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…

How To Write A Story That Begins Before The Public Life To write a story honestly, you have to begin where the truth begins, and my truth came well before the music. Mine did not begin with peace, safety, or the kind of love a child has a right to expect. It began in a war zone, inside a home where my mother loved me and my father did not want me. That brutal division became one of the first facts of my life, long before I had the words to understand what it meant. This personal story is not about a perfect childhood spoiled by a few bad memories. It is about a boy born into conflict between two people who should have been united in protecting him. My mother wanted me. My father did not want the marriage, did not want the responsibility, and did not want me…

Behind The Curtain, On The Road, And Sometimes Up The Stairs Some music insider stories come wrapped in contracts, managers, lawyers, and the kind of business lessons that cost more than they should. Others come from hotel lobbies, broken mufflers, warm Guinness, and the strange little moments that never make it into the polished biographies. Those are the ones I remember best, because they were not assembled for public consumption. They happened in real time, usually with no warning, and often with nobody around who understood that a small incident was quietly becoming part of a much larger story. That is the difference between legend and memory. Legend arrives later, combed and perfumed. Memory still has the sweat on it. These music insider stories are pieces of my story my life, taken from the agency business, the road, the clubs, the hotels, and the odd corners where rock and roll…

Agents And Managers With Bad Habits Is A Rock And Roll Story This rock and roll story is not told from a distance. It is the kind of rock and roll story that could only come from being inside the rooms where the deals, the drugs, the threats, the betrayals, and the bad judgment all lived together. I was there, and I will be the first to admit that I too shared some of those habits. I liked a good joint, and in fact, while in Hamburg on a visit to sign some German bands, I stayed at the Atlantic Hotel on the lake. The concierge warned me not to leave the window open because of the insects that could come in from the lake proximity. Randy Pie, a German rock band I met with, gave me a “spliff,” a fat doobie with weed sprinkled over tobacco. I did not…

TRUE STORIES FROM INSIDE ROCK AND ROLL A music business book should not read like a college course, a how-to manual, or some polished executive’s version of events after the lawyers have hosed down the floor. A real music business book should have blood in it, laughter in it, bad judgment in it, and enough truth to make the reader feel that somebody finally opened the back door and let him see what was really going on behind the stage, the contracts, the tours, and the deals. Those are the kind of music business insider stories I wrote about in Once A King, Now A Prince. I did not come to the story as a critic sitting in a safe chair or as a fan guessing what might have happened from the balcony. I was inside it. I helped build American Talent Int. Ltd., a rock and roll agency that…

Music Business True Stories From The Crazy Seventies Some music business true stories do not begin in a boardroom, a booking office, or a record company suite. They begin on the road, in some strange town, or in some Los Angeles living room where the rules of normal life had apparently been left outside with the coats. That was the music business I knew. It was not polished, not corporate, and not run by people with sensitivity manuals tucked under their arms. It was loud, loose, dangerous, funny, generous, selfish, and sometimes flat-out insane. These music business true stories are not the kind you get from a press release. They are the kind you carry around for fifty years because they explain the world behind the music better than any publicity photo ever could. The public saw the stage, the lights, the women, the hotels, and the suggestion that everybody…

A rock and roll insider memoir should not begin with applause. At least mine does not. Mine begins in Brooklyn, in rooms where the noise was not music, where the shouting came before the guitars, and where I learned early that people could hurt you long before they ever entertained you. Before I ever stood backstage with rock musicians, before the champagne, the road cases, the dressing rooms, the business deals, the perks, the madness, and the hangers-on, I had already spent a lifetime learning how to survive rooms full of noise. That is what makes Once A King, Now A Prince more than another rock and roll insider memoir. The music business did not create my story. It arrived later, after childhood had already done its worst and left me looking for a way out. A Rock and Roll Insider Memoir That Started Far From the Stage I was…