When Danny Dowd - a spoiled, upper-class white kid - is kicked out of college AGAIN, his father decides to teach him that not everyone is born with a silver spoon, not to mention a new BMW and stock options. Sentenced to spend the summer performing manual labor at a shipyard, Danny comes face to face with people from all walks of life, including Clement Buchman, a bluesmen who claims to be the bastard son of Jimi Hendrix. At summer's end, when Danny planned to begin the semester at a new college, he opts instead to continue working at the shipyards; eventually, he joins Clement's band, The Blues Flames. Just before the Blue Flames compete in a battle-of-the-bands sponsored by a local radio station, an event that could change their lives, the police arrest their lead singer. Frustrated, their dreams dashed, Clement and George kidnap the radio station's mascot, a twenty-foot blow-up figure called "Krazee Mouse". Thus begins a year that will lead to love, drugs, music, more drugs, and finally, a strange sort of catharsis in the middle of the Mississippi River.