Sometimes a story forms in a writer’s mind that will not let go. This is what happened with The Unrighteous Brothers. This story of two best friends, their boyish hijinks such as executing the rapture at Camp Meeting, their creative endeavors like forming The Noise rock band to play on Saturday nights and singing in church on Sunday mornings, their losses, sorrows, and joys, their emotional and intellectual questioning of the meaning of life—it all formed in a tangled bundle in my mind and heart, and this story came alive and took order and meaning bit by bit.
This book is their story – the odyssey of Brad and Ronnie, from boyhood in the 1960s to manhood, a coming of age and spiritual maturation. They wrestle with love and sex, rock-and-roll and religion, God’s calling or what seems fit and practical, and illness and death, all set to the backdrop of the music of the ’60s and ’70s.
They, as many of us boomers, eventually arrive at a time in their lives where they are comfortable in open thinking and secure in their questioning and their faith.
This book is a work of fiction. Though I grew up in a fundamentalist church similar to the one depicted in this book, and some of the stories are pulled from experiences from my youth, the church in this story is fictitious and all the characters are from my imagination and do not represent any one person that I’ve ever known or met.