"Hollywood Dream: The Thunderclap Newman Story" by Mark Ian Wilkerson—Published By Third Man Books

“We were the best worst band. We died but we died in style.” —Speedy Keen, Thunderclap Newman

It’s sweet to think of a stoned Pete Townshend following Andy Newman along the high street, ducking behind cars and trying to get a look at the eccentric pianist who had recently turned up at his college to play an impromptu set. But that’s the level of fascination that The Who’s guitarist held for the man who would soon be dubbed “Thunderclap,” and eventually go on to be part of the trio who would record one indelible single, and a beloved long player before essentially calling it quits.

Eventually Townshend struck up the nerve to introduce himself to Newman, borrowing records off him and striking up a friendship that would influence both men considerably. And how all that happened is spun out across nearly 400 pages of Mark Ian Wilkerson’s “Hollywood Dream, The Thunderclap Newman Story.”

If it seems odd that Wilkerson could put so much ink to this subject, then you haven’t visited a Barnes & Noble lately, where the shelves in the music section are crammed with titles examining how Taylor Swift has “reinvented” pop music, flouncy tour diaries, and the first of who knows how many volumes of Cher’s memoirs. And anyway, how many “no hit wonders” warrant an extensive examination of their career. Scads is the right answer.

Newman was essentially a self-taught player, who worked for the British post office while teaching himself how to overdub music on a pair of reel-to-reel tape decks – a skill he conveyed to Townshend at one point. The second leg of the Thunderclap tripod appeared not long after Townshend survived a terrifying car wreck that convinced him to hire his drummer pal John "Speedy" Keen as his wheelman. Once he had stepped inside The Who’s circle, he carried on sharpening his songwriting skills while crashing at the guitarist’s apartment studio and helping out on demos. Eventually Keen wound up penning the psychedelic opener to 1967’s The Who Sell Out LP – “Armenia City in the Sky.”

More fortuitous perhaps was the appearance of little Jimmy McCulloch, who walked through the doors of The Who’s Track Records office in 1968, holding his mother’s hand and looking for work. McCulloch was essentially a triple threat guitar prodigy – painfully cute, driven and gifted beyond his years. Plus, he may have been the youngest person to have been in attendance at the legendary 14 Hour Technicolor Dream gig held at the Alexandra Palace just before the Summer of Love came into full bloom. It was there that a dead sober Townshend, saw the then 13-year-old McCulloch performing with his band One In A Million.

But all that just gets us a quarter of the way through the story. Eventually those three measures of talent collapsed in around Townshend’s orbit and fused their radically different personalities into a project that suddenly seemed viable. Once Newman prodded The Who’s organization into matching the pension he was leaving behind at the post office, Thunderclap Newman materialized before the superstar guitarist’s eyes.

With some hard work and clever arranging, the trio watched their 1969 debut single “Something In The Air” rocket to number one in the UK just three weeks after its release in May 1969. From there Townshend worked hard to midwife an album’s worth of tracks out of them – while simultaneously tending to his very young family and mixing Tommy. The results, titled Hollywood Dream, arrived in the fall of 1970, a full 17 months after the single – an eon if measured by the Pop calendar of the day. Despite good reviews, there was only marginal hope that it was going to do well in a world that was cozying up to Led Zeppelin II. By mid-1971, despite spurts of touring, it was all over.

McCulloch bolted to the shelter of Paul McCartney’s Wings until addiction claimed his promising career, while Keen carried on a while longer as a solo artist and the producer who helped birth Motorhead’s debut until he died at the premature age of 56. Newman, however, reemerged periodically to carry the Thunderclap banner himself a few more times, and lived to see Tom Petty's brilliant cover of "Something In The Air" tacked onto to his "Greatest Hits" collection.

Wilkerson’s account of all this is fairly detailed throughout the run up to their dissolution, and the details he’s accumulated from insiders like Townshend (who he’s written about at length before…) are considerably impressive. And even if the end of the story isn’t quite as illuminated, a bigger shortcoming here is that all of this is rendered in a reportorial style that can sometimes come off as a touch stilted.

That said these pages more than make the case that, despite their tiny output, the Thunderclaps are more than worthy of investigation. And for that, Wilkerson is to be heartily applauded for getting this bio out there. As The Who’s septuagenarian six-stringer will tell you:

“Andy Newman was a true genius in my opinion, lost in time between the pop music of the 20s and the 30s and that of the 20th century. He often worked miracles to bring those two eras together.”