Best-known as a prominent 1970s-1990s figure in the Greenwich Village folk music scene, with 14 album releases under his name, Delray Beach-based singer/songwriter Rod MacDonald also has many other career tentacles.
Now 77 years old, he has degrees in history from the University of Virginia and law from Columbia University; currently lectures on music history in the Lifelong Learning programs at Florida Atlantic University’s Jupiter and Boca Raton campuses, and has journalistic experience as a former correspondent for Newsweek.
In 2014, he extended his writing career beyond ongoing songcraft with his first novel, the music-themed The Open Mike. In 2021, MacDonald’s sophomore effort The American Guerillas, likewise issued by Archway Publishing, brought further romance and societal commentary into the mix. And his new, self-published Election Night blends all of those tributaries, including the political ideals already familiar t8o fans of MacDonald’s astute songwriting.
“I never asked anyone else to publish ‘Election Night,’” MacDonald says. “I decided not to wait but to make it available right away due to its timeliness.”
(Full disclosure: Rod MacDonald and I have been bandmates in multiple acts for nearly 25 years, yet still have verbal musical sparring sessions regarding topics like song lyrics and tempos, the validity of hit singles, and whether singing drummers and percussionists have a place in certain musical settings.)
Election Night’s theme is formulaic, yet also timely subject matter in our politically polarized age. As its title and cover art imply (its characters’ wardrobes are color-coded by major American political party affiliation), a nurse named Ashley Beck meets a singer/songwriter named Sam Maripol, who’s performing on the eve of a presidential election. The two then spend a non-sexual night together before discussing politics the day after.
What could possibly go wrong?
MacDonald opens the introductory title chapter with everything seemingly going wrong for Maripol. He’s performing at a South Florida nightclub with his band, forced to play cover songs for a crowd more focused on hearing, and dancing to, familiar material than on his creative original songs. Plus, he’s heard ab2out the election returns, furthering his disgust. MacDonald also pinpoints, without subtlety, which election and presidential administration he’s referring to without mentioning any names.
But Ashley shows up and slowly brightens his mood by buying him a beer at the club, taking him to the beach, and inviting him back to her house. With an early morning shift, she requests that the budding romance be at least temporarily limited to a kiss goodnight. But Sam stays overnight and can’t help but find her living situation, in a carriage house set apart from the beach mansion owned by her father and stepmother, impressive.
Still there after Ashley returns from work, Sam finds out that she thought he was sad the night before, and bought him a beer to cheer him up. When the talk turns to the primary reason for his sorrow, the truth about their different attitudes toward politics comes out before before he leaves — not knowing if they would, or should, ever see each other again.
Short, self-explanatory paragraph titles (“Another Night on the Beach,” “Getting To Know You”) illustrate the star-crossed non-lovers’ path toward expected consummation, complete with Sam meeting Ashley’s conservative father and stepmother, who prove to be a major part of the plot. In between, MacDonald furthers his leftward slant, unveiling some of his well-researched election and investment firm fraud theories by having characters like Terry O’Neill, Sam’s friend and part-time bass player in his band, espouse them.
A former financial consultant who’d worked on Wall Street, Terry recognizes the name of Adam Beck, Ashley’s father, when Sam tells him about meeting him during a dinner that included Ashley and her stepmother Alice. Beck, Terry says, worked his way up to Wall Street from his native Pennsylvania by extorting money. Despite doing jail time for insider trading, he’d become one of the richest men in Palm Beach County, even if he had to buy beachfront property in Delray Beach after Palm Beach wouldn’t have him.
Reo MacGregor, MacDonald’s autobiographical lead character from The Open Mic, eventually reappears to entertain Sam, Ashley and friends at an open-air area nightclub. His lyrical recitations of some of MacDonald’s own politically charged compositions gain the unwanted attention of an armed local militia before police arrive to defuse the situation.
Meanwhile, Sam and Ashley are still taking longer to enter into a sexual relationship than Joel and Maggie from Northern Exposure, the Alaska-set 1990s TV series. The reasons include not only this primary couple’s political differences, but Ashley’s belief in organized religion, plus ill feelings about a previous relationship with a doctor who concealed that he was married. Sam, a patient, church-eschewing spiritualist, has another conversation with Ashley’s father that not only involves a $100,000 bribe to end the relationship, but also phrases that lead Sam to think Beck might have audio and video devices planted in Ashley’s cottage.
“MacDonald is a talented and perceptive writer,” Kirkus Media stated in a recent review, “especially during the assassination subplot, which combines suspense with shrewd psychological nuance and punchy, evocative prose.”
Any more information here, political or romantic, would ruin the element of surprise through too much southern exposure.
Election Night is a window into MacDonald’s political theories, and knowledge of the law, that’s cloaked in an unorthodox love story. Indirect references abound to the likes of Elon Musk, Jeffrey Epstein, Charlie Kirk and beyond, most delivered by Terry rather than Sam, the author’s autobiographical character. For liberals and progressives, the book could largely ring with truth.
For conservatives and right-wingers, it could bring back book-burning rituals. Especially if they make it through all 221 pages, their own literary equivalent of what might seem like four more years.
ELECTION NIGHT, by Roderick Owen MacDonald; self-published, 221 pages. $12.99 in paperback; $17.99 (includes shipping) at rodmacdonald.com.