This book was written by the man formerly known as SL Duff, who had previously been S.L. Duff, which stood for Screamin’ Lord Duff. An inappropriate appropriation of one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most unforgettable showmen, I’d nicked it to differentiate the writer from the musician, Bruce Duff. The musician came first, but along the way the musician was asked to become the editor of a start-up local music newspaper being jump-started in the outback of the Inland Empire, here in California. Yours Truly, Bruce, pre-SL, had no experience or knowledge of how such a thing was done but accepted the job. Why not? This was in 1977.
Roll the clock forward a few years and I’d moved to Hollywood to find fame and everything else, and utilized my previous editing and writing experience to sideline into music magazine freelancing. Soon after, I began using the S.L. Duff byline and it stuck. After a time I dropped the periods because SL without them seemed like the way a real writer would do it. SL Duff might one day write a novel about a descent into some kind of hopeless addiction, or maybe a pilgrimage to the third world on an undercover op, or something equally grand.
That didn’t happen (and why would it?), because SL Duff was always secondary to Bruce Duff, who maintained real employment within the music industry and was usually the member of at least two or three co-existing performing and recording bands at any given time. Write a book? No. But I would fly to Atlanta on Geffen Record’s dime to interview the chainsaw-wielding Jackal because no one else that wrote for that magazine would take the assignment, as they were embarrassed by the very nature of it. My thinking in these instances always was, what the hell, I’ve never been to Atlanta and I’ll bet it’s nice.
Along the way, both Bruce and SL got to travel the world on indie rock tours as well as assignments for real magazines paid for by record labels back when such things actually occurred—before budget cuts, file sharing, MP3s, and bloggers obliterated these promotional extravagances. One such indie rock tour took place in early 1993 when myself and five other gentlemen piled into a small van and toured through eleven European countries in nine weeks. We were all issued a detailed tour itinerary from the booking agency responsible for this jaunt. Each page was a new day, a new town, a new venue, and just maybe a new adventure. The back of each page was blank. As we rolled through this tour, I got in the habit of jotting down notes about each day, which I figured, when coupled with all the photos I was taking, would put together a nice little picture to help my brain keep these memories sorted out. Someday in the old rockers’ home this would bring a tear and an ever-so-slight smile. Not long after we got going, these notes and this tour itinerary turned into something of a journal.
Back in Los Angeles, following the tour—and a short time after my girlfriend decided it was time to leave Hollywood, leave me, and get back to Ohio where everything made a bit more sense—I took a look at my scrawlings on the backside of the itinerary pages and found myself somewhat amused. Thumbing through the pages, I sat back and asked myself: “Could there be a book lurking in here? Do I have a worthwhile story to tell?”
Convinced that I did, I began pounding it out, night after night, and in a few months it had a beginning, middle, and an end. I finished the draft sometime in 1994 and then pondered what to do. A few of my friends had parlayed being rock critics/music writers into the publishing game, but mostly we’re talking about music bios, ghostwriting, tell-alls, or analytical music think pieces. In other words, the same subject matters as the magazine articles they were writing, only many times longer—and with a bunch of photos. One of these folks made an introduction to a notable publisher who specialized in books about music and musicians. They reviewed the book and informed me that, while it was well written, it had no star power and wouldn’t attract an audience. They wanted sex, drugs, and platinum-selling rock ‘n’ roll.
I refused to accept that and knocked on some more doors, but soon found that the publishing business as a whole was in agreement—unpublishable. I put the manuscript on my nightstand under a CD of William Burroughs bedtime stories and forgot about it for years and years.
The clock rolls forward even farther, and in 2005 I decide to euthanize SL Duff once and for all. In the nearly three decades that I’d manhandled the word processor, the chore of writing about music had soured for me. The pay hadn’t really improved, promo items were becoming non-existent (you want me to download it, burn my own CD, and then write about it??—again, this was 2005. No iTunes for me yet). Trips on the label promo budget had vanished, the music one had to write about was more fleeting as the one-hit wonder became the norm and the artist with a multi-release career became the oddity, and the editing my work was being subjected to became more nonsensical. Sound bites were preferred to developed opinions. Meanwhile, I had set up a Pro Tools studio in my house, and the thought of writing about music I wasn’t terribly interested in as opposed to spending my time multi-tracking just seemed pointless.
The clock limps forward yet again, and now as we scrape into the Twenty-Teens, we live in a world where nostalgia for the 1990s is a real thing. At the time the first draft of this piece was typed, That ‘70s Show was a hit television program. When the real 1970s were happening, we had Happy Days. The twenty-year cycle had caught up with me. The Flannel Channel is real, and we have a Mudhoney triple play coming up right after this break sponsored by your favorite energy drink.
My book was now capable of informing of a lost time, when indie rock could survive on the road with a real, functioning indie label back at home that was working a catalog and had a staff of just-out-of-college go-getters. They would peddle vinyl records for a slim profit and CDs for something hefty. No one made much money, but no one cared too much because everyone was inspired by what they were doing—or at least that’s how we remember it now.
So it’s 2014, and SL Duff is sitting at the Mac typing a foreword to the book he’d forgotten about. My wife—who, truth be told, is the culprit who snuck the manuscript off to a publisher when I wasn’t looking and hence pulled the stake from the chest of this dormant vampire, informs me that SL must remain deceased. Since his previous departure, Bruce Duff has asserted himself in a variety of ways into the social consciousness, and the intrusion of SL Duff would only serve to “dilute my brand.” So my nom de plume is anti-brand, my ego must bow to my options. My brand? That’s what Nabisco has, not me. It is a different world from the one that birthed this od(d)yssey.
With that said, my new friend, let me gently take your hand and guide you into a forgotten time, before laptops, cell phones, texting, tweeting, Blu-rays, Bluetooth (teeth?), going green, MP3s, streaming media, digital recording, 9/11, the TSA, etc. We’re going back to an era when the A&R exec (should such a creature still exist by the time this downloads on your tablet) would actually listen to the first ten seconds of your best song and glance at your photo taken in front of a brick wall before dismissing you as not having a single and/or being video-unfriendly. Nowadays he/she skips that step and goes straight to your paltry four-digit Facebook friends tally. Hopefully you’re reading this before Facebook is just another chunk of nostalgia, rolled up like a dead fish in yesterday’s papers. Buckle up…it’s the law.