Pistonhead [Paperback]

Thomas A. Hauck (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 7, 2009

Charlie Sinclair plays guitar in a rock band. He works on an assembly line. His best friend is a drug addict. PISTONHEAD is the story of one week in Charlie Sinclair's life - a week that changed him forever.

Editorial Reviews

Review

THE OTHER SIDE OF ROCK STARDOM

A troubled man looks away as he holds his Fender Telecaster close to his leather jacket with rolled up sleeves. The image is a common one in the rock star world: A shredding lead guitarist posing for a book cover that will tell about his life's journey as a member of the rich and famous.

Careful though, one must remember not to judge a book by its cover.

Thomas Hauck, a Gloucester resident, has a new novel, "Pistonhead," that tells the unfamiliar story of a guy living in Boston, playing guitar in a rock band and keeping a day job to pay the bills. Hauck drew from his own experiences as a guitarist in two Boston-based bands -- Ball and Pivot, and The Atlantics -- during the 1980s.

"There's no limousines, there's no groupies; the story is quite different," Hauck said. "It's a story I know something about, from my own background, and I wanted to provide readers with an alternative to the typical rock star nonfiction, where the story lines tend to be similar.

"The genre is kind of defined by these established rock stars," he said. "There's really nothing of the story about the thousands of artists and writers and actors who struggle day to day, still have day jobs, are not successful, and are at the bottom of the heap. Those aren't told very often."

Hauck spent 15 years as a musician and songwriter after graduating from Tufts University and also worked as an actor on stage and in various independent films and television programs. Now, Hauck is a professional freelance writer and the editor of Renaissance Magazine, which is published every other month to detail the happenings of area Renaissance fairs. He earned a master's degree from Endicott College in 2004, around the time he started writing the book. He worked on it on and off for years before he finally self-published it this spring.

"I submitted a manuscript to various agents and publishers and was rejected, but I came to the conclusion that in the publishing industry, there's no market for this book," Hauck said. He might be on to something; 2008 was the first year where there were more books created and self-published than books released by publishing companies, according to Hauck.

The story is about a week in the life of Charlie Sinclair as he juggles his day job as a factory worker and his night job as a guitarist. He deals with the heavy drug use of a band mate and a poor living situation, and finally comes upon a tragedy that forces him into a life-changing decision.

"I think 'Pistonhead' is very succinct and doesn't waste your time and doesn't bore you," Hauck said. "I spent the last couple years refining it and cutting out some stuff. There's no filler."

Don't expect "Pistonhead" to be the end of Hauck's literary work either. He's already finished a book of short stories and poems that is going to come out later this summer, a horror novel about a vampire evangelist and a spy novel about a secret agent who does battle with an international crime ring -- sort of like an American James Bond, he said.

All of those are "in the can," he said, waiting for the right time to be published through Hauck's own service, Something.Hot Communications in Gloucester. In the meantime, he said he's happy to see "Pistonhead" out there, even if it doesn't make a splash on the New York Times' best-seller list.

"Whatever happens, happens," he said. "If five years from now or 10 years from now, the book still has people buying it now and then, then I'll feel like I have succeeded." --GLOUCESTER DAILY TIMES. Review by Cameron Kittle.

Review

Splendors and Miseries of a Performer

In a straightforward chronicle that reads more like an ingeniously compressed memoir than like a work of fiction, Thomas Hauck, formerly of the Atlantics and Ball & Pivot, sets out to describe an event-laden week in the life of a rock musician who is almost, but not quite, a star.

The novel's greatest strength is to be found in its description of the protagonist's character and how he responds to his milieu. Hauck shrewdly chooses to open the novel with a telling scene in which his everyman rock star, Charlie Sinclair, is faced with every musician's worst nightmare: It's show time, and the band's chronically fucked-up dust-head vocalist is nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, the mobbed-up club owner is off fuming and raging in the wings.

Many people who have lived the life of a struggling entertainer will readily identify with Hauck's precisely delineated descriptions of the various hazards and pitfalls in the world of low-level show biz that stand as obstacles to success. The dead end jobs. The disastrous gigs in front of downright hostile arena audiences. The unsympathetic family members. The resentful, pushy mooks from the old neighborhood. The grasping girlfriends. The venal groupies and junk-peddlers and promoters and, worst of all, the fucked-up band-mates. Those who are new to the racket and have not yet encountered these life-lessons could with profit study this book as a worst-case scenario. And those who are unlikely to endure this path but who are curious about what a person has to do to make it in this perilous world will find many of their questions answered.

Hauck's aims are modest. This is a short book. It is not particularly complex in its plotting. And, from a literary standpoint, the tale of The Boy Who Sets Out to Make Good But Who Eventually Realizes That Perhaps There Are Better Things Than Stardom is a rather hoary one. But the novel has the one great thing that separates good narrative fiction from an indifferent phone-it-in: it is meticulously, convincingly, and evincingly detailed. Superfluous passages are few.

Occasionally the descriptions of the hapless handicapped souls with whom Charlie Sinclair works at his dreary, temporary, assembly-line day-job seem a bit too calculated to tug at our lapels and keen for our sympathy. But the workplace characters, and their dialogues, are nonetheless memorable. Another disconnect I noticed was that although the novel is ostensibly set in the 1990s, one is left with the slightly unsettling feeling that much of it has been transposed from the early '80s and merely spruced up with some contemporary references (e.g., cell phones; The Simpsons). Another thing that troubles me is that, although the book is written in the third person, there seems to be little, if any distance between the implied narrator and the protagonist. The book could just as easily have been written in the first person.

These reservations aside, I have seldom encountered a more interesting account of the life of a working musician. Furthermore, there are few, if any novels I have read which manage to render with such painstaking detail and accuracy the sensations of performing, both on stage and off.

As a novel, Pistonhead is an odd duck. It's not a strictly literary work (but who would want that, anyway?). It's not an exploitative genre exercise (which would be of no lasting, or of barely even more than ephemeral, value). Rather, it's cross between a journalistic expose of Entertainment Babylon and a quasi-documentary account of a rock 'n' roll musician--one with a great many very thinly disguised music business and local color flourishes. I read it in one sitting. It was that kind of book. THE NOISE: ROCK AROUND BOSTON. Review by Francis DiMenno.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Somethng.hot Communications; 1st edition (February 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1601457448
• ISBN-13: 978-1601457448
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #605,793 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas A. Hauck earned his B.A. in History of Art at Tufts University, graduating magna cum laude. After college, Tom embarked on a fifteen-year career as a rock musician and songwriter, playing guitar and writing songs with Boston-based bands including the Atlantics and Ball and Pivot. Tom left the music business in the early 1990s and embarked on a successful career in non-profit administration and development. In 2004 he earned his M.B.A. at Endicott College. After serving with several leading Boston-area cultural non-profits, Tom founded Thomas Hauck Communications Services in 2006.

Tom has ghostwritten dozens of books on topics including business management, self-help, finance, and fiction. He is the editor of "Renaissance Magazine," a national glossy serving the contemporary ren-medieval community. His short stories have been published in "The Armchair Aesthete," "The Bitter Oleander," and "The MacGuffin." His books now available on Amazon.com include "Pistonhead," "Public Image: Stories and Poems," and "Lucas Manson."

Tom lives with his wife and two children in an 1851 Greek Revival house overlooking historic Gloucester Harbor.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Real Deal, March 20, 2009

By 

Jay Singer (New York NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pistonhead (Paperback)

A friend who is also in the music industry recommended Pistonhead to me and it was a revelation! I spent many years in the trenches of rock and roll and this book hits a bulls-eye. The audiences, the flaky manager who makes a fortune from a dead client, the smarmy concert promoter, the wacky road crew, the sleazy girlfriends, the violence and sex and drugs, the Dust Twins (I knew those guys!), the stuff that goes through Charlie's mind while he is performing on stage--it's all here.

What makes Pistonhead different is that it gives you the complete picture and devotes attention to the "real world" of Charlie's mind-numbing day job on the assembly line with the Mass Rehab clients. I remember being jolted out of bed at 7 am after playing a gig until 3 am, and dragging my tired carcass to work and falling asleep in the break room with my ears still ringing. And at every workplace there's a Lisa... the sweet and beautiful woman who seems to come from some different and better world. And we all know guys like Charlie's brother-in-law, who leeringly wants to hear all about Charlie's supposed sexual exploits. There's so much more--I definitely recommend this book to anyone who has ever had a dream worth working for.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Complex, Funny, Trashy, Deep, Incisive Novel, March 17, 2009

By 

Frank Reviewer (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pistonhead (Paperback)

Grab hold of your armchair for a funny, trashy, multi-layered and finely nuanced study of a headbanging guitar player who happens to be a real human being. Charlie Sinclair is not a superstar; during the day he works on an assembly line (when they had such things in America) and he's smart enough to appreciate the parallels between a factory and a rock band: they both depend upon a steady output of product. Surrounding him at Evergreen Software are a motley crew (no pun intended) of temporary workers who are worse off than he is--they are psychotic or have Down Syndrome or are bipolar. The portraits are unflinching but sympathetic, and the characters have real depth.

There are many terrific scenes--when Charlie has (unsatisfying) sex with the artsy Tamaya; the disastrous concert when Pistonhead opens for L.A. has-been rocker Lizzie Bordan, a thinly-disguised Alice Cooper; Roger, a psychotic on the assembly line, announces that one of his co-workers has been possessed by Satan; the Saturday morning attempted booty call by Charlie's old girlfriend Ariana.

Charlie lives in a world where nothing goes right and success is hard to define. Ultimately he has to pick himself up and plunge into the unknown, and yes, there is a happy ending of sorts: Charlie has nowhere to go but up--literally. This book is a bittersweet portrait of a guy who won't quit even when he's not sure what direction he's running in. Five stars!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly good!, February 27, 2009

By 

Charles Reader (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pistonhead (Paperback)

I bought Pistonhead on a whim and was amazed. This is not one of those mindless tales of rock debauchery; if that's what you want, look elsewhere. Pistonhead is an incisive portrait of a guy who is trying to find his way in the world as an artist. Charlie Sinclair battles a host of adversaries: drug addiction (not his--the band's singer); a bizarre factory day job that is something out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; groupies and family members who see in him what they want; pigheaded kids from his old neighborhood; but above all, his own narrow definition of himself. Yes, it is a "coming of age" novel, but one that speaks to a gritty urban sensibility informed by the artistic aspirations of the protagonist.

Oh yes, there is a romantic interest, and one that has a twist at the end (after all, this is an entertaining novel). The rock concert scenes put you onstage with the band, but you also experience the grind of the assembly line and the cold brutality of the company when the meager jobs are sent overseas. There is a hot sex scene, but the hero, Charlie, is left exhausted and feeling quite used by his oversexed companion. All in all, Pistonhead is a remarkable novel that goes to the heart of the American experience.