Originally posted March 30, 2013:
It's about twelve-thirty a.m., June something 1985. I've been watching and recording bootlegged videos off MTV all day. I have a lot of videos recorded, but there's three in a row that really got my creative juices flowing: Scorpions' "Big City Nights," Y & T's "Summertime Girls," and Bon Jovi's "In and Out of Love."
"Big City Nights" shows some of the Scorpions' time on the road, so there's a lot of concert footage, getting on airplanes, riding around in limo's, running around backstage, etc., etc. "Summertime Girls," as well as "In and Out of Love," shows the members of each band running around on the beach. The Bon Jovi video starts off with a crusty old manager dropping off Jon and the boys at the boardwalk, warning them they've got twenty-four hours to goof off before they have to get back to work.
Hmm…wouldn't it be cool to live the life of a heavy metal rock band? Isn't that just the coolest thing in the world for a sixteen-year-old who just discovered that she really digs this kind of music? So…her imagination being what it is, and when she likes to fantasize about how much more exciting her life could be, she makes up a little story about it…a rock band on tour…and all the crazy things that happen to it…
Three videos later, after Motley Crue's "Smokin' In the Boys' Room" and Lita Ford's "Gotta Let Go," there's a second recording of Helix's "Deep Cuts the Knife." I taped it again because I missed the beginning of it the first time. I have fallen in love with Helix guitarist Paul Hackman, thinking he's one of the coolest-looking guys I've ever seen.
And Jon Warren was born. The ultimate heavy metal fantasy man. Tall, dark, handsome, smart, sexy, talented, funny…
Along with his counterparts: A phenom guitarist who closely resembles the young Richie Sambora. A drummer who looks, and surprisingly, acts, exactly like Motley Crue's Tommy Lee. Rudolf Schenker's doppelganger has also been created. And, well, there wasn't any one person who inspired the creation of the blonde, blue-eyed sex god lead singer, but you can pretty much fill in the blank with anyone from Vince Neil to David Lee Roth to Bret Michaels.
I think Letterman was on that night. Back when he came on after Johnny Carson on NBC. I was drinking ginger ale and eating Butterfinger candy bars. I grabbed a green three-subject notebook and started writing, thinking I might have another cool short story to write for Ebony Rose, my high school's literary magazine. But the pen just kept flowing, scribbling out the cries of teenage groupies and the woes of drinking too much beer, my brain trying to find creative ways of disguising profanity. The hours went by, and pages kept turning, and the thing just kept getting longer…and longer…and longer…
Was it about three in the morning when I finally decided to stop? My guys had successfully made it to Chicago and had robbed a convenience store. Why I had them sneaking out of their hotel to raid a Tiger Mart? I can't say that I'd know. It just sounded like a funny prank. Maybe someone had mentioned it in the one Circus magazine I owned at the time, that I read cover to cover, every single word, including the classified ads at the back. "Rock On Tour," the cover read. Go figure. Yet another inspiration right there.
I wrote on my opus for over two years. My friend Christine Cooper was my one reader. She loved it, and helped me with ideas. I had three notebooks and a three-ring binder filled with handwritten copy. I had no idea where I was going with it, how it would end or anything. I was just writing.
I was about to start my senior year when I realized I'd made a big mistake. This band had been on tour with no opening act? What the hell. Nobody toured alone! But I'd become a huge Heart fan by then, and thought, hey, y'know, we need a real woman in this story. Let's assign them an opening band and have a chick as the lead singer, someone for my perfect male creation to fall head over heels in love with, since he's so determined to do away with the one-night-stand thing…ba-da-bing!
Her name was Haley at first, because Pat Benatar's daughter was Haley. And she was Haley for quite a while, until my niece was born… with the same name. Oops. Something didn't work then. I felt kinda weird about that. But the character basically looked like me if I were Ann Wilson. Her guitar player cousin was a big boy named Clint, who looked amazingly like Ratt's Robbin Crosby. Her other guitar player was a watered-down Warren DeMartini, who looked like the guy I knew in high school who drew me into this genre of music anyway. So I named the character Eric. Since I used one guitarist from Helix, turning him into a bass player, I made the other Helix guitarist, Brent Doerner, the bass player for the new band. Drums? Needed an opposite to the tall, skinny Terry. Trace went through a metamorphasis-he started as Leonard Haze(Y & T), then A.J. Pero(Twisted Sister), but I think he's more like a young Jason Bonham now.
Okay. Now I have the opening band, and the start of a dysfunctional heavy metal love story. I got them through the South-Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and right after they finished playing Live Aid, that's where I stopped.
For thirteen years. By 1987, I was in my first semester of college, and started having a real life of my own. My "hair" metal guys took a backseat. A way, way, way back seat.
Sanford, Colorado. Late April, 2001. I've just returned from taking four students to Adams State College to participate in a foreign language festival. It's Friday afternoon, it's warm, and my husband is on the road doing sound gigs, and is going to be gone for a while, probably about a month or so. I finally have the TV to myself, and the first thing I turn on is Vh-1, catching the last few "Top 40 Hair Bands of All-Time."
Holy cow. Is that what they call it now?
"Hair Bands" is followed by two Behind the Music episodes: Motley Crue and Bon Jovi. It seems to be Hair Metal night on Vh-1. I'm inspired. There wasn't any company coming to visit, so I wouldn't be stressing about that. I'm all alone with nothing to do but teach some summer school. Whad'ya know. I think I'm gonna start writing again.
I bring my personal computer home from the band hall. I drive to Alamosa and dig around in the storage unit for the box with all my notebooks in it. I have one floppy disk that I started writing the first chapter on with my dad's old laptop that had Windows 3.1 on it. I set up shop in the living room, and I'm ready to go.
I start typing what's been handwritten. Oops. See some problems here. Is it just me, or is it blindingly obvious that this was written by someone who: has never been drunk before, has never had sex before, has never stayed for any length of time in a hotel before…or has never even played music professionally before? I didn't even have the gear names right. And my love story kicked off way too easily. Needed more tension, more…drama.
Gotta fix this.
And my heroine? She still didn't even have a decent name. I tried two others before, during those sporadic moments I'd come up with a scene out of sheer boredom during the previous thirteen years. Then Hardcore, with George C. Scott and the former Mrs. Kurt Russell, Season Hubley, came on Encore. Hey, that's a cool name. Sounds like a "hippie" name. Hey, her parents could be former hippies. And she could be from the South instead of New Jersey, like I'd originally planned. What the hell do I know about New Jersey? New Orleans would be cooler. I know something about that. Besides, I can't have her be a former high school girlfriend of Jon Bon Jovi's because he did actually marry his former high school girlfriend. That's rock-n-roll folklore I can't screw with. Especially since they're still married twenty years later!
She kept her freaky last name, that I made up off the top of my head because I wanted something that sounded as hip as "Benatar." Then it became her stage name, because no one from Slidell, Louisiana would be named "Trovisar."
Anyway…I had to dirty up my story some. And maybe I made it too dirty, so I cleaned it up some. But the more I see how erotica is popular, I think I'll keep it dirty. It's also being told from a man's point-of-view, so he wouldn't exactly tell it like a googly-eyed teenage girl. And virgins can't write about sex, no matter how hard they try. Even if they read dirty books or take a peek at a Penthouse Letters…no. You gotta be in the middle of that action to understand that stuff.
Nor do heavy rockers from the eighties talk like Sunday School teachers. I knew that back in 1985, but since it started as a school publication, I couldn't exactly write "motherfucker" in the dialogue then. It's in there now. Along with various other choice words…
I wrote all summer. Couldn't wait to get home from summer school and Upward Bound teaching to write. I'd stay up all hours, drinking Black Velvet and Coke, eating Bagel Bites and chocolate-covered peanuts, smoking Turkish Blend Menthol Camels, and I'd take the trip back, surrounded by distorted guitars and gorgeous men with long hair who looked really good with eyeliner on. I dragged out my CD's of Dokken and Whitesnake and banged my head while tapping away at my keyboard.
I had a blast!!!
Then I went to grad school. And did nothing but write about music education for nine months. *Snore.* Then I moved back to Arkansas, and met someone that I thought would like to read what I had so far, which was still only half the story, even though it was seven hundred pages long. Heather stayed up til two a.m. reading because she couldn't put it down. Then the band left Houston and my printer ran out of ink.
Now what?
Though I shouldn't admit it, I had a lot of time on my hands during my community college teaching hours. Hey! I'll have time to write!! And I found this cool Internet radio station called GotRadio, and one of their "rooms" was the Rockin' 80's. Damn! I haven't heard "The Lumberjack Song" by Jackyl in forever! Why I'd even want to hear it again…but guess what? There's also a cool website called MotherMetal.com! And though Paul Hackman's been dead since 1992, Brian Vollmer has kept Helix going! We hair rockers are still out there! And I won't even get into MySpace at this point. (Or Facebook. But Facebook wasn't even around then, I don't think. Twitter was non-existent.)
I must finish the book!!!
I wrote on it some more the summer of '05. Then the show "Rock Star: INXS" came on. And that's how I became friends with Noël. She watched it religiously, and I thought, y'know, she's a rock fan. Another reader! Another victim! Oh, no! She was also the one who saved the newest chapters, after I stupidly left my floppy disk in a computer at the Ashdown campus lab. She rescued it, and although some files were corrupted, she willed me her old thumb drive and the story was safe yet again.
After her first semester of online teaching was done, I gave her the binder. And the next thing I knew, she was hooked also. Then I knew I was in trouble. I really had to finish this crazy thing now. I started sending new chapters to Heather and the next thing I knew they were both at the same point in the story dying to know what was going to happen next. Needless to say, I had my work cut out for me.
I was good up until Christmas of that year. I got to a point where Jon and Season have a big argument and I didn't feel like writing an argument so I could keep the holidays as stress free as possible. So I was stuck. I wanted to be done by the New Year, but I didn't make it. I wrote during registration for the next semester, and that kicked me off again.
Then…I had to finish. Heather and Noël were about to go insane wondering what would happen at the end of "Summer of Glam." (Crummy title, but I couldn't think of anything else.) I stayed up till three in the morning (again), with an Asia Carrera film on in the background, writing the final love scene. I was down to the last chapter, and decided to go to my parents' house for the weekend. I got to the final few paragraphs, and wept. In some ways, I didn't want to finish it. It meant I'd never be able to go back and hang out with my guys again.
It was sad really…
But on Saturday, March 4, 2006, I finished the epilogue. I even took the laptop back into my old bedroom and sat on the floor, writing the last words in almost the exact same location I wrote the first words. It took me over twenty years to finish a story that only takes place over four months.
Wow.
Heather called while on the road to Houston: "I love it!" Both women had the same reaction to other parts of the story: "I was crying, then I was laughing, then I was mad…" Coolness. I'm a literary diva. At least in DeQueen.
I sent some other queries. All turned down. Except for one. This agent was a musician herself so I figured, cool. Her response: "Your prose isn't "edgy" enough," and "I don't like the idea of a has-been looking back." But this was my favorite: "It's too much like watching Vh-1." Okay, I know a lot of people who watch Vh-1. They like Vh-1. That mean they might like the book, too. And how many viewers does Vh-1 have? How many Vh-1 channels are there? Hmmm…she says that like it's a bad thing.
Bitch.
I got that message immediately after I'd just had two Coronas and a shot of tequila. It shouldn't have bothered me then, but it did. I was pissed. I guess I should learn to take rejection better. I especially loved those letters that came back that read: "Dear Writer, Your stuff basically sucks. We don't publish books about drugs, alcohol, music, art, sex, or personal conflicts between individuals. We don't publish books that discuss struggles or life or whatever. We basically publish books about nothing."
Like a Seinfeld episode.
All that aside, I still have the firm belief that I wrote a great book. My other two avid readers, both of them two very different people and two very different readers, loved it. They both sat behind their computers at work and raced to the epilogue without getting fired. I singlehandedly improved their sex lives in the process. *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*
With the emergence of MySpace, (the explosion of other social media), and all the bands that were THERE in the old days with their own profiles (And some still playing, that's so awesome!), I thought well, why not give it its own site! They all say the Internet is a good place to promote your stuff...
I started the MySpace page sometime in 2007, I think? I don't remember. It was after Don & I had moved to Texarkana to the loft. I had originally planned to post the whole thing online, then I read that "why post it all online? Then people could read it for free and not want to eventually BUY it!!" Oh, well, that makes sense. So I just posted the note you're reading now (without this paragraph), a Disclaimer (trust me, it eventually really needed one), and the Prologue.
The uncensored, unabridged version ended up with 355,437 words, and 886 pages. (Yeah, it's long...so??) That's why it's an "opus" and not just a "novel." I'm the Tolkien of heavy metal literature....but this didn't stop those who've taken the journey, because they ended up having a cool time-and hopefully you will too, fellow "Hair Metal" junkies. I know you're still out there!!
I plan on submitting it to a POD publisher, sometime soon. Trying to get it published, as well as continuing to work on the sequel all had to take a back seat to 4 years of graduate school. Now that THAT'S over (THANK GOD!!), I can get on with my life, or...whatever.
Feel free to friend "Rockin' Heaven Down", or the Book Formerly Known As "Rock Opus"!!
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