Rock & Roll Crash & Burn:
The Driver Story (a memoir)

Maureen Croissant Prairie (Fahrer Entertainment 2012, Trade Paperback) 259 pages, Kindle edition $5.99

The best line in this review will not be mine. I had a few musicians over to the backyard for a barbecue and some live music last Friday night. On the big octagonal picnic table I had a copy of Maureen Croissant Prairie’s book which I was finishing reading when the lads started to arrive. I asked one veteran musician from Thunder Bay, the hometown we all have in common, if he remembered Maureen and the band Driver from the mid-70s. He sort of did and asked, ‘So what’s the book about?’

I told him it was the most harrowing book about music I had ever read. In particular the band’s manager had hooked the players on heroin, beaten them physically and raped Maureen when she was fifteen and three members of the band dies in a car crash while high. My friend finished rolling his cigarette - I said cigarette - lit it, shook his head and said, ‘Another rock and roll success story.’

And that is at the nut of it. Who amongst us has not at least had a fleeting dream of being a rock star, bright lights, big sound, personalized tour buses and hot and cold running girls? Darn few, I’m willing to wager and that is the below-the-surface theme of Prairie’s memoir - dreams either make us live or they kill us.

Driver was a bar band equally based out of Thunder Bay and London Ontario from around 1973 until the fatal car accident in October 1976. They played Thunder Bay in fall through spring while two of the members were Engineering students at Lakehead University, they moved the act south during the inter-session. This was the path for rock bands then, before Idol-type reality shows became the path to stardom. A band played the bars, developed a following, cut some singles and an album and then hoped for radio and a big label to find them. It worked for The Guess Who, Steppenwolf, April Wine and a hundred other bands on those old K-Tel compilation records your Dad has in a milk carton in the basement.

Rock music was also an escape. For Maureen, it was an escape from an abusive, un-loving, pill-addicted mother. She found family, her father aside, in the benevolent and caring members of Driver. She found safety there at the age of 15, becoming Driver’s keyboardist.

She found safety and she found hell. I have not asked Prairie but at some level it must pain her that this memoir, created after over thirty years of trying to escape the pain, has its most arresting character in the person of the band’s manager Tom. She does not give his last name and so neither will I, although a Google search will give it to you. It is the same last name as a prominent UK musician (evil Tom was from the UK) and one would not want any mistake in an incorrect attachment.

The four letter word which most people find to be the dirtiest word in the English language applies to Tom. Yes, he was that and thankfully he died of emphysema in 1994. He beat the band members to a pulp, tied tourniquets to their arms and injected them with morphine or heroin. If they tried to fire him, he would choose one and overdose him; and I’ve already mentioned the rapes.

So the question will be in your mind: why did Driver not fire the bastard? Prairie uses the Stockholm Syndrome metaphor to explain it. I think there is something else implicit in this beautifully written yet weepingly horrible story. This was more of a platoon mentality. To walk away would be to abandon one’s brothers to the horror of the enemy. One can never abandon the family.

Maureen Croissant Prairie has more guts than a hundred war correspondents. They observe the hell and human bonding of war. She lived it and more importantly faced the memory and the blank page and wrote it all down. This book will live with me forever. Put cold and blunt - best book I have ever read by a Northwestern Ontario-based writer. Nothing else is even close in terms of emotional impact. Read it before you buy your kid a guitar. Better yet, buy the kid the guitar and the book.

Hubert Hearn July 12, 2012

Reviewer/Interviewer at American Blues Scene
Reviewer at The San Francisco Book Review
Owner/Operator at By the Book Reviews
Newspaper Columnist and Book Reviewer at Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal
Television Columnist; Book Reviewer at Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal
Television Columnist & Book Reviewer at Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal