Photograph by Helena Santos
Author M.L. Rio is our kind of researcher. While writing her novel Hot Wax (Simon & Schuster, Sept. 9), she studied 1,000 concert tours that happened in the 1980s and put together a fictional band’s tour and road trip to drive her book’s plot (literally).
“Starting in about 2021, I did all-told probably four or five coast-to-coast road trips,” she says, “with different routes every time.” She whittled her playlist for the book—1,400 songs!—down to five for us. You’ll find them at the end of this conversation about her process and how road travel comes into play.
How did road trips help shape this book?
Road trips are sort of braided into my DNA. Both of my parents are from California. My mom's a foreign service brat, so she grew up in Asia. We lived all over the place—New York, Miami, North Carolina. And I traveled a lot in college for various study-abroad opportunities.
Before I was old enough to drive, I spent a lot of time sitting in the back seat with my headphones on. So, music and road trips and travel were always very inseparable for me. Then I got more into music writing in a more serious way and started spending time with artists on the road and traveling to see concerts.
I had always wanted to do a road-trip, concert-tour novel. It came out of this swirl of music and travel that seemed like such a natural kind of thing to bring together.
I looked at 1,000 concert tours that happened in the ’80s and put together a road trip for a band that I created for the book. Then I took the road trips myself, because I’m a very physical writer. I've got to be boots on the ground, sensory experience, eavesdropping on local conversation.
Can you share a few road trip highlights from your book research?
In the middle of the first big road trip dedicated to book research, I did this wonderful writers retreat out in the Middle of Nowhere, New Mexico called Turning Points, run by my friend Courtney Maum. I eventually had to get to California. I sat down with a guy named Daniel, who is from New Mexico and the chef at the retreat. New Mexico is my favorite road trip state by a long shot. I have no personal connection there other than being my favorite place to drive. Every turn you take, it's just jaw-dropping.
I was leaving the Albuquerque area and asked Daniel what route he would take. He suggested I go north to Durango. You drive through all of these tiny towns that are mostly part of Native American reservations. You have to slow down and drive at like 25 miles an hour. But these beautiful small towns are surrounded by enormous red and pink rock formations, and then just a whole lot of nothing.
I stopped at Tinkertown, which is a museum on the Turquoise Trail that Daniel recommended—kitsch Americana from the dawn of time to present day, arranged in an absolutely immersive kind of art project experience. I love a small, weird niche museum. Then I went to a flea market in Durango, the kind of thing I love about a road trip, and picked up some records. I bought a vintage cowboy coat from a guy selling a bunch of stuff out of a short bus. That's exactly the kind of thing that fuels Hot Wax. One of the characters is a vintage seller. Then I drove through Mesa Verde. I ended up making a stop in Valley of Fire. I was really interested in seeing all of the state and national parks I could. It’s wild that Valley of Fire is like 15 minutes from Vegas, and it's just gorgeous. It's like being on the surface of Mars, all this kind of spectacular red rock.
I went along the South rim of Zion and very slowly eventually made my way back to Los Angeles.
This all sounds amazing. I know we’re barely scratching the surface of all the road trips you’ve taken. But is there anything else you’d like us to know about Hot Wax?
I think it's a great book to take with you on a road trip, and it might point you towards some interesting things. We haven't touched ghost towns, which were a big part of the process. I pretty much drove to every ghost town I could get to that was accessible in the Southwest. That's a big part of the book. When you say ghost town, people might think of Tombstone and Terlingua, where it's basically a tourist stop now. And those places are fun. I've been to both of them. I actually spent a very weird afternoon wandering around Tombstone on the phone with my agent trying to figure out what we were going to call this book. I vividly remember shootouts with the O.K. Corral going on behind me as I was having the conversation.
But most of what I would call real ghost towns are interesting portraits in American history. They remind me of William Eggleston's photographs. Mundane things that take on a strange, haunted quality over time. In one town I noticed a tricycle that still had a bell on the handlebar kind of half sunk into the sand outside a house. It makes you wonder: What happened here? What's left and what did the people take with them?
I think for anyone with an exploratory instinct or an interest in history—especially if you're writing about this huge country with such varied experience—seeing the towns that haven't survived is really interesting. And you gotta be careful, because sometimes there are still people there. I've been chased off property, and I got shot at once. Which was exciting, but I promise I was just getting a feel for the place!
Oh wow, yikes! So with Hot Wax coming out now, do you have another book cooking?
Yeah, we've got irons in the fire. We sold Hot Wax to Simon & Schuster as part of a two-book deal, which was a real vote of confidence. It's still very early stages. We're going back out on tour with Hot Wax in the fall and I am again driving myself because it would just feel wrong to do it any other way with this particular book. I prefer to drive myself on tour. I love being in the car, because I have my own music and I can listen to it at a deafening volume, and that's a really key part of my brainstorming process when I'm really early in the stages of kind of putting a book together. It's a lot of making playlists and listening to music that feels like the atmosphere of the book. I sometimes live in that discovery space for months or even years at a time. So I imagine a lot of Hot Wax tour will be me on these 8-9 hour drives just listening to music to get myself hyped up for the events and to think about the next project that I want to write.
M.L. Rio’s Five-Song Road Trip Playlist
“Don’t Look Back,” The Remains
“They were a garage rock band from the ’60s out of Boston. ‘Don't Look Back’ is one of my go-to, I'm-getting-the-hell-out-of-town driving songs.”
“The Passenger,” Susie and the Banshees
“Iggy and the Stooges come up a number of times in Hot Wax, but everyone's heard that version of ‘The Passenger.’ This is a great cover. Even Iggy Pop was like, ‘I wish I had thought of that thing with the brass.’ It’s fantastic for a road trip because it's got this big bombastic sound to it.”
“Brand New Cadillac,” The Clash
“It’s actually a song about somebody else driving off in a great car and leaving you behind. But it has this wonderful driving rhythm that is classic Clash. It’s got that edge of Jamaican undertone that you find in a lot of their music, which is really surprising for something so punk-forward. It’s a great pedal-to-the-metal driving tune.”
“I have to just recommend Gun Club as a road trip band in general. They have so many songs that are about travel and driving. They're two big albums are The Las Vegas Story and Miami, so all of their records are kind of interested in this idea of place and driving around the country.”
“Railroad Steel,” The Georgia Satellites (from live album Lightning in a Bottle)
“Specifically the live cut from Cleveland in 1988. It’s the perfect song for when you finally get out of traffic and have open highway ahead of you.”
