I. INTRODUCTION

This book is an indispensable guide for anyone attempting to create a rock ’n’ roll group. Even if the reader has created one already or has a history of such endeavors, this volume will still be required reading.

This book was inspired by the cooking shows that are in such great abundance nowadays. Such shows serve to demonstrate to an audience, often comprised of culinary novices, how to make a particular meal, sometimes a quite refined one, using raw materials (vegetables, grains, spices, and so on).

These cooking programs serve to demystify the production of food, inviting the ordinary eater to take the reins of his or her destiny in preparing their own meals, which were once imagined to spring up miraculously from a particular person, people, or culture—not unlike the egg from a hen.

When a rock ’n’ roll group attains success, there is typically a fascination with its origins. “How did such a phenomenon come to pass?” everyone asks, simply because making a group is so difficult, and finding persons with the correct creative chemistry and sense of mutual commitment so unusual. The origin stories of rock ’n’ roll groups have therefore taken their place alongside the historical and religious myths of time immemorial.

Indeed, the creation of a group is looked at as a bit of magic, like an act of God, or a bolt of lightning. This is similar to the way in which primitive man saw the continuance of the species or the cathedral of nature. Like the prescientifics, would-be group members still engage in hocus-pocus—activities akin to rain dances and midsummer maypole fertility rites—when attempting to create their group. Ritualistic drug consumption, shamanistic induction ceremonies, and the reliance on industry hustlers, confidence men, and magical documents (otherwise known as “contracts”) are strategies that are as typical as they are wasteful. But the lesson which we can glean from the aforementioned cooking shows is that creating a rock ’n’ roll group, like making a fancy meal, hasn’t anything to do with superstitions. It’s just a matter of applying scientific know-how in a systematic and controlled manner.

The people in charge don’t want you to know this, though they learned it themselves long ago.

As opposed to being the outcome of chance meetings, drug visions, or divine ordination, most of the successful groups—such as Ohio Express, 1910 Fruitgum Company, Hot Chocolate, Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Flirts, J.J. Fad, Indeep, and Boney M—were actually constructed quite calculatedly out of raw materials by savvy managers who understood exactly how to concoct what an audience of music enthusiasts would respond to.

Meanwhile, the mystification of the process is perpetuated via legend-weaving institutions such as rock fanzines, fawning hagiographies, and VH1’s Behind the Music, all of which are specifically designed to obfuscate the path and confuse the aspiring group member from achieving his or her goal. They conspire to trick the ingenue into believing that forming a successful rock ’n’ roll aggregate is akin to winning the lottery or being born rich. But no longer!

With the information revealed in this book, you too will be empowered to create a rock ’n’ roll group, tour the world, and record (or otherwise construct) a body of work, so as to create a myth which might define a generation, inspire a movement, or earn the other various earmarks of rock ’n’ roll success. You might even perform at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival if you play your cards right.

Of course, the secrets of creating a group are, unlike ethnic recipes from faraway places, guarded as strictly as the most shadowy Masonic esoterica. After all, does anyone in the camp of rock ’n’ roll groups desire more competition? The answer is, “No! Most certainly not!”

There are already six hundred thousand registered rock ’n’ roll groups on Internet sites such as Bandcamp and Myspace, with more being added hourly. Though many of these are placeholders, nothing more than Mittyesque fantasies, each one of them still represents either a potential or a real threat to the privileged club of working rockers.

Therefore, no living member of the industry would agree to share the secrets to making a group. In fact, the only qualified people we could find to reveal the TRUE SECRETS OF MAKING A ROCK ’N’ ROLL GROUP were deceased rock ’n’ roll stars, who our team contacted in a top-secret séance.

The voices of ghosts are unrecordable, so we hurriedly transcribed their words directly onto the pages of this book.