A Review of Dawnie Walton’s “The Final Revival of Opal & Nev”
Rock ’n’ Roll Novel, Part Two
Black artists have been stolen from consistently in the rock ’n’ roll era. Whether it was the Rolling Stones being “influenced” by the blues or Led Zeppelin taking lyrical lines from Robert Johnson, Black artists have not exactly gotten their due until well after the fact — usually after when the money’s been all made or they’ve died. The Final Revival of Opal & Nev isn’t exactly about this theft — not overtly at any rate. However, the book does have its overtones of how race is impacted by the world of pop culture, and vice-versa. Sometimes, that means that Black artists end up being “cheated” in some way.
The novel is about a strong Black American woman named Opal Jewel who is recruited to form a band with Neville Charles, a white Englishman, during the early 1970s, and specifically ’70s New York City. This was a time when interracial groups such as Sly and the Family Stone were mixing things up to great success. Still, there’s an undercurrent of tension in the book that’s about race. An African American artist — the drummer for Opal & Nev’s group — winds up sacrificing his life in the pursuit of creating music, and at the hands of white people to boot. More on that to come.
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is an unusual story in that it is presented as an oral history. I’d say about 60 percent of the text is strictly quotes verbatim and the rest is either text meant to clarify details or introduce new chapters of the book or is told from the perspective of a journalist named S. Sunny Shelton who is writing a book on the duo. This is commendable from a writing perspective. While I feel that so-called “oral histories” are less journalism and more transcription, it strangely works here in a fictional context. And because it works well is a testament to the skill of the author of this book, Dawnie Walton. It takes a certain kind of talent to speak words onto a page and have different characters have different “voices.” But The Final Revival of Opal & Nev sparkles on the page, and because the voices are so believable — from the performers right down to record executives and producers, and various hangers-on — the book feels authentic. You may be forgiven if you think that Opal & Nev is some obscure proto-punk act that was, at a time, real.
The book is at its most successful when it is chronicling the day-to-day grind of being a rock star, and the various things that people will do to become famous and maintain that fame. Less successful is a family drama subplot: it turns out that Shelton is the daughter of the drummer who died during an Altamont-like concert in New York City when he was mobbed by a biker gang furious over what happened to a Confederate flag brought to the concert. It also turns out that Opal Jewel was his lover (though it should be noted that Opal is not Shelton’s mother). So a large part of the story is about Shelton trying to get to the bottom of her father’s relationship with Ms. Jewel. I don’t know how they practice journalism in the United States, but, in Canada, this would likely be a no-go.
I don’t think any major media outlet in Canada would subsidize a book or even an article if the journalist had publicly revealed that he or she was related in any way to the subjects being interviewed — at least, in most cases, this wouldn’t fly. The media outlet probably wouldn’t want to deal with the public backlash if it was found out that there was a personal connection between an interview subject and an interviewer in a story. The reason there would be any kind of backlash is because it would be perceived by the public at large that the interviewer was too close to the subject or subjects to do anything closely resembling objective reporting. This all means that there’s a question of journalistic ethics in this part of the book that gets glossed over. In any event, regardless of how you feel about the bias of the narrator in her reporting and how this aspect of the plot is dealt with, the sections about Sunny’s family are by and large boring, even though they’re kind of the whole point of the book because they fuel the revelations that determine Opal’s choices in the climax of the novel. (It seems, from the book’s Acknowledgements section, that Walton confesses this angle came out during writer’s workshops. It might have been better if she ignored her mentors’ advice and had written a straight-up rock ’n’ roll lifestyle novel, in my opinion.)
Despite this fault, there is plenty of food for thought in the book about race, naturally. It’s interesting to watch Opal transform from a mediocre singing talent who made up for it with her natural presence in working a room to a spokesperson for a kind of ’70s version of the Black Lives Matter movement. However, at the same time, due to the oral history nature of the book, it’s hard to pinpoint how this transformation takes place — other than to suggest the concert in which her lover was killed may have played a triggering role. The other issue I have with the oral history aspect of the book is that characters walk in and out of the narrative, sometimes never to be heard from again after playing a pivotal role.
However, I’m just kvetching here because The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is one of the most readable and enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time, even though it is a little long and leaves no stone unturned when it comes to its fictitious rock group creation, sometimes to the novel’s detriment. It’s serious and has something to say, and yet is fun without being trashy — a little unlike this other fairly recent novel about ’70s rock bands, Bootleg Stardust. If you want to get a sense of what it was like to be a member of the New York club scene before punk and New Wave broke big, The Final Revival of Opal & Nev will give you a glimpse into that world. This is an epic book, an epic read of proportions, and is epically pleasurable. If you want to know what it is like to be a Black artist — a Black female artist, at that — in a white man’s world, this is the definitive book to read on the subject from a fiction perspective. There’s a lot to chew on with The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, and, at the end of the day, you won’t feel cheated by reading it. It will make you wonder, what if this story was real — and then you’ll realize, in a way, it kinda is.
Dawnie Walton’s The Final Revival of Opal & Nev was published by 37 Ink / Simon & Schuster on March 30, 2021.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
