The Whyte Python World Tour: A Novel

by Travis Kennedy

Overview

Rikki Thunder, twenty-two-year-old drummer for the scorching new ’80s metal band Whyte Python, is about to have it all: absurd wealth, global fame, and a dream girlfriend. But an unwitting role as an international spy? That was definitely not part of the plan.

"A rock-n-roll thrill ride... Heavy Metal icon Rikki Thunder's satirical memoir is sweeter than Cherry Pie and better than a prescription from Dr. Feelgood! You need to read it."—Ernest Cline

It’s Los Angeles, 1986, and metal rules the world. For aspiring drummer Rikki Thunder, life is beautiful, just like his hair—even if he is sleeping in a condemned paint store and playing with a band that’s going nowhere. But when Rikki gets a shot to join L.A.’s hottest up-and-coming club band, Whyte Python, his young life takes a mind-blowing turn. Soon he and his new band mates have a hit single rocketing up the charts, Whyte Python is selling out major clubs, and Rikki has a gorgeous girlfriend in the audience and in his life. He literally could not ask for anything more.

But good fortune can be deceiving. As the band gets a deeper taste of success in the US, the late-80’s Cold War is breathing its last gasps around the world. American music is blasting through the Iron Curtain and a youth revolution is taking hold—with a hair band unknowingly playing host to the final battle for the hearts and minds of young people everywhere. Rikki Thunder soon questions the forces that are helping to propel Whyte Python, and he realizes the stakes of his musical journey—to spread peace, love, and epic shredding across the globe—might be far more dangerous than he had ever imagined.

Crafted on the satirical knife-edge between high-suspense and head-banging hilarity, The Whyte Python World Tour is a raucous, uplifting, and refreshing debut. Travis Kennedy’s adrenaline-charged novel is delightfully steeped in ’80s music and cultural nostalgia, delivering one of the most entertaining reads of the year.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385551335
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/24/2025
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

TRAVIS KENNEDY's work has been featured in the Best New England Crime Stories and Best American Mystery Stories anthologies, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He is the Grand Prize Winner of ScreenCraft’s 2021 Cinematic Book Contest for “Sharks in the Valley,” to be published as Welcome to Redemption. He lives in Scarborough, Maine, with his wife and their two children. The Whyte Python World Tour is his debut novel.

Read an Excerpt

1

Okay, I’ll set the scene for you.

The place: the Sunset Strip in L.A.

The year: 1986.

Me: Rikki Thunder, twenty-two years old. Skinny, leather pants, ripped T-shirt, jet-black hair sprayed a mile high.

I was playing drums in a band called Qyksand with some of my buddies from high school. It’s pronounced like “quicksand,” but we spelled it with a y, because spelling stuff wrong is rock ’n’ roll, bro!

I do have to admit that we were kind of copying this other Sunset Strip band, Whyte Python, by doing the y thing. See, those guys were just on the verge of breaking out. If you’re gonna steal something, steal from the winners, right?

Anyway, I thought we were pretty good. Ron Finch was our lead singer, and he had a great scream. There was Sully on guitar, Marty on bass, and yours truly on the sticks and tubs. We covered Mötley Crüe and Ratt, a little Jovi for the ladies, and a few originals that Ron and I wrote together.

But it was seriously dog-eat-dog on the Strip at that point. Metal bands like Van Halen and Mötley were on top of the world, and everybody was doing the same act in their wake. It was all big hair and leather and makeup, everywhere you looked. So it was hard to get noticed if you were new and didn’t have a gimmick.

It was getting close to sunset, and the streets were packed with party animals. I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the Shed, a little dive bar that Qyksand played two nights a week. The owner, Gus Conley, paid us a hundred bucks to play—total, not each—but we had to earn it back for him by getting enough people to pay a cover, so we technically didn’t cost him anything.

If we didn’t break even, we never got to play there again. He charged three bucks at the door, which meant we needed to get at least thirty-four people to come on a show night or we were a failed investment, and some other band who was just starting out got to take our place.

The Shed was one of the shittiest clubs in town. A lot of bands got started there, but a lot of bands got finished there, too. If you couldn’t break even at the Shed, nobody else was going to book you on the Strip. You either had to quit playing music or move to Anaheim, and I don’t know what’s worse. And there were probably fifty other bands who looked like us, trying just as hard to sell out their own clubs so they wouldn’t get stuck playing at the Shed.

Every concert night, the Strip was elbow to elbow with a bunch of other glam band guys handing out flyers. You had to have a shit-ton of flyers. Flyers to hand out, flyers to put on windshields, flyers to staple to telephone poles. And then you needed a whole other stack of flyers to replace the ones some dickhead in another band tore up.

But flyers cost money, and between all the hustling and shredding and partying, we didn’t have the time or life skills to get actual jobs. So we pretty much just hustled here and there.

I sold Italian ices along the Strip. Sully took shifts with a moving company, and he sold weed. Ron’s brother worked at a grocery store, and he paid Ron in cash to clean the bathrooms so he wouldn’t have to do it himself. Marty also sold weed; but sometimes he sold it to Sully, which really cut into our profits.

If we had any money left over from the latest gig, it would go toward flyers. If we had any money left over after buying cereal, beer, and weed, it would go toward flyers.

If we got it right, we would have just enough money to make just enough flyers to bring in just enough people to get another gig at the Shed, so we could buy more flyers for next week.

If we fucked that cycle up anywhere along the way—even one time—we would probably starve to death.

I hope that by now I’ve made it super clear just how important these flyers were.

Now, some of the bigger groups had other tricks to turn out a crowd. They either knew the DJs and could get a plug on the radio, or they had merchandise, or the club they played at would actually promote them with posters and whatnot.

But the real players—the ones who had it made in the shade—had groupies.

Groupies were the most valuable resource on the Sunset Strip. Locking down even a small army of groupies was like owning a gold mine that sometimes gave blow jobs.

The bigger bands had groupies making handmade flyers and T-shirts, flirting with horny dudes, talking the band up all over town, and bringing in fans.

The more loyal groupies would even cook and clean for the band, so they could just focus on thrashing. Those bands didn’t have to do their own marketing at all—which freed up, like, 90 percent of their time to get better at playing music, which meant bigger gigs and cooler clothes, which meant recruiting more groupies. Next thing you know, you’re Poison or Whyte Python, and you’re fighting off record labels.

Me and the guys in Qyksand daydreamed about having groupies all the time. Like on the nights when it was raining and we’d be five people short of our quota, so Marty and Sully would have to beg their parents to come to the show and Ron would sneak his grandmother out of her nursing home.

Or the time Sully’s van blew a tire coming back from the used music equipment store and none of us knew how to change it, and we pined for a team of grease-monkey groupies to pit-crew for us while we walked to the nearest gas station.

Someday! we would promise one another. Someday, if we work hard enough, we’ll have groupies. And then it will be straight to the top.

But we hadn’t earned them yet, so it fell on us to spread out across town on show nights and hand out our own flyers. Now, on the night in question, I was posted up in front of the Shed, shoving paper at strangers and saying, “Come see Qyksand at the Shed? Come see Qyksand at the Shed! Lots of babes!” Just mixing it up, seeing what got people’s attention.

I wasn’t getting very far. Most of the people who bothered to take a flyer just dropped it a few steps later. If I could grab it before somebody else stepped on it, I would pick it up and hand it out again.

I was so focused on getting flyers in hands that I didn’t notice a commotion brewing down the block. Then somebody yelled, “Fight!” And nobody was taking flyers anymore.

Everyone on the street moved at once, becoming a mob as they formed a big circle around whoever was fighting. I couldn’t see who was in the middle, but after a couple of seconds Sully’s head popped up and looked my way.

His eyes were saucers, and he very clearly mouthed the word “Ron.”

Aw, dammit.

2

Here’s what you need to know about Ron Finch:

I met the guy in the band room at school, all the way back in junior high. I was practicing on the drums during study hall when the door banged open and this wild little animal came running in. He was short and skinny, with brown hair down to his shoulders. His face was ghost white, and he was sweating bullets. He slammed the door.

I was like, “What’s up, dude?”

And he was like, “You gotta hide me.”

I told him he could scoot under the risers and nobody would see him. Just as he slipped out of sight, the door banged open again. A gang of dudes came running through, asking if I’d seen a “longhaired little pussy” who had mouthed off to them in the cafeteria. I shrugged. They left.

The kid came out from underneath the risers and wiped tears from his cheeks. Then he puffed up his chest and strutted around the band room, all confident now, and he said that he would’ve beat all of their asses at the same time but he couldn’t get suspended again.

He said his name was Ron, and he asked if I was a good drummer, and who my favorite band was.

His eyes kept darting back at the door while he talked. I could tell he was stalling so he wouldn’t have to go back out into the hallway. But I didn’t really have any friends, and I was psyched to have somebody my age to talk music with. So I just started gabbing.

I talked about Rush and Zep and Creedence, everybody else with big drums. Ron was soaking it all up, and before we knew it the period was almost over. He demanded that I play something on the drums for him, so I played the beginning of “Immigrant Song” by Zeppelin.

His mouth opened in a silly, toothy grin. He said he knew that one, and he started singing. And I shit you not, this little dude sounded exactly like Robert Plant.

I mean, he sounded like Robert Plant if he was thirteen, but still! So I was like, “Dude, we should be in a band,” and he was like, “Dude, we already are.”

That’s Ron.

Now it sounded like he had gotten himself into another one of his jams. I ran toward the scrum and pushed my way into the middle. Sure enough, Little Ron was on the ground and this tall, jacked metal rocker was putting a hurting on him.

“What’s going on?” I said to Sully.

“That guy papered over us,” Sully said.

Aha. In rock-speak, getting papered over meant that the big guy had stapled one of his flyers directly on top of one of ours. It was a dick move, and Ron saw him do it.

Sully didn’t have to tell me what happened next. I had known Ron long enough to fill in the blanks.

“Yo, cut the shit, you guys,” I shouted. I pushed myself in between them, and the big guy punched me right on the back.

It hurt, but it also proved that the guy didn’t really know how to fight. In that situation, he had the advantage. He could’ve punched me in the spleen or chopped my shoulder or at least taken a shot at my head, anything that would actually slow me down. Instead he punched me in the middle of the back, which didn’t really do anything but sting.

I fell into a crouch and brought an elbow up into his stomach. I heard him drop to his knees and let out an “oof,” and I knew I had knocked the wind out of him.

I probably could’ve walked away then. But if there’s one thing I learned growing up, it’s this: once you’re in a fight, you stay in it until it’s over.

“Kick his ass, Rikki!” I heard Sully shout from the crowd. I stood up and leaned over the guy while he was trying to catch his breath. I grabbed a handful of his big mane of hair and the fingers on his right hand, and I bent them backward. He squealed.

“Don’t make me, bro,” I whispered to him.

“I give,” the guy coughed out. “I give.”

I let him go, and I helped him to his feet. Sully and Marty helped Ron up, and he looked okay. “All right, dude. Good on ya,” I said to the stranger, and I smiled as I wiped imaginary dirt off his shoulders. “See, that’s my buddy Ron, and we’re just starting out. You don’t like to get papered over, either, right?”

“I guess not,” he said.

“Who are you playing with?”

“Symphony of Chaos.”

“Right on,” I said. “I heard you guys shred.” The guy grinned a little, all bashful now, and shrugged. Here’s a secret: I had not actually heard that his band shreds. But he’d just gotten humiliated in front of the whole Strip by a skinny kid half his size, so I figured he could use a little boost.

“What time do you go on?”

“Like, ten o’clock,” the guy said.

“Well, all right,” I said. “We go on at six-thirty, over at the Shed. We’ll send everybody your way after, if you take my buddy Ron here around and hang flyers together. Cool?”

“Yeah, cool,” the guy said. “Hey, I remember when we were going on before dinner. Keep scrapping, dude.”

We clasped hands and bro-hugged, cementing a new friendship. I waved Ron over.

“Hey, buddy,” I said. “You got yourself some security.” I patted the big guy on the back, like you might do to a new dog to show your own dog that everything is cool. “Go get those posters up!”

“With this guy?” Ron sneered. His breathing was short and hitched, like he was trying not to cry.

“Better off with friends than enemies, right?” I said.

“Fine,” Ron said. “See you in an hour.” And then he looked at me as if to say, Thank you for saving my ass for the millionth time, Rikki, and I looked at him as if to say, It’s all good, Ron! and off they went.

The crowd split up, and it looked like everything was about to go back to normal. I was feeling pretty good about smoothing things over and making a new ally for the band, until I remembered something bad.

Something really bad.

A cold shock went through my body.

I had dropped all my flyers.

Fuck, dude.

I scrambled through the crowd, back toward my post in front of the Shed, my eyes on the ground. I was praying that I’d see a pile of flyers there, that some of them hadn’t been stepped on or crumpled and could be salvaged.

But I didn’t see them anywhere. The show was in less than two hours. Without those flyers, we had no chance of getting at least thirty-four people to come. We were going to get shit-canned by the smallest club on the Strip.

I had no way of knowing at the time that this very moment was one of the biggest turning points in my life, and everything that followed would be a roller-coaster ride of fame and notoriety and danger that would end with me running for my life in East Germany.

I couldn’t know any of those things at that point, while I stood there with my mouth hanging open. I only knew that Qyksand was done for.

My heart sank. I didn’t know what to do. I finally lifted my eyes from the pavement.

And that was the first time I saw Tawny.

Editorial Reviews

2025-03-22
In 1986, a heavy metal drummer is recruited by the CIA to help topple the Eastern Bloc with the power of rock.

This weird, wry caper is built from bits and pieces of lore from both rock ’n’ roll and the Cold War, not least the persistent rumor that the Scorpions hit “Wind of Change” was secretly written by the CIA. Richard Henderson may be an amiable, unemployable loser during LA’s waking hours, but as Rikki Thunder, he’s channeling his inner John Bonham in a dead-end band going nowhere during the golden age of hair bands. His fortunes change when he meets Tawny Spice, a miniskirt-bedecked vision whose own alter ego is Amanda Price, an undercover CIA agent freshly assigned as a punishment to the agency’s secretive Project Facemelt. The agency’s scheme is to insert Rikki into one of the country’s fastest-rising glam-pop bands and send them on a youth-corrupting tour of the Soviet republics, complete with a pro-democracy anthem, “Tonight, for Tomorrow.” One minor assault later, Rikki is the new drummer in Whyte Python and brothers in arms with the group’s diva-esque lead singer, Davy Bones; closeted and spectral axeman, Buck Sweet; and pleasant-but-dumb bassist, Spencer Dooley. “It’s my understanding that they rock,” says Amanda’s uptight boss, Deputy Director Ed Lonsa, checking his notes. “Yes, they rock hard.” It helps that the other players are even more outlandish—for example, there’s Officer Boone, who kind of digs writing the lyrics, among other suspects in an agency mole hunt. Meanwhile, an East German general plans to cut the Whyte Python world tour short permanently in Berlin. Packed with cameos from heroes of glam metal like Steven Tyler and Bret Michaels, musical montages and lyrics, and a juvenile humor that winks at, rather than worships its subjects, this offbeat gem does for metal dudes whatDaisy Jones & the Six does for the yacht-rock crowd.

A nostalgic, headbanging comedy about rock ’n’ roll refugees.

Kirkus Reviews

The laughs are as big as the mullets in this rollicking story about a hugely successful hair-metal band that’s really a cover for a covert operation in Cold War-era Eastern Europe.”
—People

“A rock ’n’ roll thrill ride. . . . The Whyte Python World Tour feels like a cross between a harrowing episode of Behind the Music and a Roger Moore–era James Bond flick. Heavy metal icon Rikki Thunder’s satirical memoir is sweeter than cherry pie and better than a prescription from Dr. Feelgood! You need to read it.”
—Ernest Cline, bestselling author of Ready Player One

“Travis Kennedy is too fiendishly clever for his own damn good. As he’s perfectly satirizing the hair-metal scene on the very first downbeat, you’re strapping yourself in for a wild ride. . . and suddenly he spikes your drink and cranks the Marshall stack to 20. Outrageous fun. Outrageous twists. Just outrageous, period!”
—Lincoln Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“Sex, thugs, and rock 'n' roll! If Iron Maiden had made a James Bond movie it would have been Travis Kennedy's The Whyte Python World Tour, an antic thriller that spins the shiniest metal videos of the1980s with cliffhanging adventure movie in which an unsuspecting heavy metal band is infiltrated by the CIA and becomes a secret weapon in the final days of the Cold War. Heads are banged, fists raised, and the KGB and Stasi are no match for the power of rock 'n' roll.”
—Peter Ames Carlin, New York Times bestselling author of Bruce and The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.

“The Whye Python World Tour has everything: the glam rock satire of This Is Spinal Tap; the cloak-and-dagger thrills of Bridge of Spies; and a hero you'll want to climb over the hood of a car in a leopard-print bikini for. The only thing missing is a parental advisory sticker: WARNING: THIS BOOK ROCKS HARD.”
—Kat Rosenfield, bestselling author of No One Will Miss Her

“Hilarious, fast-paced, and thoroughly debauched. The Cold War was a lot weirder—and funnier—than we knew.”
—Cory Doctorow, author of Walkaway

"A unique story, told in a unique way. Kennedy makes the late 1980’s come alive on the page.... Filled with color, sights, and sounds. You can almost see yourself walking down Sunset Strip, hearing Poison, Mötley Crüe, or Van Halen pouring out of one of the many clubs you pass by. You experience being in the crowds on the street or in the venues, smell the cigarette smoke and feel the spandex/leather pants.... A fun and wild ride of a book."
—Chicago Review of Books

"Author Travis Kennedy is bringing you the best of hair metal bands with espionage on the side."
—John Scalzi, Whatever

“A heavy metal drummer is recruited by the CIA to help topple the Eastern Bloc with the power of rock.... This offbeat gem does for metal dudes what Daisy Jones & the Six does for the yacht-rock crowd. A nostalgic, headbanging comedy about rock ’n’ roll refugees.”
—Kirkus Reviews

"Kennedy nimbly heightens suspense via numerous twists... without neglecting the story’s ample comic possibilities.... A diverting dive into the paranoid past."
—Publishers Weekly

“Top Secret! meets This is Spinal Tap… GenXers, metalheads, and fans of spy thrillers alike will enjoy this delightfully silly and suspenseful Cold War-era adventure.”
—Booklist

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