[Clive]
Frank Portman (alias Dr Frank) leads an unusual double life. Rock aficonados may know him as the singer-guitarist with the Bay Area group, The Mr T Experience. He’s now also the author of "King Dork", a terrific novel for wordly-wise older teens (and adults too). It’s a hugely readable mix of high school angst and detective story. A film version is said to be in the works. I had a great evening with him not long before the book came out. Sloshing back beers in a grungy San Francisco bar, as a juke box played in the background, I actually started enjoying music I’d normally run miles from.
Here’s his choice:
I first saw Richard Allen’s "Punk Rock" in 1977 on a table in a strip mall bookshop. I was thirteen, stranded in a hopeless suburb yet gathering clandestine data on punk rock wherever I could, so I tended to notice stuff like that. I didn’t buy it at the time, but the cover copy impressed me: "The Punks are on the march – and the Teds are out to nobble them." A punk rock novel, I said. One day I will read you.
Time passed. Twenty years later, I stumbled on the book again in a used bookshop in Sheringham, Norfolk. This time, the cover copy made me laugh. I bought it though. It traveled with me back to California, but remained unread for ten more years, till now.
A reporter goes undercover to write an expos√© on "a day in the life of a punk star," plunges into the seamy world of New Wave rock, and bites off a bit more than he can chew. The punk rock material is simply plugged in to a standard trash-pulp framework, like Michael Avallone with spikes. Richard Allen, I understand, is a pseudonym of one David Moffatt, who churned out tons of the stuff in the seventies. All in all, not a bad way to tie up a loose end in one’s life, though I doubt I’ll be reading another Moffatt title any time soon – unless I manage to find a copy of "Diary of a Female Wrestler", which he wrote under the name Trudi Maxwell. I very much doubt I could resist that.
The Dish 
