In the fall of 1975, America is in something like the half-slumber of a Saturday afternoon nap after a rough week. Leisure suits are everywhere, even on “The Tonight Show.” Bell-bottoms are wide, sideburns are long, and whatever sexual inhibitions America had seem to have dissolved in alcohol.

Big Sioux Valley, Iowa would be the most somnolent place in the sleepy country were it not for the Great Plains Motel, whose lounge is referred to by regulars as the GP.

The GP is a home-away-from-home for long-haul truckers, road musicians, salesmen, and the local women who crowd the bar for one-dollar well drinks on Wednesdays. On the periphery are the town’s residents who work hard for a living, including the luggers, cutters, and pullers at the town’s meat packing plant.

The County Line Express rolls into the GP for an open-ended gig, with Carl, a good-looking but inexperienced guitar player; Brandon, a road-weary drummer; and Ronnie Lee, a semi-famous Cajun country singer sought by the IRS and his ex-wife’s attorneys, who now finds Big Sioux Valley’s remoteness to his liking.

Also livening up the GP is Jerilyn, an out-of-work nurse with skills she didn’t learn in nursing school. Jerilyn’s actions and intentions become an issue at the GP after someone steals two cans of pharmaceutical amphetamine from the cab of a trucker during a party she attended. When another trucker asks a group of packers to help find the drugs, the delicate balancing act that is the GP – even on a slow night – begins to teeter.

At the center of Angels of the Great Plains Motel are lessons learned by Carl, and by Grace, the battered ex-wife of a meat packer, whose life turns out not to be the dead end she thought it was. Around them swirls the trouble that follows from mixing perpetual travelers with people who don’t expect to be going anywhere any time soon.

The Great Plains Motel is where all of them meet, and the results – during two weeks in November of 1975 – are explosive.

Warren Miller

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