Life in the world of professional music requires incredible devotion but pays big rewards. Your body clock is skewed toward night-time; touring is an endless parade of sound checks, hotel rooms and road food; success for most is a long incremental climb. But you're doing what you love most in the whole world -- and there's no substitute for the reception from a room full of people who love it too.
Based on interviews with more than a hundred working musicians conducted over more than twenty years, this book covers every aspect of the music life: starting out, playing the first gig, making a record, living on the road, crafting the perfect set, writing great songs, and much more. Among the musicians who share their thoughts are: Harry Connick Jr., Gene Simmons, Tim Rice, Bruce Springsteen, Leo Kottke, Phil Everly, Jerry Garcia, Robbie Robertson, Paul Simon, Donald Fagen, John Lee Hooker, Jim Webb, Frank Zappa, Keith Richards, Carole King, Randy Newman, Neil Sedaka, Brenda Lee, John Sebastian, Bruce Hornsby, George Thorogood, Leonard Cohen, and many more. The result is a lifetime's worth of wisdom and experience that will open the eyes of fans and musicians alike.
After winning the Dejur award for fiction at CCNY(later won by Walter Mosley) and the Deems Taylor award for journalism from ASCAP, my review of Bruce Springsteen's second album is published in the Sunday New York Times, launching a freelance career in which I publish an article a week in one publication or another for something like 13 years. During the same time, I produce eight books, including three young adult novels for Houghton Mifflin. "An animated funny book," hails The Horn Book about the first. "Ray is a winning narrator," says Kirkus about the second. "Wry, funny, knowledgeable and shrewd," says School Library Journal about the third.
Aside from The Disco Handbook, my best seller is The Face of Rock & Roll: Images of a Generation (Holt), which was even hailed in Creem Magazine. This was followed by When Rock Was Young ("A fine work of impressionistic nostalgia," The Baltimore Sun) and When the Music Mattered ("Notable and worthwhile, insightful and evocative," Publishers Weekly).
After creating the first music video column in USA Today, I help start GUITAR For the Practicing Musician, which will become the most successful music magazine launched in the 80s, and edit the first 100 issues. During this period Hipper Than Our Kids is published by Schirmer. "One of the best books about the boomers and their generation," said Greg Shaw.
After jumping to another dream job as a record producer at BMG, now Sony BMG, I continue writing for Musician and Entertainment Weekly and compiling annual reference books on songs for Gale Research, leading to The Rock Song Index: the 7500 Most Important Songs of the Rock and Roll Era (Schirmer) which is praised by Booklist for its "concise, often excellent commentary" and the Bomp Bookshelf "Pollock is perhaps the most important scholar of American pop music."
In 2002, I compile over 100 interviews into Working Musicians: Defining Moments from the Road, the Studio and the Stage (Harper Collins)."A marathon Phish concert of a book," (Variety). "Marvelous, compulsively readable,"(Paul Williams). In 2005, the second, greatly revised, edition of The Rock Song Index comes out (Routledge) "Music fans will find plenty of satisfaction." (Gale Reviews)
Now I have completed my latest novel, first for adults, The Next Year Effect, a fictionalized memoir (are there any other kind) based on the lives of one of the rock and roll era's most romantic and tragic songwriting couples, but more importantly, a culmination of my experiences in and out of the music business and the writing business for the last thirty years.
