Once A King, Now A Prince:

A Rock And Roll True Story From The Other Side Of The Stage A rock and roll true story depends on where you were standing. If you were in the audience, you saw the lights come down, the band walk onstage, the first chord hit, and several thousand people lose their minds. I saw that too, but I was usually looking at something else: the promoter, the building, the ticket demand, the money, the manager, the next city, and the problem nobody in the audience knew existed. That difference is at the center of every rock and roll true story I tell. The audience saw the finished product. I saw the machinery that put it there. Rock And Roll True Story: The Audience Saw Rod Stewart And Faces. I Saw The Strategy When Rod Stewart and Faces were beginning to build in America, the public saw a band exploding in…

Why The Best Music Autobiography Tells The Whole Life Childhood Came Before The Music To understand why I believe a best music autobiography has to be about more than the music business, you have to begin long before I ever booked an artist, negotiated a contract, or walked backstage. My story began in a severely dysfunctional family, where survival came before ambition and childhood left scars that followed me into adulthood. Those years shaped the way I dealt with people, the risks I was willing to take, and the drive that eventually pushed me toward a completely different life. Music became an escape, but it also became something larger: a place where I could build an identity that belonged to me. Many of the best music memoirs concentrate almost entirely on fame, records, tours, and celebrity. My story cannot be told that way because the person who entered the music…

How Power and Influence Raised a Small Fortune for Parkinson’s Disease In the music business, power is usually measured by how many artists you control, how many promoters take your calls, and how quickly you can make something happen. In my years as owner of American Talent International, I had that kind of power. Promoters all over America knew me because they bought my artists, and they knew that when I called, it was usually about business. This music business true story is about one of the rare times I used that position for something that had nothing to do with putting money in my pocket. By then, I was not some guy hanging around the edges of rock and roll. I owned American Talent International, and ATI had become one of the most powerful agencies in the business, representing artists such as Rod Stewart, Deep Purple, and ZZ Top….

Well, I’ll tell you first that I am not a shrink, so I can only speak from firsthand experience, and that is my true life story. After years in the music business, I saw something that probably has shown up in other music business memoirs: many of the people I have come across in the music business were seemingly living their lives and ambitions as if they had their own dysfunctional family story to tell. Many, it seemed to me, were driven by the need to overcompensate and “wet their beaks” in the talent pool. This goes for both artists and music business executives. Looking back, I can see how a dysfunctional family story can become a source of ambition as much as pain. My Dysfunctional Family Story Of Survival Maybe my fellow gym rats had a valid point that extended inside as well as outside the gym: there was…

New York Delis And The Food In My Memories In my original Great New York Delis piece, I wrote about the places, tastes, and traditions that were part of growing up Jewish in New York. That story was really about more than food. It was about neighborhoods, family, memory, and the restaurants that became part of everyday life. This second piece picks up where that one left off, with a few more places that still come back to me whenever I think about the new york delis I grew up with. These are some of the stories from my life that food has managed to preserve better than almost anything else. For me, pastrami on rye was never just a sandwich. It was the smell when you walked through the door, the pickles on the table, the mustard, the noise, the white aprons behind the counter, and the certainty that…

Rock Stars Weren’t Always What You Thought When most people think about rock bands, the picture that comes to mind is usually the wild, crazy, drug-addicted rocker with very little humanity left once the stage lights go down. That image sells movies, magazines, and plenty of books. It also happens to be wrong much of the time. If a best music memoir is going to tell the truth about rock and roll, it has to include the people behind the mythology, not just the mythology itself. I spent a large part of my life inside the music business, first as an agent and later as an owner of American Talent International. I saw plenty of behavior that lived up to the reputation of rock and roll, but I also saw something that rarely gets as much attention: kindness. Some of the people who looked the wildest from the outside were…

I never set out to write a book. That may sound strange coming from somebody who eventually spent almost fifteen years writing one, but it is the truth. Once A King, Now A Prince started as a journal. Nothing more ambitious than that. I was not sitting there thinking about publishers, readers, reviews, podcasts, or whether anybody in the world would give a damn about what I had to say. I was writing for myself. Maybe even writing to myself. There were things I had carried around for most of my life that simply needed someplace else to live. Memories, anger, questions, people I loved, people I hated, things that happened to me, and things I did to other people. There were successes I was proud of and mistakes I would have preferred to leave buried. Unfortunately, memories do not always cooperate. Some of them keep knocking on the door…

I spent a major part of my adult life in rock and roll as the founder and owner of a major rock and roll music agency. I signed artists, represented them, dealt with managers, promoters, record companies, lawyers, and every other character who came with the territory. I broke Rush in America, and I have enough stories from those years to fill more than one lifetime. So when I built a website around my memoir, I assumed the stories that would attract the most attention would be the obvious ones: the bands, the deals, the backstage insanity, and the kind of things people expect when they go looking for the best rock n roll memoirs. Then one of my stories about great new york delis started getting more attention than some of the rock and roll pieces. At first I thought that was crazy. Here I was writing about a…

Being 84, one might say I had a front-row seat to much of rock music history as it happened. What I learned from that front-row seat was that the biggest stars were rarely just discovered—they were presented, promoted and built to appear “larger than life.” A Front Row Seat To Rock Music History I was there for the rise of Elvis and witnessed how it all began. Later on, as an avid record collector, I became aware that the fifties did not see the start of rock and roll, but that it was the forties with the pop sounds of groups like the Mariners, with “I See the Moon,” and the Mills Brothers, along with Billy Ward and The Dominos, whose music the radio stations referred to as “race music.” Not to forget the blues of Howlin’ Wolf, Joe Turner, and his jump blues style that added to the music….

Music Business Secrets Begin Before The Audience Arrives Most people hear the words music business secrets and think sex, drugs, crooked managers, disappearing money, and somebody throwing a television out of a hotel window. I saw enough of that to keep a psychiatrist and accountant occupied for years. But some of the most important music business secrets were less theatrical: decisions made in offices, record-company meetings, and record stores that determined whether an artist ever got heard in America. A great record was not enough. Talent was not enough. Sometimes even a signed deal was not enough. The music business secrets that mattered were knowing where an artist belonged, who needed to hear them, when to push, when to wait, and occasionally when to keep your own big mouth shut. Music Business Secrets I Found In The German Record Bins After years of working heavily with English rock acts, I…

The best rock autobiographies reveal what happened behind the stage, including the decisions that helped shape careers. How Black Blues Artists Reached White Audiences It wasn’t The Cream, Savoy Brown, Chicken Shack, or other British bands bringing the blues to white audiences who may never have heard of that art form before that allowed black musicians to share the spotlight. The truth is, many did not look beyond The Cream recording songs by Howlin’ Wolf to discover who Howlin’ Wolf was and how he contributed to the blues and rock and roll. It took more than that. To me, the best rock autobiographies should explain not only where the music came from, but how it reached people who had never heard it before. Black Artists On White Concert Bills It took someone to place black blues artists and R & B artists to bring their music to the attention of…

Some of the most interesting rock n roll memoirs aren’t about sex, drugs, trashed hotel rooms, or musicians behaving badly. They’re about money. Who made it, who controlled it, and who walked away with it. As the founder and owner of American Talent International, a major rock and roll booking agency, I saw enough to know that what happened behind the scenes could be considerably more interesting than what happened onstage. Take Deep Purple, a band I helped establish in America. Their story includes an accountant who stole millions, an offshore financial structure, years of legal battles, and something I personally witnessed involving a mysterious $100,000 refund to the promoters of California Jam. That refund was never satisfactorily explained to me. Was there hanky-panky involved? One can only surmise. It’s the kind of business story that gives rock n roll memoirs a dimension traditional music biographies seldom capture. Rock N…