Once A King, Now A Prince:

When ZZ Top Walked Into Our World A real rock autobiography is never only about the stars once they become legends. It is about the point before the mythology hardens, when the musicians are still flesh and blood, hauling equipment, fighting for audiences, and moving through the chaos of the music business one night at a time. England had already become my home away from home, and American Talent International, Ltd. was expanding rapidly on both sides of the Atlantic. New artists were arriving constantly, and the roster was becoming a collision of rock, soul, funk, progressive music, and Southern bands that carried a completely different kind of energy. One of the most important additions to the agency came through Bill Hall, who had been working in Macon, Georgia, for a regional agency, Paragon Artists. Bill arrived carrying serious Southern rock credibility, and through his close relationship with Bill Ham,…

You Don’t Know Diddley From Diddy I ran into an old acquaintance who started talking about today’s rock and roll music as though history had started last Tuesday. After listening longer than I cared to, I finally told him squarely, “You don’t know Diddley!” He looked at me as if I had just thrown a cymbal at his head, so I explained myself. “You don’t know Diddley from Diddy,” I said, and what I meant was that he did not know squat about rock autobiographies, where the music came from, or the roots that fed the whole wild tree. Rock Autobiographies Begin At The Root As Jocko used to say on his 1950s Rocket Ship Show in New York City, “It’s not the flower, but the root.” The root of rock autobiographies began in the fifties, when the original rock and roll exploded out of radios, theaters, jukeboxes, and teenage…

I spent years inside the music business surrounded by artists, managers, promoters, agents, and people whose public image often had very little to do with their real lives. That is one reason I have always been drawn toward the best memoirs by celebrities. The strongest ones are not polished advertisements for fame. They leave fingerprints on the page. They talk honestly about ambition, fear, survival, betrayal, addiction, loneliness, and the emotional cost of living inside a public identity. That is why readers still search for authentic stories about musicians, actors, entertainers, and public figures who lived through chaos instead of hiding it behind publicists and ghostwritten perfection. The public image may sell the book, but honesty is what people remember. As I like to tell my readers of Once A King, Now A Prince, I let it all hang loose, warts and all. The Celebrity Memoir That Tells The Truth…

It was 1990, and I was about to sing my swan song: “Bye-Bye American Pie, this will be the day the music died.” It was take-stock time, and I did. However, I will never be sure whether, at that late date in life, I could have continued with any form of success in the music business, as my last year in the world of rock and roll produced only about $30,000.00. At the time, that seemed woefully short of what I needed to continue and pay my bills. I was selling my house due to a pending divorce, and the profit from that would keep me going for some time. Between the divorce and the state of my business affairs, maybe I could have hung on. Looking back, $30,000.00 in 1990 would be worth approximately $76,500.00 today, so it was possible. However, my mind was thinking to hell with it….

Why This Best Rock And Roll Autobiography Begins With A Rock And Roll Education The best rock and roll autobiography does not have to begin with fame, a guitar solo, or a screaming crowd. Sometimes it begins with a kid on a Brooklyn rooftop, above a troubled apartment, learning from a radio before he ever learned the language of contracts, promoters, managers, hotel rooms, festivals, and agency politics. That is where Once A King, Now A Prince begins to find its musical direction: not in the spotlight, but in the private education that taught Ira Blacker what rock and roll could mean before he entered the business that moved it. That rooftop radio was Ira Blacker’s first rock and roll classroom. He was not yet studying the music business, but he was absorbing the sound, rhythm, power, and emotional charge that would later become part of his working life. He…

How NYC Food Became Comfort, Memory, And Part Of My Memoir Writing the story of my life was never something I set out to do as a book. It began as a journal, or maybe more truthfully, as a place to put things I had carried around for too many years. I was not trying to become an author. I was trying to survive the memories. There is a difference, and anyone who has had to drag old pain out of the cellar knows exactly what I mean. It took me nearly fifteen years to finish what eventually became Once A King, Now A Prince. That was not because I was short of stories. I had too many of them. The problem was that some memories do not sit politely in a chair waiting to be interviewed. They come at you with their shoes on. Some of the traumatic events…