Dan Kennedy - Rock On: An Office Power Ballad

Praise for ROCK ON

Imagine a love child born of The Office and High Fidelity. With Knocked Up as the slacker godfather.... [An] amazingly funny yet perceptive look at rock music and big corporations in crisis.

USA Today

Fast-moving and darkly funny, Rock On should be a chart-topper.

People, four stars

A succession of gently mordant vignettes, with hilariously spot-on asides about media image-making, music-biz hierarchies and sensitive singer-songwriters.... Like Walter Mitty in reverse, Kennedy constantly retreats from an absurd corporate environmentequal parts tyranny, vanity and fecklessnessinto neurotic internal-reality checks even funnier than the folly all around him.... Neither Kennedy nor the music business will ever be the same.

The New York Times Book Review

Scathingly funny.

The Onion A.V. Club

Pitch-perfect.... A brilliant, hysterical and insightful look at what happens when truly creative people try to blend into a Banana Republicized mediocracy.... The author makes it clear, in laugh-out-loud fashion, that the lid was shut on the coffin of music business dreams some time ago, weve just delayed the burial.

New York Post

Very funny.

GQ

His story is a crash course, a cautionary tale, and a hilarious riff on what happens when you come face to face with your fantasiesand it turns out they blow. Kennedy, ever the optimist, finds humor in awkward exchanges and uptight boardrooms and sentiment in an increasingly sterilized industry. Its the book one dreams of writing.

Daily Candy

The decline of the major labels has inspired plenty of rancor, but Kennedy uses it as the basis for a hilariousand damninginsiders memoir about how the suits managed to scuttle the ship and pad their expense accounts.

Wired

Kennedys got the guts to reveal our collective internal monologue.... If he werent so self-deprecating, Kennedy might come off as a jerk. But hes just as hard on himself and, besides, hes funny. Super funny.

Los Angeles Times

Effing hilarious. The book is not just laugh-out-loud funny; its snort-audibly-on-the-subway funny.

Time Out New York

Dan Kennedy chronicles how his fantasy is fulfilled, albeit cruelly, as an office drone at a record label. His workplace boasts all the dysfunction of The Office, except its the real deal. Sycophantic underlings jockey for position, psychotic bigwigs condescend, Kennedys soul slowly withersand we laugh, as he describes it all with satirical playfulness.

Fast Company

Dan Kennedy tells all in his keenly observed, laugh-out-loud funny, insiders view of the music biz.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

A hugely enjoyable read.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Youll laugh, youll rock, youll turn up the volume on your iPod. Youll remember your first job. Youll wonder if you ever grew up. And youll be glad Dan Kennedy is out there somewhere, rocking on, living the dream.

New Orleans Times-Picayune

Riotously funny.... Kennedys running commentary is hysterical, and his thoughtful inner monologue makes this a page-turner, more than a few times inducing laugh-out-loud moments followed by a whisper of Thats sooo my office.... A hilarious and enjoyable read that belongs on the bookshelf of every fan of the self-deprecating hipster memoir.

Denver Rocky Mountain News

Kennedy tars and feathers these yes-men (and women) with his sharp reportage. But theres still a degree of respect, a benefit of the doubt, for the creatively dead bottom-liners.... Rock On is less of a gripefest and more of a tragicomedy.... It turns out that Kennedy cant save rock n roll after all, but hell make you laugh pretty hard.

The Oregonian

His feverish interior monologue smacks you over the head, shoving you forward, often latching onto something so alarmingly funny you must suddenly brake to appreciate the authors skill.

SF Weekly

Also by Dan Kennedy

Loser Goes First

DAN KENNEDY

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

2008 by Dan Kennedy. All rights reserved.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.
Design by April Leidig-Higgins.

Lyrics on page from Bastards of Young, words and music by Paul Westerberg, 1995 WB Music Corp. and NAH Music. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.

Lyrics on pages 54 from To Love You More, by David Foster and Junior Miles, 1995, 1996 by One Four Three Music and Boozetunes. Rights for One Four Three Music administered by Peermusic, Ltd. Rights for Boozetunes administered by WB Music Corporation. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Peermusic, Ltd., and Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.

eISBN-13: 9781565126497

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

In most places where profanity appears in this work, its 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, wouldnt you agree? When I attempted to edit the line and have him scream, If you ask me, youre a horses ass! it still seemed contrived. Only when I simply used Mr. Pops actual remark as I recalled it from that evening, Betcha wish you werent 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 thats sad, isnt it? Mister dirty bird cant 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 Im not proud of my occasional use of even relatively mild profanity in this book.

A more important advisory, though: theres 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, Ive got some kind of cold today; Im delirious with fever and I shouldnt be writing a last-minute preface sitting here all twisted up on DayQuil and junk soda like this. Its just that my editor tells me this is my last chance to add anything to this book before it goes off to press, so Im sitting on the couch thinking, What would I want to add to this thing if I werent so high on these delicious, beautifully translucent orange capsules and two liters of yellowy green Diet Mountain Dew?

Well, theres this to add: Im 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, Ive spent a good amount of time wishing the timing couldve been better; that I wouldve 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, theres a little voice inside my head that says maybe thats the most interesting time to show up for something. You know what I mean? Or is that the DayQuil and Dew talking?