Rock and Roll Love Story : A Novel

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Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

God
2007-05-16 01:40:00
At the end of The River, Book One, Rocket has a revelation from God that gives him a Number One record. As book two opens, the sudden pressures of fame have him collapsing under the pressure. But the Reverend Jerry Falwell and James Dobson comfort his mother that "at least someone in Hollywood is talking about God."Jerry Falwell died today at 73.

Exotic dancer Monique Alexander is the lithe, sli...
2007-05-15 04:46:00
Exotic dancer Monique Alexander is the lithe, slim 20 something model for Book Three's Krissy Shooter, an Atlantic City go go dancer who captures a 40 something Rocket's attention.
More About: Ique , Nique , Dancer

Still thinking of the book
2007-05-14 19:21:00
I havent posted much about the book lately and I haven't put much down on the third book. As I have said, Book One is ready for the copy editor but I haven't lined someone up just yet.I've been thinking a lot about Book Three, and Rocket's relationship with Krissy Shooter, a penniless dancer half his age. Krissy is a starry eyed optimist who goes after what she wants, and she sees Rocket as a ticket to bigger and better things.Abby Warner on the other hand, is fed up with Rocket and if not for the fact that he is the father of her children, she would not have him in her life. Abby is a pessismist who is down on everything, which is ironic because despite the troubles in her life with Rocket and his illness, she is really quite fortunate.Abby is like a lot of angry conservatives who have more than anyone else but still feel somehow that they are being cheated. They just can't stay in their neutral corner and let it all go by. They have to be on the attack.
More About: Think , King , Still , Thinking

Hot Blooded
2007-05-11 17:40:00
Reese Witherspoon could play the mercurial Abby Warner, Rocket's first wife. Linday Lohan is also a leading contender.
More About: Blood

God Save the Queen
2007-05-08 04:51:00
After he gets famous, Rocket calls up Princess Diana and claims to be related to Mary Queen of Scots. She thinks he is a lunatic but she is a fan of his music.Believe it or not, that's actually an old family legend on the Silone side. I could tell you more about it but I would have to divulge my real paternal surname to prove it. Whether or not we're really distantly related to the British Royal Family, our family really does go back at least 400 years.
More About: Save , The Queen

Keanu Reeves looking very rock and roll, protecte...
2007-05-07 16:31:00
Keanu Reeves looking very rock and roll, protected as the character of Rock et in his later years.
More About: Keanu Reeves , Roll , King , Look

Exotic dancer Monique Alexander is the 20 someth...
2007-05-07 16:29:00
Exotic dancer Monique Alexander is the 20 something, lithe, slender prototype for the character of hippie go go dancer, vegan, witch Krissy Shooter in Book Three.
More About: Ique , Nique , Dancer

Make No Mistake
2007-05-06 19:03:00
Bush is atrocious but let's face it, blogs like mine are doing well enough with Bush in office. He's done some potentially dangerous things with our freedoms but he hasn't even come close to seriously fighting any cultural wars. He hasn't even gone as far as Nixon went to create an enemies list of people he doesn't like. He doesn't listen to us of course but he really doesn't mess with us seriously either. We're free to go about our business.If Al Qaeda and the Taliban were in charge of the US, you could be imprisoned, dissembered, killed for posting notes and photos about rock and roll. The pretty girls in low riders and crop tops that you see occassionally here would be executed as whores, instead of being glorified as sex objects and glamour interests.There wouldn't be a trial; there wouldn't be a chance to confess and repent.Islam even it in it's most moderate and modest forms is a pretty restrictive religion. If people want to worship their God in that fashion and le...
More About: Make , Mist , Mista

The Real Enemy
2007-05-06 17:21:00
Much as I oppose what the Bush Administration has done in Iraq, I think it's worthy to look at the situation objectively. While Iraq and Saddam originally had nothing to do with Al Qaeda and 9/11, it is very true that the war in Iraq has everything to do with Al Qaeda right now.When asked whether the Democratic-led withdrawal of troops from Iraq would make any differance, Al-Zawhari, the Number Two in Al Qaeda said that "the battle would not be over until 300,000 Americans were killed." Let's face it, there are only 150,000 Americans in Iraq today. At present we lost 3,000 people in 9/11 and 3,000 soliders in Iraq, and that is not good enough for Al Qaeda. There aren't but 500,000 combat troops in the entire US Army.Very obviously, Al Qaeda means to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans right here in the United States to achieve its goals. Since they only number a few thousand and are far away with no air force or navy to get here, the only way they could do that would...
More About: Real , Enemy

Twister
2007-05-06 16:21:00
My sympathy and prayers go out to the people in Kansas and other parts of the Midwest that have been rocked by tornados. I've looked into living different places in the US and it really seems to me that Kansas would be a nice place for someone like me to live, but I really couldn't handle the threat of storms. To those of you who make your home there, I sincerely hope that you are okay and that life returns to normal as soon as possible.

Art Work To Return
2007-05-06 15:11:00
One of the things that made this blog go were the JPGs of Hollywood stars and rock dignitaries who either inspired the characters in Rock and Roll Love Story or were slated by me to possibly play the roles in a movie.Those JPGs came from Google and Yahoo, where I assumed they were in the public domain. But I took them all down a while ago because I was unsure of the copyright status and the photographer's legal rights.I am just a little guy and I really cant see why if Google and Yahoo are running these JPGs, that I really can't.If you're a photographer for one of these shots and you have an objection, please email me and I will take your art down.
More About: Work , Return , Turn

Comments Welcomed
2007-05-06 01:31:00
I set this blog up so any real human being can post a response to anything I say. At the moment, 100-200 of you come here every week, mostly from the United States, and very few people have left comments. The majority of comments were supportive or agreed with what I was saying. A few people tried to post links to their own web pages and blogs. I really dont mind if you do that but if its just spam, I will remove it. The only person who ever had a negative comment about anything I said suggested that my sympathy for the American farmer bordered on welfare. Unless its really important to one of my novels, however, I have given up on making statements on most politics. I am anti-war, pro-environment and I believe in some kind of national health insurance. That sounds somewhat liberal but I am also sympathetic to the kind of conservatives who worry that we are losing our manufacturing base and unique American values to foreign competition. I am an American and proud of it.
More About: Comments , Come , Comment , Comm

Looking forward to a good book
2007-05-06 00:47:00
I set out this morning in search of JRR Tolkien's new book, Children of Hurin, but it was sold out everywhere. I have an order in with Amazon and I am eagerly awaiting this Number One Best Seller.When I am not thinking and writing about rock and roll, I am a very big fan of Tolkien, mythology and science fiction authors like Frank Herbert, who created the immensely successful alternative universe known as Dune.My own son has little interest in rock and roll but he is a great fan of Tolkien, mythology and fantasy. It may interest to you that I wrote an earlier unpublished novel when I was 19 years old -- the year I was in the band -- called "Hail the Morning Star" which was about a psychic Stone Age King Arthur type warlord in the mythical land of Lithian. Ironically enough, I choose the word Lithian to signify Stone Age without any hint that I would one day be writing about an unbalanced post punk rock star who was taking Lithium.Someday I hope to publish "Hail" and perhaps my son ...
More About: Book , Good , Ward , Look

Lip sync
2007-05-05 23:55:00
Britney is not a singer or rock star at the moment -- she's a phenomenon like Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan. If I had to guess I would surmise that this story wont have a happy ending. But I could be wrong. Kim Basinger and Cher were bimbos known for their perky abs but as they approached their 30th birthdays they developed a real talent and they both won Oscars. So dont rule Britney out just yet. If she writes some of her own lyrics and actually sings some new songs, the world could be a lot kinder to her.
More About: Sync

Cinco De Mayo
2007-05-05 22:34:00
Johnny Rocket runs into big trouble in Book Two with a narcoterroristic cult called the Santerios -- they're not quite Mexican and not quite Islamic but the have elements of both the Mexican drug gangs and Al Qaeda/Taliban terrorists who control the heroin trade in the United States. They don't like Rocket because he's always meddling in their business in the slums of East Los Angeles and Newark with his charitable efforts known as Angelfire.But late in the game, he gets himself involved in a paramilitary plot ironically engineered by a French Legionaire -- to disastrous results. Bottom line is, Johnny has faulty intelligence and he almost takes half of LA with him. I won't tell you how he gets out of it, but its totally a family intervention.In the original writing, which occured right after 9/11, Rocket was a hero for what he did but as I began seeing the disaster of the Iraq war and the phantom WMDs unfold, I decided that a vigalante rock star was not something I needed to en...
More About: Cinco de Mayo

Four Dead in Ohio
2007-05-04 23:28:00
Today is the 27th anniversary of the killings of four students by the National Guard at Kent State University during an anti-Vietnam war rally.Johnny Rocket was only 10 years old in 1970 but by the time he was a freshman in high school, the Vietnam War was still raging. He believed that the soldiers who were fighting the war were brave and noble men and that some things are worth dying for, but he virulently opposed the war in Vietnam.Set in the present, Book Three tells us of his horror at the 9/11 catastrophy at the World Trade Center, from which his music company had just recently vacated before the attack, and his anger at the Bush Administration for getting us into another unrelated quagmire in Iraq.It's a difficult subject to write about because while Saddam and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and Al Qaeda in 2003, Iraq has everything to do with Al Qaeda at the present.
More About: Ohio , Dead , Four

The sound of the barn door closing behind the lost cow
2007-05-01 03:53:00
The governor of Virginia today closed the gap on the gun ownership law that allowed a deranged mental patient to buy two automatic weapons which he used to kill 31 people.This is too little, too late and in fact, it is precisely the wrong thing to do. The new law enters anyone who is involuntarily committed to a mental hospital or judged to be a danger to himself because of biological illness into the instant criminal database available to gun dealers and God knows who else. That is exactly what should not happen. That is a draconian violation of the civil rights of the mentally ill.Virginia has taken one giant step into the dark ages where mentally ill people were treated like criminals.In New Jersey, mental patients are not entered into the instant criminal database. Instead anyone who wants to buy a gun must obtain a permit for it which must be approved by the police in his or her town after an extensive investigation involving personal references and interviews by the cops. The ...
More About: Lost , Sound , Barn , Sing , Behind

More later
2007-04-28 03:34:00
This post is really just a sign post for all of you out there who have been wondering if I've been doing any thinking about the book since Earth Day. Yes, indeed, I've been doing a lot of thinking about all three books, but at this point I am not doing any writing.I have a name for the 21 year old hippie, go go dancer, vegetarian witch who romances the mid Forties Rocket in third book. Her stage name is Krissy Shooter and no one knows her real name -- Rocket calls her Kissy. She is slim, blonde and very lithe and petite, just like The Fabulous Shelly.I dont have much else about the third book yet but it does take place in Atlantic City. Originally it was going to take place in Daytona Beach but I thought that a casino hotel might be a better place for an aging rock star from New Jersey.Book One, which is the only book anywhere near publication is on hold right now. Somebody I trust has to read it all the way through and at this point, no one has the time. Many people have read bi...
More About: More , Late

Futile
2007-04-27 04:30:00
51 votes is enough to pass any bill but its not nearly enough to over-ride a Presidential veto, so in a sense the Congress's efforts to end the Iraqi war are an exercise in futility. We're stuck in this abominable war until some time after January 2009 when a new president takes control of the situation. And dont look for it to end there either. 65% of the people may be against the war but Guiliani still beats either Hillary or Obama and he isnt talking withdraw. The job before those of us who oppose the war is decide upon the Democrat who has the best chance of taking Guiliani down. Or perhaps convincing Guiliani that extending the war would be a disaster. That would have to take down a lot of Republicans in Congress, and I'm not sure Middle America is quite ready to hand it all to the liberals right now. So call me pessimistic. I dont think the war can be won, just pulling out without a plan would be a disaster, and escalating the war and sending more US troops to die and more ...

Earth Day
2007-04-22 14:34:00
Rock and Roll Love Story is set in the Highlands of New Jersey, and it begins with Rocket's lament for the vanishing wilderness.
More About: Earth , Earth Day

Marketing
2007-04-22 02:12:00
This blog has attracted just under 7,000 people, a few of them influential in rock and roll, journalism and academia. As the costs of self-publishing and basic editing drop, the book gets closer to a reality. And the more ambitious the marketing effort I am planning is getting. Originally I had hoped to sell just enough books to pay for the publishing. If everyone who logged on here bought a book, that would be more than enough for that.Now I have said in the past that I am not really looking to be famous here. I dont want to be a household name with all the hassles that involves. I do want some recognition from the rock and roll and publishing world, I would like my book to sell well enough in rock, mental health and certain journalistic/academic circles.And of course I would love to be rich enough that so that we could retire and I could support my family on the proceeds of my novels. Unless I win the megamillions lottery however I dont think that is going to happen. I dont have a...
More About: Marketing , Mark

End the Stigma
2007-04-20 02:43:00
Of course when something like Virginia Tech happens, immediately everyone demonizes the killer as a "psychotic". They want people who have been to a mental hospital to be put into the criminal background check list.Is this really productive? I mean yes, you shouldn't be able to buy a gun.But is it really necessary to label the mentally ill criminals in this day and age? Will anyone ever be ever to work once they've been put in a database like that?Nobody is going to submit to treatment if we persist in this awful stigma...
More About: Stigma

By Week's End, More Heat than Light
2007-04-20 02:00:00
By now we've all seen the video of the Virginia Tech gunman. We've heard his sad, pathetic story and had a week to consider the terribly tragic deaths of 32 students.Glorifying the killer won't help; it won't prevent future tragedies to demonize him either. He was a deeply flawed, mentally ill young man that society couldn't or wouldn't help. There are many such individuals amongst us. Given the mad fascination this country has with high tech, military style weaponry, virtually any one of them could turn into a mass murderer.I handled the issue of guns and mental illness in Rock and Roll Love Story : Book Two : The Ocean. The story was originally written one way after 9/11 -- after the failure of intelligence of the Iraqi war, I completely rewrote the story. I won't give away the ending but I am more comfortable with the new ending than I was a while back ago. I think it tells the story in such a way that people might understand how to prevent future Virginia Techs.Bottom lin...
More About: Heat , Week , Light , More

Week of Silence
2007-04-19 02:33:00
I'm still not posting in difference to the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting.I have no words of blame for the university or the police who might have prevented this. I will save the lecture about gun control for another day.Matt Laport, 20, of Dumont, one of the victims lived not too far from where I am. He worked at the Cresskill town pool with my nephew. He was apparentally a great kid.My deepest condolences to all the families.
More About: Week , Silence

Too Many God Damned Guns
2007-04-16 19:44:00
Virginia Tech.Oh I know all about the right to bear arms and the need for hunters to control the wild animal population. I'm sympathetic to animal rights people but I am not an extremist.But let's face it, there are far too many guns in this country and they're much to easier for criminals and nutbags to get. We have really strict gun control laws in New Jersey and the legimate hunters and sportsmen have to pony up with a lot of ID and credibility to legally own a firearm and use it in the few areas of this state where hunting is still allowed.Whether its the streets of Newark however or the bayous of the deep South, lax gun control in other states is flooding us with cheap, deadly and illegal weapons. It's not easy to kill 32 people in a classroom full of students who are able to put up resistance. That must have some mother of a gun. Someone said they heard 80 or 100 shots in rapid succession. Only a military style assault rifle or a machine gun could have done that.There's a...
More About: Guns , Damn

I see France
2007-04-16 00:28:00
Minimalism...and actually, as my old friend Pete, the inspiration for Duncan, Rocket's towering business manager, said if you lived in Paris or Rome and had a library card, you wouldn't need the car, the expensive health insurance policy or the laptop. You could just get yourself an Ipod and hoof it or use mass transit and the national medical system...
More About: France , Franc

Girl of My Dreams
2007-04-15 18:42:00
There was a story on Yahoo today about Alicia Silverstone, the movie star. She was saying how fat and unhappy she was as a resource consuming multi-millionaire American living off steak and donuts. When she married a penniless musician, she converted to a vegetarian diet, bought a hybrid car, adopted a minimalist lifestyle and started turning her house into a green, alternative energy saving center with solar panels, energy star appliances and high tech, electricity conserving light blubs. She lost all kinds of weight, saved a ton of money,never gets sick and is really happy and excited about life.When you read Rock and Roll Love Story, keep in mind that the real life character of Madeline, Rocket's first girlfriend, was a dead ringer for Alicia when she was 16 years old and starring in all the Aerosmith videos.
More About: Dreams , Girl , Dream

Road Trip
2007-04-15 18:18:00
I've just about had it with working for a living and suburbia and the American Dream too...The average low budget motel room has everything I need -- cable tv, bed, table & chair, microwave, small fridge, dresser, coffee maker, bathroom...give me an acoustic guitar, a good car with a stereo and CD player, a laptop with ev-do wireless Internet, a cell phone, and my collection of about 30 "best of"classic rock CDs, and food and gas money and a week'sworth of casual clothes, and I'm happy...Minimalism my ass. That's actually a shit load of luxuries compared to what the average third world person has. In a perfect world, there would be national health insurance, and I wouldn't the union card either.There might be a pretty girl at my side with her duffle bag full of clothes and a harmonica. But then again, I dont want to be tied down. I dont want somebody to tell me to roll over all night long because I snore...I can rent the girl too...The less I own, the better off I'll be. This ...
More About: Trip , Road Trip , Road

But dont listen to me
2007-04-13 00:57:00
A 10 year old girl told me today that I was really out of touch because I did not know that Hilary Duff is out and Hannah Montana is in.
More About: Listen

All in a name
2007-04-10 22:56:00
Rocket's first wife is named Abby Lane Warner, as in Warner Brothers, as she likes to say. The Abby Lane part is for Abbey Road by the Beatles. The Warner Brothers is based on something someone I love once said to me about her family.There is a reason why Abby and Shelly have Jewish sounding first names, but are really white Anglo-Saxons. But I am not going to tell you what it is!
More About: Name