Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty

Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty by Tim Sandlin

Category: Novel Grade: C+

Great premise for a book. The year is 2022 and the action takes place in Mission Pescadero, a retirement home. If you do the math, you'll see that the residents are, well, me and my fellow baby boomers. Since its California, there's a real mix of people all divided up by what they were up to the 60s. There's the Haight-Ashbury table (peace and love), the Haight-Ashbury table (drugs and revolution), the Berkeley table, the mid-West table, ... You get the drift. Even though the folks are "getting on in years", there's still lots of sex, drugs and rock and roll.

And, of course, there's "the man" - in this case, Alexandra, the director, who wants to keep everything quiet and controlled and will send any unruly resident, "through the tunnel" to the Nursing Care wing, where they are drugged in to oblivion. And there's "the pig" - in the case, Cyrus Monk, a local police lieutenant who believe his Vietnam vet father was driven to suicide by the hippies, represented in force by the residents of Pescadero. There's the inevitable revolution and takeover, the inevitable LSD spiked punch, the inevitable...

You get the picture -- pretty predictable. I had high hopes for this and it wasn't terrible. Just wasn't particularly good either.