Rock On

D
AN
K
ENNEDY

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Dedicated to Maria Lilja, whom you may know as Mia Skaili.

“God, what a mess, on the ladder of success

Where you take one step and miss the whole first rung”

—“Bastards of Young,” The Replacements

Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics

A Note About the Names

Before We Go to the Office, A Power Ballad That Addresses Following Our Hearts

Welcome to the Working Week

I'm Paid to Write Love Notes to Phil Collins

When it Began, or the Twenty-Nine-Year-Old White Guy From Orange County, California, Tells you About Soul Music

Changed His Name so I Don't Get Sued

Hi, Do You Guys Carry Picture Frames, Little Mahogany Boxes Covered in Alligator Skin, Little Pen Holder Things Made of Leather, That Kind of Thing?

Anthems For A Seventeen-Year-Old Girl, or “Duran, Duran, And . . . You Are?”

Rock Opera Trilogy: I. The Donnas Sing Songs About Sex in Cars II. Be Cool, Stay In School, And Leave The Fully Automatic Assault Weapons At Home III. Jewel is a Human Being, For Your Information

For Those About to Rock in Vallerie's Office, We Politely Salute You

How to Shoot a Three-Hundred-Pound Hip-Hop Star From the Bronx

You've Got an Idea, and the Only Problem with that is this: Ideas Make the Robots Attack

Intuition Sells, But Who's Buying?

Subdivisions

Black Dog

The Sound of Unsettling

Chinese Democracy

The Salvation of Stooges

Ladies and Gentlemen, Please Put Your Hands Together for “Middle-Aged Billionaire And the Prestigious Investors”!

The Bends

Welcome to the New Marketing Meeting, Baby

Not a Creature Stirred. Not Even an Executive Dressed as a Cop Handing Out Speeding Tickets

Auto Flash and the Darkness

We Won't Get Fooled Again. I'm Kidding. Obviously, We'll Get Fooled Again

Smash Hit

How to Plan a Bloodbath

My Corporate Good-Bye E-Mail Never Sent

The Trick is to Keep Breathing: Trying Meditation Instead of TV Watching

Kids, Don't Follow

Exactly One Year After the Layoffs: Hellhounds in God's Country

Whole Lotta Love for Sale

Suggested Further Reading

In most places where profanity appears in this work, it's basically a matter of authenticity. I tried to leave out the profanity, but sometimes it seemed like betraying the moment a bit. For instance, a scene where punk-rock icon Iggy Pop jumps up on a stack of amplifiers onstage at Roseland in New York and screams, “Nuts to you and your shenanigans!” at people in the VIP balcony strikes a bit of a false chord, wouldn't you agree? When I attempted to edit the line and have him scream, “If you ask me, you're a horse's ass!” it still seemed contrived. Only when I simply used Mr. Pop's actual remark as I recalled it from that evening, “Betcha wish you weren't fat! Jump down here you fat fucks. I dare you to jump!” did the scene come alive the way it inspired me that night. There are other times when the hopefully forgiven, relatively mild profanity seems simply a matter of convenience on my part, and that's sad, isn't it? Mister dirty bird can't even take a minute to find a more mature way of saying something other than cursing a blue streak like an angry motorist or a bitter prison inmate high and insane on homemade prison booze made by cramming a Ziploc baggie with white bread, sugar, ketchup, and fruit-cup remnants from the mess hall, then wrapping the baggie in a washrag and letting it rot and ferment behind the hot-water pipe in his cell. I know, I agree with you. Please know that I'm not proud of my occasional use of even relatively mild profanity in this book.

A more important advisory, though: there's scant mention of some of the best people I met during my relatively short stint of employment. There were people in that office building who
loved music and were working there for all the right reasons. I maybe mention two of them. Nice.

Look, I've got some kind of cold today; I'm delirious with fever and I shouldn't be writing a last-minute preface sitting here all twisted up on DayQuil and junk soda like this. It's just that my editor tells me this is my last chance to add anything to this book before it goes off to press, so I'm sitting on the couch thinking, “What would I want to add to this thing if I weren't so high on these delicious, beautifully translucent orange capsules and two liters of yellowy green Diet Mountain Dew?”

Well, there's this to add: I'm honestly grateful beyond measure for this chance that came my way and for the good, bad, and in-between that came of it. It was everything I signed on for and then some. Sure, I've spent a good amount of time wishing the timing could've been better; that I would've had a shot at working in the record business back in the heyday of the major labels. As it worked out, I got in the door just about the time things were falling apart. Then again, there's a little voice inside my head that says maybe that's the most interesting time to show up for something. You know what I mean? Or is that the DayQuil and Dew talking?

D. S. K.

New York, NY

The names of people in this book have been changed, with the exception of pop stars, public figures, and three other people. When I asked my friends Nat and Ben if they wanted me to change their names, they asked to be referred to as “Bryce” and “Suck It,” respectively; my own girlfriend asked me to change her name to “Cherry Crystal.” I did not honor these requests.

I'm not a top-notch, grade-A, tanned and successful middle-aged record executive; sadly, you'll realize this shortly. I'm not dictating these pages to a well-scrubbed, starry-eyed, sexy underling on my private jet, interrupted only by nosebleeds that I insist are simply the result of my allergic reaction to a tasteful leather interior and the rigors of daily cabin pressurization. No, I'm basically the guy who made it to the middle and has no problem swiping his ID at the door to let you in for a look around. My biggest qualification here aside from a magnetized laminate that opens a couple of doors is simply this: I've loved music all my life. And you probably have, too, right? Ten bucks says you have. With hearts and brains like hard drives, we all move through this life constantly shuffling through thousands of songs triggered by memories and names, a certain season, or even just the way the light or landscape feels in a certain place. Maybe some of the songs are triggered by a specific small cluttered studio apartment where your ex-girlfriend Kristin seemed to routinely break your personal belongings, then later took to the habit of sleeping with handsome patrons of local restaurants in exchange for cocaine. Or not, I don't know, maybe I'm kind of doing what therapists refer to as “projecting.” Anyway, the point is this: our hearts and heads
are filled with music, and as years go by we continue to amass a catalog of songs that permanently score some of the biggest moments and memories of our lives; we have that in common, no matter who we are.

I remember my dad teaching me Johnny Cash songs when I was four years old. I would wake up and shave with him before he went off to work, using my toy fake plastic razor and shaving kit. And instead of having to use the empty toy can of fake shaving cream, my dad would give me a little bit of his real shaving cream to use, and man this made me feel like I had arrived. And we would shave and he'd sing “I Walk The Line.” I still remember how lucky and amazed I felt that this ninety-foot-tall superhero with his American workingman-tanned forearms and biceps would glance down at me with a grin and take a second to back up and teach me the line.

“I keep a close watch on this heart of mine,” he would repeat.

My way of excitedly repaying my dad for these weekday mornings that I would keep in my heart for the rest of my life was to wake the poor man with seizurelike drumming at around seven in the morning on weekends; one toy metal drum, just marching and pounding. First, the length of the hallway in front of my parents' bedroom a couple of times, then the perimeter of the backyard; a pounding and marching that was at once obsessive-compulsive, extremely punctual, and eerily, calmly emphatic — like a new recruit to the Naval drum corps honoring the dead or a tiny drumming version of Christopher Walken. At the age of nine, I bothered him relentlessly for rides to the Toys “R” Us out by the freeway, where I would stare at an Ohio Art brand toy drum set for twenty minutes in total daydream silence, while he patiently
waited. Then it was straight home to sit in my room and stare at posters of Kiss and Led Zeppelin in the same wide-eyed quiet trance.

My parents must've lain awake in bed nights, silently considering options like boarding school or exorcism. Because, while my dad dealt with the drum set situation, my mom knew that in the beginning of September she'd have to endure long meetings with me that would lead to deciding which member of Kiss I would be trick-or-treating as, come the end of October. There would be discussions about the details of the actual band's current costumes and whether duplicating them was feasible this year, which makeup would work best, etc. Even though I wanted to be a drummer in real life, I always decided I would be Gene Simmons for Halloween, since his fire-breathing, blood-spewing demon/bassist persona seemed like more fun than drummer Peter Criss's well-behaved domestic cat persona. What was a cat even doing with a demon?

My mom juggled work and everything else she had on her plate with making my demon cape from scratch. She used scissors and stitching to convert ordinary witch wigs into perfect Gene Simmons hair, plus did my makeup exactly the way it was on the cover of the Kiss album
Destroyer
. She never let me go in for spitting fake blood, though. And I was not to play with fire, either. Also, it was made perfectly clear to me that being the Lord of the Wastelands did not give me the right to act like a hooligan; I was to thank neighbors when they gave me candy, and only take one piece unless they invited me to take a bit more. So, each Halloween I essentially became a smaller, oddly well-mannered, polite version of the real Gene Simmons.