For Those About to Rock: A Road Map to Being in a Rock Band
By Dave Bidini
Tundra, 138 pages, $12.99
It's the first day of class and Professor Bidini has expelled everyone who believes 40 is not old.
"You have no right reading this book," he scolds. "It isn't for you. It's for those who wouldn't be caught dead sitting next to you on the bus."
By rights, I shouldn't have read For Those About to Rock. It's too late for me. But man, I could have used its wisdom 20 some years ago, when, too green to sense the danger, I was seduced by rock and roll.
The temptation began innocently; it always does. For me, it was an AC/DC album, coincidentally entitled For Those About to Rock (We Salute You), released in the summer of 1981. The record sleeve was gold, I remember, and opened up like a book. Better still, my local record shop included a free AC/DC T-shirt with every purchase. The shirt was black, with a gold cannon pointing erect across the front.
On that day, I did what many kids my age did. I rushed home, crawled into that shirt and put on the record. An air-guitar frenzy ensued wherein I used every move in my arsenal: the windmill, the high kick, even the scissor leap off the mattress. Having stopped only to flip the LP, I didn't notice that my free AC/DC T-shirt had melted on my body, disintegrated from the heat of my nascent rocking. Cheap fabric? Perhaps. I took it as a sign, and embarked on a painful and futile journey toward the rock and roll dream, with no Bidini to guide me.
Dave Bidini is a rock veteran. A co-founder of the Rheostatics, he has been at the forefront of the Canadian music scene for two decades. You couldn't ask for a better teacher.
In For Those About to Rock, Bidini offers a distillation of hard-won wisdom. Beginning with the basics -- like choosing an instrument and a band name -- he leads us through the turmoil and triumphs of a life servicing the muse.
The book dispels some the most enduring myths about rock and rock musicians. There is no guide to orgy etiquette, no how-to-safely-decapitate-a-chicken diagrams, nor are there pointers on dealing with dealers. Instead, Bidini gives his class a journeyman's perspective on the music business and the business of survival.
Bidini's world is not Canadian Idol, and his idea of "making it" has nothing to do with caviar and limousines. (Making it big for Bidini is after-hours access to a record shop in Moncton.) Rather, the book details the daily grind of a working-class musician on an endless tour along frozen highways. It's the story of lost luggage and bruised egos. In it, we find sage advice on maintaining a healthy diet on the road and tips to overcoming situations of . . . let's just say compromised hygiene.
That Bidini is a fan and student of music is clear. Equal parts career guide and history lesson, For Those About to Rock tells not only how to get where you're going, but where it all came from in the first place. Bidini offers a condensed version of rock history, a contextualization sorely needed at a time when dead celebrities sell vacuum cleaners and history is a jumble. The book is an attempt to indoctrinate a generation, to sway impressionable minds away from the pop mirage and toward the sometimes gritty, anti-romantic reality.
Still, he writes, a musician's job is "creating something as wild and beautiful as you were on the day the doctor held you upside down and you cried your first tear."
Some of the material is rehashed from Bidini's first book, 1998's On a Cold Road, but he should be forgiven for this: People of a certain age tend to repeat themselves. For Those About to Rock is unlikely to inspire your children to run off with a travelling band, but it will better prepare them should they chose to.
Mark David Dunn is a recovering rock star and a graduate student at Wilfrid Laurier University, and a poet and essayist. His last CD, Floodgate, can be found in discount bins across the continent.
Chapter One
Readers can find the first chapter of For Those About to Rock today on our website, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/bookclub.
