UMaine alum’s new book keeps on rockin’ in the free world

Can rock and roll change the world? Turns out it can – at least in a new novel by University of Maine alum Travis Kennedy ‘01.

Kennedy’s book is titled The Whyte Python World Tour and was published by Doubleday in late June. Set in 1989, it’s the story of Rikki Thunder, a young rock drummer who winds up joining one of the fastest-rising bands on the Sunset Strip, Whyte Python. However, it turns out that Rikki’s placement in the band is part of a secret government effort to combat communism and end the Cold War.

Intrigued yet? You ought to be.

Bringing together two seemingly-disparate worlds via fiction might seem like a stretch – particularly from a writer who was perhaps just a little too young to be fully aware of those tumultuous times in the moment – but Kennedy (a political science major in his time at UMaine) has crafted a compelling narrative that will delight fans of glam rock AND political intrigue.

Oh yeah, and there’s already a movie in the works. Keep reading to learn more.

(The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.)

Q: You’re a little young to have experienced the events in this book in real time. What inspired you to write this story in particular?

A: Yeah, you know, it’s funny. I mean, I think the fact that I’m a little young for the era is what inspired me to write it. I was maybe eight years old when the events of this story played out. It’s over the course of a couple of years, but I was born in the 1980s, so this is my childhood.

Being a kid through the end of the Cold War was a very black and white experience. It felt like this thing that had existed long before I was born had ended and the good guys had won. It was this celebratory thing that made a huge impression on me. Another thing that had a huge impression on me was these hair bands I was watching on MTV, though as a kid, I probably shouldn’t have been, but the subtext of what they were singing about was going over my head, and I just saw these, like, live action Muppets on the screen. They were wild party animals, and the music was super catchy and fun, and they were just so entertaining. So those impressions of those two things for me as a kid are so specific and so baked in.

And so I had this idea for probably 20 years of a story set in that world. Not a Behind the Music exposé, but something about how these misfits came together and found their superpowers and did something uncommon. And then, you know, “Oh, my God, that was it!” I mean, they were underestimated, they were surprisingly hardworking and clever, and they were willing to live in squalor. In short – these guys would make really good spies. And so this story that I had been building about them, who they were as characters in my head for decades, all of a sudden I had the hook and I couldn’t not write it. I mean, it just took off from there.

Q: What has the general response been so far?

A: The response, I mean, I’m new at this, so I can only kind of gauge what comes my way, but what has been really amazing to me is how much I’ve been seeing and hearing from people all over the place who are finding it in a bookstore, facing out with a note from the bookseller saying “You’ve got to read this one.” The other day, I just got texts from a guy in Nantucket and a guy in Durango, Colorado, within an hour of each other showing the book being featured. It’s surreal to me as a middle-aged teeball coach in Maine that, all of a sudden, this thing that I wrote is everywhere. 


From what my publishers and publicists have said, it’s really unique, the amount of attention and love that this debut from a guy nobody’s ever heard of is getting, especially at the seller level. The bookstores are just really into it. I’ll hear from people through Instagram or through Facebook or whatever saying “This is my favorite book of all time. I didn’t know books could be like this.” Now, I haven’t had any big national reviews or anything, but the kind of one-on-one contact that I’m getting from people everywhere has been so enthusiastic, so heartwarming, to hear that people are connecting with it, the way that I connected with it when I wrote it.

Q: Can you speak to the process of putting this book together? 
How long did it take? And what did your research process look like?

A: A lot of the research had been happening over the course of many years because I just found this category of biography or autobiography that was just fascinating and entertainment to me. By the time I had come around to start writing the book, I’d probably read six different autobiographies and biographies from the era.

But when I sat down to write it, the first draft was probably four months beginning to end. I mean, it really, it really flew. That said, this book is the one thing that I’ve worked the most on in my life, I think. I mean, I had probably put it through eight or nine rounds of revisions before I felt like I could even share it with my agent. From there, she dug in and we did probably six rounds of revisions together, where we focused on a different thing every time and tried to get it just right. And then we took it out to market. It ended up with Jason Kaufman at Doubleday and I can’t imagine anybody else editing it. He was amazing. He has such a great sense of humor and he understood what it needed right away. There were a couple more rounds with him. 


Honestly, when I was going through those last couple of drafts with the copy editors, where they kind of say, this is laid out, don’t really change it because it could mess with the print layout? I still probably made 100 changes per edit. This is such a labor of love to me, and every time I opened it, it put me in a good mood. I enjoyed diving in and editing it. The saddest part of all of this was when they said, okay, it’s done, it’s going to the printer, because it meant I couldn’t work on it anymore.

So: big fast burst to put the whole story down, then edit after edit after edit, making it just right.

Q: How does the saying go? “Art is never finished, only abandoned” – something like that? 


A: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Oh, I could go through it right now and edit it again, but I’m not allowed, so I’m trying to keep still.

Q: Obviously, music is centered here, but geopolitics also play a pretty significant role in the story. Now, you majored in political science here when you were here in Orono, and I know that your career has involved politics, but I wanted to ask if you feel like your studies here contributed in any way to your methodology or the reasons why you chose the time that you chose?

A: Well, I learned how to party at Maine, so that made it in. But no, I mean, honestly, the fun part about the geopolitical stuff and the CIA stuff – because, yes, I worked for Senator King, who’s on the intelligence committee (he told me nothing, to be perfectly clear) – the fun stuff for me was letting go of trying to get that correct and accurate and operating more with a sense of it all, a sense of, say, how did Kid Travis feel at the time? And how does pop culture represent those things in that era? Basically, all the stuff in my brain about that, I’m not going to worry about. I’m going to have fun with it. I wanted to tell a story about this CIA using a hair band to end the Cold War; what I may have learned about the truth of that isn’t as important as the fun I could have making it up from scratch.

Q: I’ve seen the reports about the potential movie deal and whatnot, but I’m guessing that’s all still very much up in the air? I would love to hear about it if you don’t mind.

A: Sure. So this was, I think, somewhat rare – maybe not quite as rare anymore – that we sold the film rights at auction to Paramount at the same time we were selling the publisher rights at auction to Doubleday.

They’ve been an amazing partner. They brought in Gold Day to produce, which is John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein. They make these like great sort of big, fun, adventure comedies like Date Night, the latest Dungeons & Dragons movie. They wrote one of the Spider-Man movies. They get the world that we’re trying to build.

Q: They’re a perfect choice to work on a project like this.

A: Yeah, I think so. And I’ve been involved. We had a lot of conversations about tone and what we were looking for before we started vetting screenwriters and we had a great process where we talked to a lot of writers who came in with different pitches and angles and we picked a guy who I think is going to do an amazing job; we should see a draft soon.
After that, of course, it takes a thousand things to go right to get a movie made and only one thing to go wrong to derail it. So I’m knocking on wood and crossing my fingers every time I talk about it, but it’s been a blast to get it this far and hopefully we’ll keep going.