Typically West Coast

Becoming Johnny Nova by David Kupisiewicz

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As a young lad, I was very into the West Coast bands - Jefferson Airplane / Starship, The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver et al and I would have loved to have been out there lazing in the sunshine, dreaming to the music, basking in the casual amiability and maybe even choking on the weed (I have always preferred wine myself, but California has a few gallons of that too).

David Kupisiewicz's 'Becoming Johnny Nova' is a generation later than my fantasies and somewhat less fantastical, but it is still from another world of impromptu mass parties and irritatingly intrusive policing. I didn't even have the over-controlling parents.

You really do get a sense of being there in this life lived on Planet David, surrounded by some very dodgy friends, a very reliable girlfriend who isn't, drugs galore and academic rebellion. Then its all off to the hills - or the streets - to mill, drink, smoke and play, and occasionally to fight.

It is one of those books where you simply pick it up and read another couple of chapters at a time until you have soon finished it, with the thought that you have been living in somebody else's skin.

I don't believe that people are jerks, but I do believe in playing a little bit of rock 'n' roll.

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