ROCK & ROLL BOOKS: THE TRUTH BEHIND THE NOISE

I have lived enough rock and roll to know the usual menu served up in rock & roll books. You get the lights, the girls, the drugs, the limousines, the ruined hotel rooms, the backstage passes, the fights, the managers, the lawyers, and the big famous names served up like cold cuts on a platter. Some of that is fun, and I would be a liar if I said I did not enjoy some of it myself. I lived close enough to that world to know the fantasy was not entirely fantasy. A lot of it happened, and some of it happened with more madness than any polite publisher would know what to do with.

But that is not the whole story. The best rock & roll books are not only about who was famous, who got high, who got rich, who got cheated, or who wound up in somebody’s hotel room at three in the morning. The best ones tell you what the music meant to the people who needed it before it ever became a business. They also tell you what happened after the curtain came down, when the applause stopped and everybody still had to deal with the money, the egos, the promises, the lies, and each other.

That is where my story begins. Not in a dressing room, not in an office, not with some grand entrance into the music business, but with a kid in Brooklyn trying to survive a home that felt more like a war zone than a family.

Why Fans Yearn for True Rock & Roll Books

I think fans yearn for true rock & roll books because they know, somewhere in their gut, that the records did not come from clean lives. They came from hunger, anger, loneliness, ambition, fear, sex, joy, pain, and the desperate need to be heard. That is what drew me to the music in the first place. I was not sitting around as a kid thinking about publishing, booking, contracts, promoters, or commissions. I was trying to find a place where I could breathe. Music gave me that before people did.

When I was young, I found comfort in rock and roll because it gave me something my house did not always provide. It gave me energy, rhythm, rebellion, and a world bigger than the one I was stuck in. On the roof of our five-story walk-up in Brooklyn, I would run an extension cord from my bedroom window so I could bring my radio upstairs and lie there with the city under me.

That roof became one of the few places where I could be alone without feeling abandoned. I listened to Fats Domino, Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and then the Black radio stations that played the blues and rhythm and blues that helped build the whole damn thing. I did not know it then, but I was listening to the road that would eventually lead me into the music business.

Maybe that is also why so many rock & roll books miss something when they begin with fame. Fame is not where most of these stories really begin. Mine began with fear, anger, a radio, a rooftop, and the need to get somewhere else.

The Difference Between Rock and Roll Myth and Rock and Roll Memory

A lot of rock & roll books polish the myth until it shines better than the truth ever did. I understand why. Myth sells. Famous names sell. A good backstage story sells. But memory is not a publicist. Memory does not always walk in a straight line with clean shoes and a press release in its hand. My memory often comes back with the smell of a room, the sound of a voice, the look on someone’s face, or the feeling that I had just been handed a lesson I did not ask for and would not forget.

That is why I do not see my book as just another rock and roll memoir. My life did not begin when I entered the music business, and it did not become interesting only when I met famous people. The earlier damage mattered. The fear mattered. The anger mattered. The hunger to become somebody mattered. By the time I found my way into the business, I was not some shiny kid looking for glamour. I was a survivor who had already learned that people could hurt you, abandon you, underestimate you, and then act surprised when you came back swinging.

And when the famous names did arrive, they were not names to me. They were people I signed, represented, booked, argued with, laughed with, worried about, made money with, and occasionally lost sleep over. That is the difference between reading history and having it walk into your office.

From Fan to Music Business Insider

I did not come to rock and roll from a throne. I came to it from Brooklyn, from family dysfunction, from fear, from a father whose anger taught me lessons no child should have had to learn, and from a mother who loved me in ways that were sometimes powerful and sometimes not enough. Music did not erase any of that, but it gave me a direction. It gave me something to love that was mine.

After Hofstra, I went into Associated Booking Corporation, where my first two signings were Rod Stewart & Faces and Savoy Brown. Later, Sol Saffian and I helped turn a package with Faces, Savoy Brown, and The Grease Band into the kind of tour promoters wanted. That helped open doors, and the doors did not stay quiet for long.

When I owned American Talent International and the agency grew, so did the list of people coming through my life. There was Badfinger, Osibisa, Mungo Jerry, Nazareth, Brian Auger and Trinity, Chicken Shack, Larry Graham, P-Funk with Bootsy Collins, Mandrill, Michael Des Barres, Rory Gallagher, Blue Öyster Cult, Rare Earth, Billy Preston, Frank Zappa and plenty more.

Those are not decorations added to make the story look important. They were part of the work. Some became successes, some became headaches, some became tragedies, and some became memories that still make me laugh. That is the human side I look for in rock & roll books—not just the billing, but what became of the people behind it.

Those are the names I want in rock & roll books because they remind readers that rock history was much bigger than the same ten people who appear on every cover.

That is why Once A King, Now A Prince is also a music business memoir. I was not writing from the stage, and I was not pretending to be the star. I was inside the machinery. I saw how things worked, how people worked, how deals worked, and how quickly a handshake could turn into a fist if enough money, ego, fear, or ambition got into the room. Anyone who thinks the music business was only about music probably never had to survive it.

When the Backstage Story Is More Honest Than the Stage

The stage can make almost anything look good. Lights are forgiving. Sound is forgiving. A cheering crowd can make a man feel like a king even if he is falling apart inside. Backstage was different. Backstage was where the business showed its face, and that face was not always pretty. Sometimes it was funny, generous, exciting, and alive. Sometimes it looked like a guy smiling at you while quietly measuring where to stick the knife.

That is the part many rock & roll books do not spend enough time on. They tell you who sang the song, who played the solo, and who trashed the room, but they do not always tell you who got paid, who got cheated, who got used, who did the using, and who walked away pretending it was all just show business.

Take Rush. When Ray Danniels brought me their Canadian record, nobody in America was exactly breaking down doors to get at them. I sent the record to Donna Halper at WMMS in Cleveland, where she began playing it. I put Rush on American dates opening for acts including Uriah Heep and Savoy Brown and started shopping the record.

Irwin Steinberg at Mercury Records came aboard, and what had been a Canadian record nobody wanted suddenly had an American future. Later they toured with Rare Earth, KISS, Rory Gallagher, Sha Na Na and others. That is a rock and roll story, but it is also a business story: timing, radio, touring, belief, leverage, and knowing when to push.

Or take Germany. I used to dig through import bins in Greenwich Village and found music coming from people like Kraftwerk, Randy Pie and Inga Rumpf. I went to Germany, pursued those relationships, and signed Kraftwerk before “Autobahn” became the American breakthrough everybody now knows. I was looking for someplace where I could be first instead of following somebody else through the door. That kind of story belongs in rock & roll books, too, because careers are often built before the audience ever knows there is a story.

What I Think the Best Rock & Roll Books Reveal

To me, the best rock & roll books reveal what fame does to people and what people will do to get near it. They reveal how ambition can become a religion, how loyalty can become a business expense, and how quickly friendship can become negotiable once money enters the room. They also show how many people in and around rock and roll were trying to fill some private hole that applause could not fill for very long.

I saw that from more angles than I expected. At the California Jam in 1974, I was there with clients including Deep Purple, Earth, Wind & Fire and Rare Earth, with hundreds of thousands of people on the other side of the stage. It was spectacular. It was also business. The crowd saw the show; I saw the show and everything surrounding it. That double vision never really went away.

I also saw Badfinger become a tragedy instead of merely a successful band. I saw talented people surrounded by managers, accountants, lawyers and deals that could determine whether the dream remained a dream. That does not mean every person in the business was a crook. Far from it. But enough sharks swam in that water that you learned quickly not to mistake a smile for a life preserver.

Those are the parts of rock & roll books that stay with me. Not simply who was in the room, but what the room felt like, who had the power, who thought they had the power, and who discovered too late that they did not.

That is what I understand because I brought my own holes with me. I brought my childhood, my anger, my humor, my fear, my hunger, my need to be seen, and my ability to keep going even when I did not always know why. Rock and roll did not make me damaged, and it did not cure me either. It gave me a place where my damage could move, talk, negotiate, fight, laugh, and sometimes even win. That is why a real rock n roll memoir should not just be about famous people behaving badly. It should be about why the whole circus was so powerful in the first place.

Why Once A King, Now A Prince Belongs in That Conversation

I did not write Once A King, Now A Prince to make myself look like a saint. I have no interest in sainthood. The robes would not fit, and I would probably spill something on them before the ceremony was over. I wrote it because I lived a strange life, survived enough of it to tell the tale, and came out of it with memories that belonged somewhere other than the back room of my own head.

The difference between my book and many rock & roll books is that my life does not conveniently begin when the first famous musician walks into the story. My book begins long before the rock and roll years because I began long before the rock and roll years. The family dysfunction, the fear, the institutions, the anger, the loneliness, and the search for some kind of safety all came first.

The music came later and gave me a road. The business came after that and gave me a battlefield with better clothes. The mob, the sex, the drugs, the artists, the tours, the deals, and the betrayals are part of the story, but they are not floating by themselves in some cheap rock and roll parade. They came into a life that had already been shaped by damage and survival.

When readers open rock & roll books, I think they deserve more than a list of celebrities somebody once stood next to. I have pictures and names, plenty of them. What interests me now is what those encounters meant, what went wrong, what went right, who surprised me, who disappointed me, and what I learned after the noise died down.

The Truth Behind the Rock and Roll Dream

I still believe in the dream, but I do not believe in lying about it. Rock and roll gave me joy, purpose, identity, danger, money, trouble, laughter, and some of the most extraordinary people and moments of my life. It also showed me greed, stupidity, betrayal, weakness, cruelty, and more bad decisions than any one business should have been allowed to manufacture.

That is why the rock & roll books I remember are the ones that get behind the mythology. They do not only tell you that somebody became famous. They tell you what the climb did to him, who helped him get there, who tried to stop him, who got rich beside him, and who disappeared once the money or applause was gone.

Fans do not only want the dream. They want to know what it cost. They want to know what happened to the people who lived near the fire, who warmed their hands by it, who got burned by it, and who somehow walked away with enough memory left to tell the truth.

That is what the best rock & roll books should do.

That is the kind of story I care about, and that is the kind of story I tried to tell.

If you are a fan of rock & roll books, then Once A King, Now A Prince is for you.