Tim Kirk is the author of the new novel All His Damned Mother's Sons. He also has written the book The Feral Boy Who Lives in Griffith Park, and is a director and producer.
Q: What inspired you to write All His Damned Mother’s Sons?
A: Josh Lawson. You'll find Josh on the dedication page of my novel. Josh was a unique man, truly one of a kind, a raconteur, filmmaker, actor, writer and the hardest working man I’ve ever known.
At some point before I met him, Josh had written a screed of a screenplay about a washed-up country singer who only sang Eddie Noack’s songs. It’s a good thing it never got made because Eddie’s family would have come after Josh because he writes Eddie as a pervert and a woman killer. But it was a crazy cool script!!
It made me want to have my own singer, but a rock and roller. I'd read a lot of bios and I'd been in a few bands. So I created Billy Clover. Billy was my subject in a couple of stories in a collection of short stories called The Feral Boy Who Lives in Griffith Park.
Billy had left a small town in Central California with a guitar at twelve in 1949, arriving in Los Angeles just in time for the fad of Western Swing. He gets jobs as extras in Westerns, playing in bars and finally gets a steady gig as a backup player at the country music club, the Riverside Rancho.
I ultimately wanted him to have his own book and to have an arc like Elvis had... I was sorry to do it, but I had to kill Elvis - which I did on page one, allowing Billy to have Elvis's career from 1959 to 1973, which is the how far the book goes.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: Since the book scans from the late ‘50s to the late ‘70s, I had to be on my toes with the fads and fashions. And especially the music. That was the most fun!
I also used graphics to break up the years. Instead of a banner with the number of the years to alert the reader that now we were in 1962, for example, I dropped in a TV Guide page displaying a Billy Clover TV show premiere! I had a lot of fun -- stuff like back pages of Boys’ Life, Variety gossip pages and Rolling Stone reviews.
I am always surprised to find that a glimpse of an image can create a moment in time. These jewels described many of my periods in time without dragging out long paragraphs.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The book title took a wild ride to bookshelf. The whole time I was writing, I had "The Last of the Singing Cowboys" in my head. My publisher, rightly, pointed out that none of my characters where cowboys and the book was not a Western.
As the book drop closed in, I went to my favorite Shakespeare plays for inspiration. However, it was a line from a John Wayne movie that did it. One night it just popped into my mind. In Big Jake, Wayne twirls his rifle and lists the men he'll kill. "The mother's sons!" So, it wasn't William Shakespeare that inspired me, it was The Duke.
For me, the title, "All His Damned Mother’s Sons," signifies pure damnation. You are in a lot of trouble when someone hates you down to the very center of things - the fact that you have a mother.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope that they feel eerie moments of distraction when something goes wrong in the background of the main drive of the story. That's because Elvis is no longer there. He's supposed to be there in 1959, in 1962, in 1967, etc. I hope these moments can jump out on you as you follow the real story. It's a trip when it happens.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am deep in the second draft of a new novel. Our hero is a ghost who lives in a hotel in Hollywood in 1995. I chose '95 because that's the year that they gave up on shooting Waterworld in Hawaii and were shooting in a large water tank in a stage on Universal. They had to hire all the stuntmen they could find and put them up in this hotel. Along with a bunch of wannabe starlets and wannabe screenwriters. And a demon.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I have made new films from already existing old films. I have actors preform dialogue over these old films, thus creating another film with an entirely different plot. Sort of a scripted dramatic MST 3K.
So far, I have directed and co-written Director’s Commentary: Terror of Frankenstein with Clu Gulager & Leon Vitali, and Sex Madness Revealed with Patton Oswalt & Rob Zabreckey. These kind of things come in trilogies, don't they? I need to make a third. I'm working on it...
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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