides around with her in the middle of the night and tries to talk reason into her, tries to tell funny jokes and get her to look at him instead. Inevitably she ends up going back for more abuse. In the remote and violent backwater of Blackden, Paddy is a gentle soul, a fatherless boy on the verge of becoming a man, on the verge of seeing past the horizon of the only place he has ever known. --Emily White

Book Description

A wickedly offbeat look at a Scottish Holden Caulfield trying to make his way out of his small, native village even as he pursues sex, laughs, and a witches' Sabbath. Duncan McLean has been called "Scotland's answer to Roddy Doyle" (Cosmopolitan), but he has his own unique, scruffy voice full of quirky humor and surreal images. In the highland town of Blackden, things have gotten overheated despite being overtaken by the chill of winter. Inside the head of eighteen-year-old Patrick Hunter, an auctioneer's assistant, the blood is boiling. Fueled by a potent mix of yankee doodle pie and beer, Patrick spends a November weekend on his own when his off-balanced mother goes to the city. Racing around the hills and dens of his hometown, he is half in escape from worn-out friends, drudging work, and painful memories, and half in pursuit of a girl, his father's ghost, and a new life.

Customer Reviews:

There is no place like home.......2004-04-20

Duncan McLean is an important Scottish writer who lives in Orkney, in the northeast end of Scotland where most of his fiction takes place. He is known in America for his novel Bunker Man. He is also the author of an intense book of short stories, Bucket of Tongues. Irvine Welsh spoke of McLean's early work: "It's very hard to think of a better short story writer in Britain today." Much of McLean's work is a perfect voice for what it's like to grow up in Scotland.

Even though Blackden is actually Duncan McLean's first novel, it is only now being published in America. Blackden is the story of Patrick Hunter, an 18-year-old auctioneer's apprentice, and his life over a three-day lost weekend. He rides his bicycle around the village, he meets people, loses his bicycle, and his comic and dark experiences become the bulk of the book. Blackden is a somewhat bleak, but also a tender, gentle and realistic novel. Patrick reminds me of Stephen Dedalus at the end of Portrait of an Artist fleeing from Ireland so he could become a writer, instead of becoming a drunk like his father. Patrick sees people in his village leading lives that go nowhere, and at the end he sees an image of the wall of death.

While Patrick Hunter may choose to leave Blackden someday, and ride away on a missing bike, Duncan McLean has definitely found his own voice as a writer. He seems fit to write and to work on a small island with waves washing over. Over the past few years he has created an impressive body of work.

Another Great Piece of Scottish Fiction.......2000-05-15

From the author of the totally creepy Bunker Man comes another finely honed short novel set in the slightly askew world of northeast Scotland. The teenager on his own for the weekend has a fine tradition in modern fiction, and McLean adds to it with his tale of Patrick, an 18-year old in the tiny town of Blackden. Many familiar elements are present in his story: comic misadventure, unrequited admiration of an older woman, a somewhat manic personality, and alienation from his ostensible peers. He a hard worker and yet gentler and far more thoughtful than those around him. It's a truly affectionate portrait of a boy grappling with his place in the world. McLean's writing is both economical and evocative, as he vividly displays Patrick's life and surroundings.

A Wonderfully Engaging Voice.......2000-03-30

Once acclimatized to the lovely, amusing and lyrical Scottish vernacular of the first few paragraphs (the vernacular becomes actually addictive) I couldn't stop reading this book, staying up till 3 A.M. or so each night and grabbing for it first thing on waking. As the book is written in 'real time' (over the span of a single weekend) it felt like I'd spent the weekend with the brilliant and sweet and lusty Paddy Hunter himself, in his home town (somewhere outside Aberdeen?) and left me wondering about his next day, Monday - then would he switch jobs? Would he recant his disaffected barbs or would he take pains to get on better with his friends? Will he go on to London or New York and once there, will he feel better or what will happen? I want to know where Paddy will end up, I want to hear what he thinks about; wherever he lands himself, will his disquiet abate itself? How will he deal with what he feels? When I was finished, I turned to page one and began again. The press reviews invoke Holden Caulfield, but I feel that is doing a disservice to McLean's originality and ingenuous, articulate, and chirpy wisdom. He's a guy who finds he is longing for a place to feel at home, or people to feel at home with, but never does the narrative sink to any annoying or whining admission of this; instead, it depicts the uninvited rumblings that disrupt the complacencies and denial that shield us all from the truth of what or where we find ourselves.

Privatization in Argentina: An Overview of the Menem Experience

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Privatization in Argentina: An Overview of the Menem Experience
Alexander Duncan McLean
Manufacturer: UMI
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000QYK58M

Product Description

A student thesis

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Bucket of Tongues
Duncan McLean
Manufacturer: Secker and Warburg
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000J4NFFY

Authors:

Authors

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