A GOOD RUSH OF BLOOD by MATT PHILLIPS + THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON by PINK FLOYD
BY TIM P. WALKER
I can’t remember the last time I watched Victor
Fleming’s cherished 1939 film The Wizard
of Oz from start to finish. I want to say the last time I did, Bush the
First was still President and the internet as we know it was still in the womb.
Granted, I do have a DVD of that movie sitting around somewhere, but I have yet
to watch more than the first 43 minutes of it. (Full disclosure: I’ve never
read any of the L. Frank Baum novels on which that film is based. And—get ready
to call for the revocation of my cult geek card—I’ve never seen all of Walter
Murch’s 1985 sequel Return to Oz
either.) Anyway, when I watched this film when I was younger, I’d always get
bored with the first twenty minutes. To watch it now, I’d likely still be bored
with it if I wasn’t watching it on mute with a record playing. (More on that in
a bit.) Dull, drab, boring-ass black and white Kansas—is this really the place
Dorothy spends the rest of the movie fighting to get back to after a tornado
whisks her away to the merry old Technicolor land of Oz? Keep the tumbleweeds
and the dust. I’ll take flying monkeys and pissed-off trees any day of the week.
I bet Creeley Nash would’ve been just as bored with
the first twenty minutes of The Wizard of
Oz as I was. In the opening chapters of Matt Phillips’ novel A Good Rush of Blood (Run Amok, 2023),
Creeley, a woman in her early middle-age, scrapes out a living
on the road running drugs for Animal, a dealer operating out of Portland,
Oregon. When a run sends her to Palm Springs, California, the place that she’d
run away from as a young teenager, she connects with a person from her past and
learns that her estranged mother, a one-time prostitute who operated out of a
seedy motel that both her and Creeley once called home, had been locked up in prison
for over two decades for a murder she claims she didn’t commit. Creeley’s world
gets a little more colorful when she takes it upon herself to look into this
mystery herself. Like Dorothy Gale in The
Wizard of Oz, she collects characters to help her along the
way—a local librarian named Amber, a corrupt local cop named Monty, and a gay
divorcee from out of town named Kimmie. Unlike the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the
Tin Man, none of these characters seem to be in need of anything other than good
times, sex, and anything else they can find to fill the holes in their lives.
There doesn’t seem to be much of
a sense of urgency to this mystery. This rag tag crew bumbles around, asks a
lot of questions where the answers have all but crumbled to dust, and stumbles
across a murder scene or two which may or may not be related to the case. When they're not trying to crack this case, they're hitting the clubs around town and pounding drinks. Creeley even finds time to make an extended side quest to Arizona to meet her
biological father. One thing she doesn’t find the time to do is return a bag
full of money to the drug dealer she works for.
Of course, this creates problems, and occasionally she has to dodge one
of the flying monkeys Animal tasked with collecting this bag of money. Even then, at times it seems
like Creeley and her newfound friends are stuck on the Yellow Brick Road somewhere in
the woods, right around where the forty minute mark of The Wizard of Oz would be. Then again, of course it'll seem that way when the man behind the
curtain is a corpse, everybody knows Emerald City is really only a place for
tourists and rich people, the Munchkins are handy with a cocktail but don’t
have any answers, and the Wicked Witches are either in prison or a thousand
miles away. And if there’s no place like home, then Creeley wouldn’t know a
thing about that either because she’s never really had a place she could call
home.
Okay, you knew where I was going with this, right? I
mean, you have tried it? At the very least you’ve heard of it, I hope. It’s
been a whole thing for thirty years now. Well, for the uninitiated, if you
start playing Pink Floyd’s classic psych-rock opus The Dark Side of the Moon (Harvest, 1973)—an album as iconic in the pantheon of
rock music as The Wizard of Oz is in
film—at the third roar of the MGM lion just before the opening title
credits, it synchs up uncannily with key moments in the first act and a half of The Wizard of Oz. Of course,
the members of Pink Floyd have denied any connections between their album and
the film, explicitly stating that any synchronicity found between the two is purely coincidental. To
put it more bluntly, bassist/singer/songwriter Roger Waters called the
phenomena “bullshit.” To be clear, I’m not arguing otherwise and quite a lot of
the legend doesn’t add up to very much; but coincidence or not, when those cash
registers and that bass line on “Money” kick in as Dorothy steps off her
porch into Munchkinland, both the song and the movie hit a little differently.
Reading A Good
Rush of Blood, we know Creeley Nash is a fan of classic rock, and I’m sure
that she’s logged plenty of hours on the road with Pink Floyd on the
radio while she was running dope for Animal. I’d even bet that at some point in
her life a boyfriend of hers probably sat her down, popped Dark Side of the Moon into a CD player, threw a copy of The Wizard of Oz into a VHS player, lit up a blunt, and told Creeley to prepare to have her mind blown. Of
course, it seemed like Pink Floyd were already out to blow minds without visual
aids or narcotic stimulants when they recorded this album. The tracks are
banded so it sounds like one continuous piece of music, and the lyrical content
takes big swings at a variety of themes—war, greed, madness, death. Through it
all, there’s a pervasive sense of melancholy— the song “Time” is a rumination
on the lost moments of a misspent youth, and “Us and Them,” with its funeral
organ and mournful sax solos, spends its final seconds walking past a dying man in the street. Then
there’s “The Great Gig in the Sky”—four minutes and forty-four seconds of Rick
Wright’s sad piano and Clare Torry’s wordless wailing. By the way, that track,
which ends side one, does synch up nicely with the tornado scene.
Melancholy also hangs over the pages of A Good Rush of Blood as Creeley, in investigating the murder that put her mother behind bars, examines her own life—the family she never knew, the relationships she never nurtured, the roots she could never allow herself to lay down. And no matter how many turns the story takes and how many breaks she gets in the case, you get the sense that there will be no rainbow waiting for her in the final chapters.
In a lot of ways, reading this novel is like watching something on television
with the sound off and a record on. At times it seems like you’re reading a
detective novel, or sometimes you might think that you’re reading a coming of
age novel, but the music in this novel is so much different than what you’d
find in either.
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