PeckerWoodstock
Review of the Titan Books Hard Case Crime paperback edition with reference to the Kindle eBook (both published July 11, 2023).

Ahead of a steep downward grade, Chuck noticed the paint had chipped away from the S on a caution sign that had once read SLOW DOWN. “Check it out, cuz,” he said. “We’re on the Lowdown Road.”
“Shit, Chuck. I’ve known that all along.”

This is one crazed redneck noir road saga about two cousins who hijack a ton of weed and a taco truck with the goal of selling it all for $1 million dollars at the on-location fan fest of Evel Knievel's Snake River Canyon Jump in September 1974. They end up being pursued by a crooked small town sheriff, the marijuana king-pin, and a hoard of outlaw bikers.

Weed dealer Dean and his cousin prison-parolee Chuck end up in all sorts of unlikely situations along the way including a run-in with a family of bootleggers, a 72-ounce steak eating challenge and a barroom/restaurant brawl. They finally arrive at Snake Canyon, which ends up resembling a scene out of Hieronymus Bosch's Hell panel from The Garden of Earthly Delights.

I read Lowdown Road due to its nomination for Best Paperback Original in the 2024 Edgar Awards.

Soundtrack
This book cries out for a playlist, but no one seems to have assembled it yet. The cousins’ journey from Texas to Idaho is accompanied by songs played on the 8-track like Little Feat's Willin', ZZ Top's Waitin’ For the Bus, Neil Young's Revolution Blues and jukebox and radio plays of songs like Barry White's Can't Get Enough Of Your Love and Eric Clapton's I Shot the Sheriff. Arriving at Snake River Canyon there are live cover band renditions of Santana's Evil Ways, Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama and Jimi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower.

Trivia and Links
Lowdown Road is part of the Hard Case Crime (2004-) series of new works, reprints, and posthumous publications of the pulp and noir crime genre founded by authors Charles Ardai and Max Phillips. GR's Listopia is not complete (as of March 2024) and the most current lists of publication can be found at Wikipedia or the Publisher's own Official Site.

You can watch a documentary about the Snake River Canyon Jump on YouTube here.

In my research I came across a 1974 Rolling Stone article by Joe Eszterhas called “King of the Goons.” Long before he penned Showgirls, Eszterhas went full gonzo journalist on Knievel’s Snake River Canyon event, making it sound like something out of a Mad Max movie. Having subsequently read more about the event in Leigh Montville’s definitive biography Evel and the quickie paperback Evel Knievel on Tour by Sheldon Saltman (and viewed clips on YouTube and in the 2015 documentary Being Evel), it seems clear that Snake River was indeed a horrific shitshow, but the account in these pages is fictional. - from the author's Afterword.

Scott Von Doviak's research included reading the article "King of the Goons: Deliver Us From Evel", written about Evel Knievel and the Snake River Canyon Jump by then journalist Joe Eszterhas who wrote for Rolling Stone in 1974 prior to his screenwriting days. The article was written in the so-called "gonzo journalism" style of Hunter S. Thompson so its veracity might be in doubt. The original piece appears to have been completely eradicated from the internet, but an article in the Billings Gazette quotes from it (you have to do a quick screengrab before the paywall comes down) at 40 Years Later, Rolling Stone Article Still Controversial:

Weeks have passed since I left the canyons of the snake. ... My pores have finally been freed of that foul dust and my sun-broken lips have finally shed their deadman’s crust. God damn it, though, I can still hear the howls behind that kiddyland picket fence; a jiggling Jello-like wall of flesh is strung around rocks, cottonwoods and sagebrush. Thousands of voices, hypnotic and obsessed, howl at the sun. ‘Eeeeeeeeeeevel. Eeeeeeeeeeeevel. Knieeeeeeeevel!’ Then with a whoosh the beer-bottle-shaped rocket zooms the blue sky and the cheap picket fences come creaking down and swarms of shrieking bodies are hurtling wildly through the dust storms of their own demented creation toward … the abyss, a few hundred feet from them, where the earth stops and there is nothingness, a headlong suicidal swan dive into the vomit green waters of the forsaken Snake.

( )

“I tried the Boy Scouts when I was a kid. You know the problem with the Boy Scouts? No girls.”

They are now Dean. They are now.

Awesome song playlist in this book! VERY awesome!!!

The cousins' adventures at the Silver Dollar roadhouse might have been my favorite part of the book! Hilarious! And being chased by THREE separate parties that want them dead, makes for a decent tale! All roads lead to the big event and climax - Evel Knievel and his attempt to jump the Snake Canyon River! And, like Evel, not everyone makes it...

“I was the death waiting for you all along.” ( )