Whew. The pace has picked up. I’m writing this at my friend Tim’s desk in suburban Washington, D.C., where I came to a gathering to celebrate the book. My old Dead Head cronies Tim Scully, Diane Blagman, and Dave Moran (who manages, among other things, a cool new music venue and restaurant/bar … [Read more...]
A Satellite Radio Tour and More
Woke up early this morning and spent 100 minutes doing 10 10-minute interviews with radio stations around America, from Rochester to Charlotte to Abilene… a couple of old friends like Brother Wease in Rochester and Jim Monoghan in New Jersey, new friends like Arroe Collins at WRFX in Charlotte and … [Read more...]
Publication Day…and some Validation
Today is the official publication day – which is of course a great satisfaction just to get to. I’ve no idea how things will work out in terms of sales and so forth, but no writer ever got sweeter validation from his first readers than I have. For your reading pleasure, the first item is a link to a … [Read more...]
My First Bookstore Event and More Reviews & Media
I had my first bookstore event the other night, at Diesel Books in Oakland. Lovely people, and a good turnout considering that I was competing with the Giants-Nationals game – every once in a while we heard loud cheers or groans from the bar next door. One of the nice things about bookstore events … [Read more...]
The First Review
The first line of my first review – for my bio of Jack Kerouac, Desolate Angel – was in the Boston Globe, and it started, “Dennis McNally isn’t going to like me.” Not promising. Actually, after I read it I ended up not being terribly depressed, because it wasn’t a review of my book, it was a review … [Read more...]
We Have Liftoff
The pace is definitely picking up. Amazon started shipping books two weeks early, and already I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a picture on my friend Jan’s FB page of her reading the book. Now that’s satisfying. The folks at a very cool website called All About Jazz asked for a sample from the … [Read more...]
The Book Arrives
I’m sitting here holding a finished copy of the book and feeling a gamut of emotions. Fortunately, pleasure predominates—it just plain feels good in my hands (take that, Kindle!). The process of making a book, as I’ve said elsewhere, is a group effort, and the Counterpoint folks came through like … [Read more...]
Alternet Ends The Days Between
The past six weeks were the days between. I don’t mean this in the Grateful Dead song sense (for those of you who don’t know the song of that title, it was, for my money, the last great Hunter-Garcia collaboration and talked about the span of life between their youth and the 1990’s – life in … [Read more...]
College Rock: from Sgt. Pepper’s to Jethro Tull
Loud, it turned out, wasn’t too terrifying, and following my first step into a real rock concert with Herman’s Hermits, I stayed interested. Of course, for the next year plus I was in Dexter, Maine, and that did not offer a lot of musical possibilities. So what I found interesting had to come … [Read more...]
Radio Gives the Book a Warm Reception
This being my third go-round with publishing a book, I’ve got a moderately jaded – let’s call it realistic – set of expectations, which can be summed up as, “If they buy you cheap, they’ll sell you cheap.” With notable exceptions, most books that start out small stay that way – publishers scale … [Read more...]