Torkel “Mac” Macleod is a young Cowboy from southern Alberta. It’s the 1970’s and he is just an ordinary cowboy working ranches, riding lease in season and playing in a small time country-folk band when it is too cold to punch cows. He can ride, rope and treat a calf like any other ordinary cowboy. Mac hates being ordinary!
If he has a special skill, it is training and working with horses. He also has an uncanny ability to attract talented women! Maybe it’s because he treats both horses and women with respect. Maybe it’s because he plays guitar and sings with a powerful voice turning his own lyrics and poetry into things of beauty. Somewhere or somehow he gets it into his thick, Scots-Irish head that he wants to be a Rock Star!
This is a story of how he goes about making his wish come true. It is also about what people will do and how far they will go to fulfill their dreams. Lastly it is about what happens if “Fate” has already made other plans. Throughout and ultimately, it is a story about love and the human condition.
Anja is a pretty Swedish folk singer Mac meets by chance on a trip to Europe in the summer of ’74. Raised on a small backwoods farm by her Grandma the “Mormor”, (known in the region as the “White Witch of Lindstrom Wood”), all Anja wants is to be ordinary. She doesn’t stand a chance! Mac should have known there was much more to this tall, slender girl. He met her inside the stone circle of the “King’s Grave” at Uppsala, the ancient home of Sweden’s Heathen Kings after all. Anja has only one desire. She wants to see that Mac’s wishes come true.
Enter Brigette Kozak or just ‘Gette’ to her friends. A Hungarian musical virtuoso living in Vienne with her brother Peter, she never was ordinary and has no plans to change. Talented and intelligent, she has a past that won’t give her peace. She has convinced herself that nothing good can ever come to her. Even Mac and Anja must be a mistake. She begins to believe that all the drugs available to up and coming Rock Stars are the only way to find the solace she seeks.
The last and youngest member of the band Mac forms is Deedee Hanlon. Hardened by the poor, working class Protestant enclaves of Belfast she is no stranger to violence both sectarian and domestic. Yet still she shines as a Diamond hiding behind her rough Belfast mouth where simple wisdom springs forth amid all the expletives.
These four disparate characters find purpose and joy making music,…and love, together forming a unique bond that seems beyond friendship. Their gift to the world is music and in exchange all they asked is to be allowed to create the music they love. What they want from the world is to be taken for the serious musicians they are and not as some freak show because of their living arrangement. Sadly it is not to be.
“Beware the first long lives his hate. Vengeance is swift but always too late!” What did the “Mormor’s” words to Deedee mean and what did she say to Gette to send her into a spiral of self destruction? Why is Malcolm Forsythe out to destroy the band and why does the millionaire Publisher have such hatred for Mac Macleod? It is possible that they might never know for sure, but there is something sinister about Malcolm Forsythe.
When trouble comes and Mac and his band take refuge with his childhood friends in southern Alberta, will they stand by him? What about his family? Anja’s Grandma warned that they will be tested, that there will be sacrifices and they will have to be strong and stand together through very difficult times. Their only chance of survival will depend on them working together and relying on each other completely.
But it is much more complicated than that. How are they to accomplish their “mission” if after the “accident” Mac does not remember,… if he forgets there ever was a band called ‘Loud-Macleod’? What if he is told that Anja, Gette and Deedee are just figments of a brain damaged mind and his life with them only but some madman’s dream? Malcolm Forsythe’s plan is unfolding. What will happen to Anja, Gette and Deedee, and what must Mac do when he finds out that they once shared their ‘Heathen Hearts’?
*****
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