Hellhound On His Trail

Dubbed the “rock critic’s rock critic” by Q, Charles Shaar Murray has been writing professionally for practically all of his adult life. A teenage contributor to the notorious Schoolkids issue of Oz magazine in 1970, which saw him involved in the consequent obscenity trial, and one of the star scribes at NME during its ‘70s heyday, he has produced countless magazine articles and penned well-received biographies of Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and John Lee Hooker. However, it’s taken until now for the 60 year-old Englishman to finally realise his lifelong ambition of writing a novel.

“It was something that I always wanted to do, but I could never figure out how it was done,” he explains, talking down the line from his London home. “Eventually these characters who’d been hanging around in my head for ages combined with bits of plot from various uncompleted short stories and other bits and bobs. It basically took a long time to assemble the ingredients and let them gestate, but once that happened the actual first draft of writing took place implausibly quickly.”
It took him just three months to write the first draft of The Hellhound Sample – a heavily hip, immensely readable, and musically knowing tale of bluesmen, rockers, rappers and gangsters.
“It was very weird the speed with which it came together,” he says. “It was almost like a trance experience. I would find that stuff I had plotted in advance wouldn’t happen because the characters didn’t seem to want to. Sometimes a conversation that was supposed to be a simple exchange over a few paragraphs ended up expanding because the characters kept coming through.
“At the end of it, I had this thing – which I then did nothing with for a few months. When I came back to it, and read it again, it was almost like reading something for the first time. I started doing revisions. Then I showed it to a few other people who made suggestions, most of which I incorporated. Basically they spotted where I’d left a hole in the plot or a gap in somebody’s character arc. They sort of interrogated the book and I had to provide answers to their questions.”
The Hellhound Sample tells the story of elderly blues musician James ‘Blue’ Moon, who’s dying of cancer, and desperate to reunite his estranged soul singer daughter and hip hop mogul grandson for one final album. There’s a supernatural twist. A midnight deal Blue unwittingly struck with a mysterious stranger at a Mississippi crossroads many years earlier – à la the Robert Johnson legend – has come back to haunt him.
“There is the ancient myth of the crossroads,” Murray explains. “Any crossroads has immense symbolism and is a powerful metaphor. The whole thing about Robert Johnson started because essentially he was a kid who played really badly, and then he disappeared for a few months and he came back and he was playing great. Of course, the simplest explanation is that he practiced a lot!
“But he showed up at a dance where other people were playing and asked to play during the break. They were going, ‘Oh no, you’ll drive everybody out of the room’. But he was fantastic. So people said he must have sold his soul to the devil. But that was just a way of paying him a compliment, and saying he’s made fantastic progress in a very short time. But it stuck. And because it goes along with the vibe of Johnson’s music – songs like ‘Me And The Devil’ or ‘Hellhound On My Trail’ – the legend built up. And it is a legend, but a very powerful one. And so the ‘what if?’ of my novel is what if it actually did happen?”
While the names of many real-life musicians are scattered through the text, he insists that it’s not a roman à clef. “Because of my journalism and my musical interests, I’ve been able to go to places and meet people who enabled me hopefully to turn the characters from sketchy outlines into reasonably well-rounded fictional individuals. But I wouldn’t recommend anybody read this book with the idea of, ‘Oh wow, I’m gonna find out something about real life people that couldn’t have been printed in a magazine for legal reasons or anything like that’. Nothing that’s in the book should be taken as a reflection of the real lives of any real people.”
Having said that, he admits to using some real-life stars as the initial basis of his characters. For instance, the fictional English blues rock superstar Mick Hudson is partly based on Eric Clapton.
“With Mick, I was thinking a little about Eric Clapton, and also Keith Richards. Clapton especially, when he went into his heroin hermit phase at the end of the ‘60s, and of course he lost a child as well. I didn’t want to make any of the characters sort of thinly disguised portrayals of specific people. Instead I drew on aspects of people I’ve met to round out the characters.”
Although Murray spent a lot of time hanging with John Lee Hooker, he says that the character of James ‘Blue’ Moon isn’t based on him. And while he did steal Hooker’s house for the story, at least he added an extension... and moved it somewhere warmer.
“Blue is not very much like John Lee Hooker. But I did spend a lot of time with Hooker when I was writing my biography of him. And Blue’s house is essentially John Lee’s house, but with a couple of extra rooms added on and in a different location. John Lee used to have a house in a place called Redwood City, which is essentially a suburb of San Francisco, but Venice Beach in LA was a much better location for my story so I physically picked up John Lee’s house, built a couple of extra rooms onto it, and moved it 400 miles and dumped it within walking distance of the ocean.”
Still very much active as a music journalist (he writes a monthly column for Guitarist magazine), Murray is currently midway through writing a sequel to The Hellhound Sample. When not writing journalism or fiction, he sometimes plays with his blues band Crosstown Lightnin’.
Although he doesn’t rate himself particularly highly as a musician, he says that the fact that he occasionally performs music himself really helped him write realistically about music makers. “All the musicians who feature in the novel are brilliant and successful, or they have been at different points in their career at the top of their game, and I’m none of those things,” he laughs. “But nonetheless I found the experience of playing music a vital inspiration for the task of writing about people playing music.
“Even though the characters play better than I ever could in 15 lifetimes, I’ve at least seen occasionally glimpses of the spaces that they inhabit while they play, and I’ve done my best to bring that to the novel. The Hellhound Sample is actually intimately concerned with the process of making music, but hopefully it’s not geeky to the point where non-musicians will have no idea what I’m talking about.”

The Hellhound Sample is published by Headpress