1960s

The 1960s are evoked less as a historical setting than as a musical inheritance: a period of blood rock that follows Will Radley from childhood into his adult life and shapes the stories he tells Clara Radley. Its songs and performers make the decade a vivid cultural memory, while the novel leaves the boundary between vampire legend and performance deliberately unstable.

Music as a Cultural Memory

Will associates the period with the music his and Peter Radley’s father played when the brothers were infants. He still favors that sound years later: listening to Jim Morrison, Hendrix, the other Morrison, and the Stones, he treats Jim Morrison as the closest rival to Lord Byron and beats time to Twentieth Century Fox on his steering wheel. His recollections join several generations of musical fame to the vampires’ own past without presenting the decade as a fully reconstructed historical backdrop.

The connection reaches back to the barge, where Will danced with his father at seven to Hendrix’s Crosstown Traffic. When Clara later listens to old guitar music that Will recommended, she laughs at how much she dislikes it; he responds by defending Hendrix’s talent and recalling his father’s stories. The contrast is affectionate but clear: the music that carries Will’s childhood and family memories does not automatically become Clara’s taste.

Will’s Stories of Blood Rock

In explaining Hendrix to Clara, Will describes him as a vampire who played guitar with his fangs onstage, supposedly without the human audience noticing. He says listeners attributed the purple haze to the drugs they were taking, and extends the story to Prince, whom he claims abstained and became a Jehovah’s Witness, while Hendrix faked his death and continued as Joe Hayes. Will further claims that Hayes runs a blood-rock club called Ladyland in Portland, Oregon. These are presented as Will’s exuberant account, not as independently confirmed historical facts; the tale makes popular music a vehicle for vampire lore.

His recollections also resist a simple distinction between celebrated human artists and hidden vampire performers. Will doubts the theory that Jim Morrison was Byron’s chosen 1960s identity, yet moves freely among Byron, the Morrisons, Hendrix, and the Stones as figures in the same musical imagination. The period thus appears as a repertoire of names and sounds through which he interprets both celebrity and vampire culture.

Inheritance and Continuity

The decade’s importance lies in how its music persists across different moments in Will’s life: first as the sound of his father on the barge, then as music Will continues to enjoy, and later as something he introduces to Clara. The recollections make the past intimate rather than remote. At the same time, the music’s repeated association with blood and vampire performers turns nostalgia into a means of sustaining the family’s supernatural history. For Will, the 1960s remain audible in the present, even when the next generation hears only an old style it does not share.