I started The Truth of Rock and Roll shortly after my first wife told me we were through.
This happened in 2008, when I also lost the job that I had thought was my – as they say – forever home. I didn’t know at the time just how bad everything was for everyone everywhere. I didn’t know that someday, when someone asked me why I left that job in 2008, all I would have to say is “2008 happened”, and they would nod in understanding.
All I knew was that my life had gone completely wrong in ways I had never imagined. Although there had been problems between my wife and I for a long time, divorce was something that happened to other people. Surely we would someday find the key that would allow us to return to the passion and happiness of the early days of our relationship.
Nope. That door was officially shut. Those days would never return.
I’d experienced unemployment before, but nothing like this. It wasn’t until years later that I appreciated just how lucky I was. At the time, it just seemed like an endless wasteland, where work that had previously come easily was nowhere to be found and I learned about things I’d never wanted to know, like how you lose part of your Unemployment payments when you get even one day of work out of a week, and you have to measure what you’ll earn at the job against what you’ll lose from the check…but at the same time, turning things down isn’t really an option or you could lose your Unemployment entirely, and in any case taking those day jobs helps to make the Unemployment last longer.
Worst of all, I was afraid that the combination of the two things would make me lose New York.
I remember a low point. I’d gotten a gig working as a proofreader at a law firm while their full-time employee used up his vacation days at the end of the year. It was a night shift, several nights a week of Six PM to One AM with frequent overtime. This was the job where I learned that I didn’t like night shifts and being out of sync with the rest of humanity, but the work itself wasn’t bad, proofreading contracts and agreements. Sometimes much of the night would pass with nothing to do, and I would spend hours surfing YouTube, which was a fascinating new discovery to me at the time. One night I watched The Town That Dreaded Sundown in ten minute increments, which perhaps wasn’t the best choice when I was alone in a dark and silent office.
Ah, the Wild West days of Youtube.
Anyway. The low point came one night when I was actually pretty busy. I’d taken a break, gotten a grape juice from the kitchen (they stocked the fridges with free juice, which was kind of neat) and gone into a darkened board room to look out the huge windows at the nighttime city. It was one of those archetypal views of New York that they put in movies or coffee table books: twenty-odd floors up, with the city spread out before me in a network of light and darkness, with the highest buildings rearing above it all like gleaming crystal spikes.
I’d been listening to Meat Loaf’s “Is Nothing Sacred” a lot that fall:
If a love as strong as ours
Couldn’t make it all the way
How can anything make sense at all?
If a love so deep and true
Couldn’t stand the test of time,
Then Mount Everest could slide
And Jerusalem could fall.
It started running through my head again as I looked out across that city nightscape, and I started crying.
How had this happened? Where had it all gone so wrong? Less than ten years out of college, and the fairytale romance that was supposed to last forever was over. The great things I was supposed to do had turned into professional free fall. Worst of all, I might have to retreat in defeat to my hometown, maybe crash in my parents’ basement, maybe see if a high school friend could hook me up with a job. If that happened, would I ever be able to return? Or would the glittering landscape before me be lost to me forever?
(From the perspective of ten years later, I wonder if maybe those fears weren’t a bit exaggerated. New York is a city where you have to work very hard just to stay, and there’s something to be said for retreating and resting when you’ve taken two blows like that. Still, it worked out for me in the end.)
That’s when it came together. I wanted to write a story. The elements had been perking in my head for a while. I wanted to write a story about a man who had failed. A man whose life had turned out all wrong. A man who had made the wrong choice early on, and whose life had gone on the wrong path from that point on. A man who desperately wanted a second chance…and who would get one.
And as I stood there, looking at that glittering night city like the opening credits of Radio 1990 from when I was a kid, Meat Loaf singing in my brain, I wanted his saving grace to be Rock and Roll magic.
To learn more about The Truth of Rock and Roll, check out its page in the book gallery here, or just pick up a copy here.