In 1976, during a “troubled night of fever dreams,” then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush had a vision of how the U.S. could finally take down Cuban leader Fidel Castro. With a 103-degree temperature, “Poppy” Bush staggered into Langley and demanded an emergency meeting. His idea was to send Maine country singer Dick Curless and “Those hippies who play the song Bar likes” (Hall & Oates) to the island to topple its socialist regime through music. The plan never came to fruition, but for years afterward, the joke around CIA headquarters was that if you slipped up, you might end up on a secret mission behind the Iron Curtain rolling joints for The Alan Parsons Project.
None of that is true, but that’s the background of Maine author Travis Kennedy’s new novel, The Whyte Python World Tour, about a group of scrawny misfits turned glam-metal superstars who unwittingly become a vehicle for the CIA to overthrow Soviet dictatorships in the Eastern Bloc.
The story begins in 1986 in Los Angeles, where a glam-rock band named Qyksand is living in a condemned paint store and surviving on cereal, beer and weed. They flyer the city to generate enough buzz to keep their gig at a bottom-tier club, and occasionally bring in elderly relatives to meet the venue’s mandatory attendance figure.
Our hero is 22-year-old drummer Rikki Thunder, an earnest yet naive former foster kid turned sexy bad-boy rocker who shoots to stardom after a “chance” meeting with bodacious blond bombshell Tawny Spice (a.k.a. CIA agent Amanda Price). As her classified profile states, Price is a “quick thinker, a capable manager of assets” with a body that enables her to “thrive in a culture that values, above all else, blond females who appear welcoming of an opportunity to crawl across the hood of a red Corvette attired in nothing more than an animal-print bikini.”
With some further CIA manipulation, Thunder finds himself behind the drum kit of the hottest rock band in America, the spandex-clad Whyte Python. With their new album atop the charts (also thanks to the CIA), Whyte Python tours Eastern Europe, rockin’ the Bloc and inspiring millions of youth to fight for their right to party as cracks emerge and spread throughout the Soviet empire.
Whyte Python is a hilarious thriller that combines spy intrigue, bro hugs, zippy guitar riffs, beer and boobs, like a blend of VH1’s Behind the Music, the ’80s Val Kilmer comedy Top Secret! and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. The book is full of laugh-out-loud moments, like when Poison frontman Bret Michaels appears as a Mr. Miyagi-like sensei imparting wisdom on the subject of banging groupies, and it contains numerous Maine references — some obvious, others less so, like Thunder’s musical mentor, a plumber who shares the name of a certain colorful former Maine legislator.
Paramount Pictures has greenlit a film version of this fast-paced rock ’n’ roll comedy, and like the novel’s protagonist, Kennedy’s life has significantly changed since the book was published by Doubleday in June. The author, who grew up in Buxton and now lives in Scarborough, previously worked for Democrats in the Maine Legislature and for Sen. Angus King. Most recently, he was Director of Public Affairs for Cumberland County’s government. Four days before the book’s launch, he left his day job for the writing life.
“It feels like this crazy kind of creative renaissance that I’m enjoying right now, because I’ve been trying to work on a book for years now, but I always had to work and raise a family,” Kennedy told The Bollard. “After you have dinner and put your kids to bed, you just want to relax. It’s hard to ramp up that creative engine.”
Whyte Python is Kennedy’s sixth book, but the only one published by a major house so far. He recalled squeezing in writing time early in the morning or late at night — even composing parts of this book on his phone in his kids’ bedroom while they slept.
He started writing seriously six years ago, while sitting by his late father’s hospital bed as he was dying of cancer. “He got through like ten chapters and he died before I finished it, unfortunately,” Kennedy said, referring to Python. “But that was enough to get me to keep going.”
Kennedy was in elementary school during the heyday of hair-metal bands like Mötley Crüe, Quiet Riot and Ratt, and he remembers his early impression of them as “feral Muppets.” The idea of writing a novel about a band of misfit rockers saving the world came to him after reading a lot of rock biographies.
“Most of the time, they were like these scrawny kids who got kicked out of their houses, didn’t graduate high school, had crappy jobs and just weren’t going anywhere,” he said of those rock stars. “But they were good at music, so when they found each other, it was like they unlocked these superpowers.”
The plot came together after Kennedy heard New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe’s podcast investigation into a rumor that the Scorpions’ 1990 power ballad “Wind of Change” was written by the CIA. (Scorpions singer Klaus Meine denies this, but of course he would.)
With his new book getting rave reviews and Hollywood on the horizon, Kennedy is currently working on the release of another novel, as well as other creative projects. He said he couldn’t have made it without the support and encouragement of Maine’s literary community.
“A person at a bookstore recently told me she had recently moved here from Florida, and that there’s nowhere on earth like this state in terms of how hard they support their artists,” said Kennedy. “I think we boost each other up here, and that’s so necessary, because writing can be such a lonely thing.”
For more about Kennedy and his new book, visit traviskennedy.com.
