Let me stop you before you ask the inevitable question. Here she is talking to Sunny about growing up in 1960s Detroit: Walton clearly has a blast here giving distinctive voices and backstories to the throng that populates this novel, but it’s Opal who effortlessly casts everyone else into a back-up role. Sunny pieces together the tale of that pivotal concert - and the shameful secret that’s been hidden at the heart of it for decades - through interviews with a chorus of characters: They range from one of the surviving Bond Brothers to a now-70-year-old woman who worked as a receptionist at Opal and Nev’s old record company.
#Opal and nev cracker#
The Bond Brothers had been waving a Confederate flag around backstage and a fed-up Opal managed to slip the flag under her dress and tie “Old Dixie,” as she puts it, “the last place a … cracker would come looking for it.” Once Opal and Nev went onstage, The Bond Brothers fans’ racist heckling escalated and Opal flipped her costume up so that, as she says, “they could all see … exactly what I thought about them and all their hate.” If you know your rock history, the chaos that results sounds a lot like the 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Altamont. He was killed during that infamous concert when fighting broke out between audience members and the Hell’s Angels type fans of a Southern-fried rock group called The Bond Brothers who were also performing that night. Her father, Jimmy Curtis, was a drummer who had an affair with Opal. Sunny’s interest, particularly in Opal’s story, turns out to be personal.
Afterwards, Opal, who’s African American, naturally bald, and hailed, in her prime, as an “intergalactic showstopper” along the lines of Tina Turner and Merry Clayton, briefly became a punk icon and then faded from view Nev, who’s white and British has gone on to enjoy a long career. They’re an interracial rock duo who struck it big in the early ’70s and were immortalized by a photograph taken of them after a racially fueled riot broke out at one of their performances. Sunny decides that her first big “get” will be a book-length interview with Opal Jewel and Nev Charles. The premise of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is this: In 2015, a journalist named “Sunny” Curtis becomes the first African American editor-in-chief of a Rolling Stone type magazine. I tell you, even many of the fake footnotes in this novel are moving. And, all the glitzy, quick-change narrative styles don’t detract attention from the core emotional power of her story. Walton aspires to so much more in this story about music, race and family secrets that spans five decades.
To say that The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is a sly simulacrum of a rock oral history is to acknowledge only the most obvious of this novel’s achievements. That’s how authentic this odd novel feels, composed, as it is, out of a pandemonium of fictional interviews, footnotes, talk-show transcripts, letters and editor’s notes. But after I started her book, I had to stop and double check to make sure that this wasn’t a true account of a real-life rock duo from the 1970s. I knew from all the buzz about The Final Revival of Opal & Nev that it’s a work of fiction by first-time novelist Dawnie Walton.
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