It's out of print, but can still be bought at amazon.com.

I could write a review on it, but I'm drained. ( )

There are few novels, and few novelists who can write a Rock ‘n’ Roll novel that has a real love of the subject and insight into the personalities attracted to Rock ‘n’ Roll. There have been a few pretenders like Elmore Leonard in Stay Cool, but he was already middle aged when Elvis broke onto the scene. But Lewis Shiner grew up a child of Rock ‘n’ Roll immersed in the culture and his writing shows a genuine love of the music and an understanding of the characters attracted to Rock ‘n’ Roll from the stars to the bouncers at the clubs.

Say Goodbye is the fictional biography of Laurie Moss a singer/songwriter who put out one album and disappeared. Say Goodbye is one of those tricky stories that gives you the ending first. You have to work your way back to the climatic moment like the movies Sunset Boulevard or Citizen Kane. We follow a rock reporter as he tracks Laurie’s career and tries to piece it together and make sense of it. From her humble beginnings singing at a coffee house open mic night, making a demo tape, putting together a band to hooking up with legendary guitarist Skip Shaw who gives the band the heat that sets fire to Laurie’s lyrics. They get a record deal and a low key tour where the band play to a full house or seven people, or a club where the owners try to stiff the band, it’s the kind of tour that pushes and pulls a band to their boundaries. An annealing process that either fuses the band together or it implodes under the gravity.

Lewis Shiner is one of the most underrated writers, Laurie Moss’ story could be his. His novels have a subtle elegance. You’re drawn by the story. The diversion of a few hours of reading but then you realize more is going on in the story, you see subtexts just under the surface like a Nirvana song of verse chorus verse, raw but beautiful. He’s a writer you should be looking to discover. ( )

Say Goodbye was one of two books I plucked from Bookslut’s “rock novels” article, the other being Matt O’Keefe’s You Think You Hear. Like You Think, Say Goodbye chronicles the cross-country tour of an up-and-coming music act. Both books offer believable enough takes on the trials and tribulations of life on the road, but both also fail to develop the characters enough for the reader to care about them much while reading the book or remember them much after finishing it.

Of the two books, I would say O’Keefe’s novel had the better writing and more interesting story. Where You Think had its band encounter different problems as it crosses America, the intra-band romantic conflict at the center of Shiner’s novel seemed to repeat over and over again without ever coming to a satisfactory resolution.

Say Goodbye also suffered from an awkward story-within-a-story dealing with Laurie Moss’s biographer and his own personal problems. I suppose that this was intended to act as the framework for the main story, but it was used so sporadically and so weakly that it acted more as a distraction. ( )

Lewis Shiner is pretty amazing in general, but his last couple of books have focused on music, and they have been fantastic.

Glimpses made me completely reevaluate my feelings about the Beach Boys, and especially Brian Wilson. It also made me much more interested in Jimi Hendrix, and in the whole sixties milieu in general.

Say Goodbye seems to be in similar territory, but takes place in the present. The main character is writing an (unauthorized) biography of Laurie Moss. As he tracks down various people she knew and played with in L.A., we start to have some of the blanks filled in for us—she’s a musician, plays guitar, was apparently amazing, got a band going from nowhere, and now, apparently, has gone into seclusion. Why, we don’t know, but presumably that’s where the story comes in.

The book is very well written; it feels a lot like a certain kind of rock biography, the kind where the writer tells her subject’s story through telling her own. ( )

http://www.engel-cox.org/text/say_goodbye.html ( )