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The Road To Nowhere

How to be a successful failure in the music industry!

Johnny Samson

$23.95   $21.59

Paperback

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English
Riverflow Books
21 June 2021
So what's it really like to play in a band? The budding rock star sets off on the road with high hopes of stardom, glamour and riches, but reality soon kicks in. The Road to Nowhere follows the trail of the journeyman musician - free from the chains of any degree of commercial success and able instead to dedicate a life to sending hundreds of unanswered emails in a vain attempt to get a gig at the Dog & Duck for $20 on a Tuesday night. A thread runs through it of the author's own hilarious and (predominantly) disastrous experiences, and dogged refusal to learn from the lessons repeatedly presented.

Be it tales of learning to play, forming a band, the rehearsal room, the recording studio, playing live or doing a photo-shoot, anyone that has played in a band will recognise the places visited within these pages. If you're not into travelling, but you're curious about foreign lands, then this might answer some questions. And those innocent souls that are considering the idea of setting off on their own musical adventure may gain some useful advice - perhaps not enough to save them, but at least they'll know what to pack...

By:  
Imprint:   Riverflow Books
Dimensions:   Height: 198mm,  Width: 129mm,  Spine: 13mm
Weight:   240g
ISBN:   9780473573621
ISBN 10:   0473573628
Pages:   244
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

My name is Johnny Samson, and I was born in Wiltshire, England, in 1974, eldest son of a sailor and a seamstress. I excelled in mediocrity at grammar school, where in 1989 I was voted most likely to have a commercially unsuccessful career in the music industry and write a book about it. I fulfilled this prediction with alacrity, which is why you're reading this. I was writing songs from an early age, and my love of music, writing and free stuff led me to working for a few independent music fanzines that you've never heard of circa 1990. I began playing in bands around the same time, which remained a constant as I hopped between dole cheques and temporary employment in Smalltown England (a home counties town absolutely indistinguishable from about fifty other home counties towns). I met my future partner and attended their wedding to somebody else in 1998, before their untimely deportation from the UK the following year. The upshot of this was the pair of us moving to Australia in 2000, where I continued to lose money hand-over-fist as a semi-professional musician for the next two decades. Despite writing more than 300 songs, playing well over 500 gigs, and releasing 14 (ish) albums I notably failed to attain any financial success, and resorted to any number of part time jobs to support myself. Nevertheless, I continued to write, finding myself involved in some thrilling creative endeavours, including the writing and design of training manuals for business process analysts, product catalogues for hydraulic component wholesalers, web copy for beauty therapists and proof-reading local council newsletters. In 2019 I realised that I now had considerable expertise in the area of playing in bands that nobody has ever heard of, and decided to write a book about it - The Road to Nowhere. This proved both enormously rewarding and far cheaper than recording another album, not to mention much easier than finishing my first novel.

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