Audiobook9 hours
Nashville Chrome
Written by Rick Bass
Narrated by Debra Monk
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
The fiction of Rick Bass has been honored with O. Henry Awards, Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Nashville Chrome presents Maxine, Bonnie, and Jim Ed Brown, a family act with a hit record sitting atop 1959's country music charts. The world at their feet, lives of success seem to spread out before them like an unending highway. But celebrity has its price, and the times ahead will deliver more than their fair share of bumps in the road.
Author
Rick Bass
RICK BASS’s fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and his memoir, Why I Came West, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
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Reviews for Nashville Chrome
Rating: 3.8103448344827586 out of 5 stars
4/5
29 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Loved it. Didn't realize it was based on real people until I started recognizing some of the songs. Now I have to read the book by Maxine Brown and look at her website.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In the acknowledgments section of this wonderful book(in the advanced reader's copy), the author provides a quote which may best describe the essential meaning to be gleaned from this book, and also serves as a descriptive parallel to the incredible drive of the book's protagonist, Maxine Brown."The book publishing industry might lie at the edge of ruin, but what fun in the still-living"The Browns emerged from their hard-scrabble Arkansas background to become one of country music's most popular and best-selling groups. Their sound, which was hard-earned and built from their rural surroundings (you must read the way that their talents were put to use by their father at the family's sawmill), was blended with a more urbane, vocal group sheen to provide a prototype for the emergence of popular music yet to come.Their success in a pre-rock 'n' roll era was both meteoric and unfortunately, doomed. As much as their incredible success was embraced by the world around them, it was soon eclipsed by their eventual associate and an even more mercurial figure, Elvis Presley.Presley, who entered the Brown's lives, as the world completely changed around them and swept them up in his blazing comet trail, was the long time paramore of the equally fascinating Brown sister, Bonnie Brown, who was able to turn her back on both Elvis and her fleeting fame, virtually unscathed. Unfortunately, the eldest sibling, Maxine, was also the most driven by her pursuit of fame and was unable to relinquish it's fickle, inextricable grip, and as a result, suffered from several personal demons on her way down to a life of near complete anonymity.Like many stories in American mythology, redemption awaits for Maxine, from a very unlikely place. Much like the Bass quote I pulled from his acknowledgements section, I believe that Maxine came to realize a certain peace, without diminishing the inextinguishable flame that resided within her, but relieving her of some of the considerable regrets she had about her life. Even as a fictionalized account, Bass's prose, as spare as it can be, reveals a lot about the incredible, improbable beauty that was the soul of the Brown's music, which was both distinctly American and unconquerably timeless.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I am not able to give an adequate review of how close to fact the book is, but story of the trio and their journey through country music was fascinating.If you haven't read Rick Bass before, you will find it a real joy. He isn't big on dialogue in this book and there isn't any real plot, but the characters and language are captivating. I found myself reading sections over and over to let the words roll in my mind with the images they created. The depth of character in his study was astounding. Maxine, Bonnie, Elvis, and to a lesser extent Jim Ed are multifaceted and engaging. You actually may be a little sad to finish the book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is an absolutely brilliant fictitious portrayal of a very real trio of family singers, The Browns, who during the 50's and early 60's tore up the country music scene only to see their fame quickly diminish as rock 'n roll and the new country music (which they helped usher in) turned their fans attention away. Maxine, the eldest sister who can't stand that their contributions to music aren't as greatly recognized as she thinks they should be, has such a great hunger to relive the group's height of popularity that her requests for a movie to be made of their story prompted Rick Bass to write the book. It doesn't hurt that the stories are so amazing--how close they were to Elvis Presley while he was just beginning, trading off with him for the current number one hit in the charts; touring with the Beatles; and their subsequent fall from fame. Rick Bass's writing style is perfect for the story, an eerily quiet method of description with little conversation that forces the action of memories and regret to drive the plot. I hope Maxine gets her silver screen treatment, because Rick Bass has set it up for a perfect retelling in the silent foreboding mode of Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood".
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Browns (Maxine, Jim Ed and Bonnie) were already a successful country music trio when I began listening to recorded music as a boy. For that reason, it seems that their music has always been part of my life. And even though the siblings broke up the trio decades ago, I continue to listen to Jim Ed perform on, and host, the Grand Ol' Opry radio broadcasts on Nashville radio station WSM. So I thought I knew a little about the Browns. But when I started to read the new Rick Bass novel about the Brown family, "Nashville Chrome," I realized just how little I knew about their personal lives or how the three eldest children became, for a time, so famous. "Nashville Chrome" tells the Browns' story largely through the eyes of the oldest Brown sibling, Maxine. Rick Bass did the research, including visits and interviews with members of the Brown family, and it shows in the story he tells; there is plenty about the family's early days and their relatively brief career as one of the most popular singing groups in the country. But fiction being what it is, it is hard to know just how accurately Bass portrays Maxine's reaction to the breakup of the group and the rather sad efforts she made during the next several decades to make a personal comeback on her own. Is his portrayal of Maxine factually accurate? Was she humiliated by the young employees of her old record label? Would she actually consider making a documentary film directed by a 12-year-old boy with a handheld video camera and a vision of his own? Bass reminds readers just how big the Browns were at their peak. They successfully competed on the charts with a young Elvis Presley and, in fact, topped him for a long time. Their admirers included people like Johnny Cash and the Beatles. They had it all; and they lost it all so quickly that most people today have never heard of them. Country music and pop music fans will appreciate Nashville Chrome for the way that Bass recreates a long gone era, a time when new music stars could still come from nowhere, and often did, catching the imagination of the country in a way that just doesn't happen very often today. What they might not appreciate nearly as much is the way Bass presents his story. "Nashville Chrome" is a novel, but it reads more like a series of magazine articles. The Browns, as individuals, never come to life, and it is never easy to sympathize with any of them - or with anyone else in the novel with the exception, perhaps, of the Brown matriarch. The feeling that the novel was pasted together from previously published works is even stronger because of the repetitiveness of what Bass has to say about the unusual sound developed by the Browns as children. According to Bass, it was simply fated to be this way; fame was the trio's destiny and they could not have avoided it, for better or worse, no matter what they might have done. This might be a great theory - but the reader is beat over the head with it so many times that his eyes begin to glaze over. Bottom line is that the story of the Browns is an intriguing one and "Nashville Chrome" is worth reading for that reason, alone. That the novel is written in such an un-novel-like style is unfortunate. I am with Maxine. The Browns deserve a movie version of their own.Rated at: 3.0