A number of real-life rock critics, both paid hacks and enthusiastic amateurs, endured my annoying, naïve questions over the past two years as this project slowly creaked to life. If the details in this book are correct, they can take credit. If I got stuff wrong, it’s not their fault. Here they are, in no particular order: Jim DeRogatis, Henry Owings, Bethany Klein, Dan DeLuca, John Strausbaugh, Kenan Hebert, Andrew Earles, Monica Kendrick, Elisa Ludwig, Glenn Kenny, and Greg Beets. I’m also tremendously grateful to Jim Roll, who allows my band to exist, and to the other members of the Neal Pollack Invasion, Dakota Smith, John Williams, and Neil Cleary. And many thanks are due Jerod Gunsberg, Joanne Abrams, Jane Lerner, and Dan Shepelavy from The Telegraph Company, my agent, Daniel Greenberg, my editors David Hirshey, John Williams, and Jeff Kellogg, Carrie Kania and Amy Baker from HarperAudio, Carl Lennertz and Jen Hart, Ben Brown and the Book Punk crew, the organizers of Philadelphia’s own 215 Festival, my parents, Regina, Elijah, and Hercules, and all the friends I’ve made along the lonesome road from independent publishing nobody to corporate sellout gutter monkey. People, I have so much love to pass around, but the media wants to destroy the world that we’ve all built together. If you give an interview without my permission, it’s over, do you hear? Over. Sweet Jewish God, I can’t take the pressure anymore.
So with that in mind, these acknowledgments really go out to those who’ve doubted me, mocked me, called me a “one-trick retardo pony,” or said that I had no business following my dream of becoming the world’s leading rock novelist. Well, after ten years of working nearly five hours a day, I’m taking my rightful place at the table of the American literary canon. And where are you now? Nowhere, that’s where! This bullet train cannot be stopped, and you don’t have a ticket! Not now. Not ever. Up yours, wadbutts! I’ve won! You can suck my big fat best-selling dick!