Pistonhead

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.

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.