Black Dogs Review

Black Dogs: The Possibly True Story of Classic Rock’s Greatest Robbery. While the book’s full title may not be concise, it’ll send you into its pages with a pretty clear idea of what to expect. Even the most straight-laced of us have probably at least once or twice pondered the idea of flirting with danger. We love the antihero, the guy who’s facing insurmountable odds and risking his life as he knows it (and possibly his life, period), but for the wrong reasons. And no matter how much we know, deep down, that those reasons are “wrong”, we really really hope that he gets away with it. It’s why we love movies like Bonnie and Clyde, Heat, or The Usual Suspects. It’s why we love fictional TV shows like Breaking Bad or Weeds, not to mention nonfictional TV reenactments of newsworthy crimes: usually either a string of high risk heists from a 21st century Dillinger, or a one-in-a-million Perfect Crime masterminded by a quiet, unassuming everyman. And though it’s not always as easy for a book to capture your full attention as a movie or a TV show, Jason Buhrmester’s Black Dogs plows forward, just as tense and compelling as any of those movies or shows, if not more.

The title claims that the story is “possibly true”. Truthfully, it probably isn’t. At least, not the overall plot. Does the author really know what happened to that $203,000 that went missing from Led Zeppelin in New York? Probably not. Did a decent amount of the specific events and conversations within the story probably happen to the author and/or his friends at some point, under different circumstances? Certainly not! (Wink wink). It’s up to you to decide what is and isn’t true. If any of this stuff really happened, the names and places have been changed to protect the guilty. Really, it doesn’t matter how that money got stolen, or if Jason Buhrmester didn’t even hear out about it until years after it happened. Whatever the truth is, Black Dogs is probably better.

The story centers around four people: Patrick, the first-person narrator who seems to enjoy hating music more than he enjoys enjoying it. Pete, who despises the old nickname that Patrick refuses to stop calling him by: “Frenchy”. Keith, a remarkably adept car stereo thief who sells radios to the very people he later rips them off of, and who seems to be the most impoverished of the four. And Alex, who at the beginning of the story is just coming off an eight-month prison stretch that Patrick is partially at fault for. However, more at fault than Patrick is Alex’s uncle Danny, a sleazy, fast-talking, slow-thinking screw-up that Patrick loves to hate. You will too.

The four of them have spent most of their lives perfecting their various thievery techniques, when they’re not getting stoned or drunk and talking about music. They’ve been pretty successful through most of their escapades, but still, Ocean’s Eleven they ain’t. While working backstage catering at a Led Zeppelin concert, Patrick is struck with the idea for the score of a lifetime: an opportunity to steal the thousands and thousands of dollars that the biggest band in the world rakes in from a show. To pull it off, however, they’ll need an in to talk to Jimmy Page and keep Richard Cole, Zeppelin’s tour manager, distracted. On top of that, they’ll need to avoid Peter Grant, Zeppelin’s hardened, humorless, terrifying gorilla of a manager. The four think they’ve struck gold when they get the idea to approach Cole under the pretense of selling Page a guitar. But when Page doesn’t want what they have to offer, Frenchy panics and throws a desperate bargaining chip: he claims to have a 1958 Gibson Les Paul. This gets Jimmy’s attention, and he offers to buy it from them if they can bring it to him in New York. Trouble is, there’s only one ’58 Les Paul in town, and they’ll need to steal it from a pawn shop owned by the leader of the Holy Ghosts, a thinly veiled doppelgänger of the Hell’s Angels that somehow sound twice as terrifying as their real-life counterpart. On top of that, they’ll need extra help to break into the shop, and the only person with the skills they need just happens to be the infamous uncle Danny.

But all this doesn’t even begin to sum up the endless twists and turns of the story, which soon spirals out of control in a series of Catch 22s that would make the Coen Brothers cream their pants. It’s got action. It’s got suspense. It’s got betrayal. It’s got parties. It’s got fights. It’s even got a little obligatory romance, though somehow it only takes up as much of the story as it needs to. But most of all, it’s got music, and plenty of it. There are times when you won’t be sure if you’re reading a heist story or a Lester Bangs article. And Zeppelin fans be warned: the narrator loves to hate on them just as much as uncle Danny, and relishes every chance he gets to tear them a new one. But again, no one can tell you you’re supposed to like these guys. Hell, the reason Alex went to jail in the first place was for breaking into his own girlfriend’s house. Once again, Ocean’s Eleven they ain’t. But good storytellers they are, and if you’re willing to put aside those pesky notions of “right” and “wrong”, you’ll hang fast to the words of this book like the notes of your favorite rock and roll album.