TOM HAUCK, AUTHOR

by Robin Umbley

Tom Hauck, former guitarist for the Atlantics and the ’80s pop-synth band Ball & Pivot, is looking rather professorial in his jeans, white linen shirt, and tan corduroy blazer. His thick, dark brown wavy hair barely has a hint of gray. It’s a look that seems apropos for his profession these days. Although he now has an MBA degree, he describes himself as simply a writer. Not only does he do freelance work for various organizations and is the editor of Renaissance magazine, he has written a novel called Pistonhead. Not unexpectedly, the book is based on his experiences in a local rock ’n’ roll band that never quite made it to the top.

Going from writing rock ’n’ roll songs to writing a novel hasn’t been the big step that it appears to be. For Tom, it seems like a natural progression. He explains, “I’m a writer; it’s what I do. I wanted to say something intelligent to people that was worthwhile that had to do with my experience—both in the music industry AND as a factory worker on an assembly line. There’s tension between those things and there’s a story there.”

The story centers around Charlie Sinclair, a guitarist in a moderately popular local band, also named Pistonhead, who still must make a living at his day job on a software production line. Tom elaborates that Pistonhead offers a different perspective than other rock ’n’ roll books such as memoirs and bios: “There have been quite a few rock ’n’ roll memoirs by successful musicians over the years, and they tend to be all the same, you know: musician works hard, becomes famous, deals with drug addiction, his wife leaves him, he arrives at a certain point of awareness and says, ‘Oh look! I survived! Here I am!’ There are very few books or movies or works that focus on the lives of musicians who are struggling, who haven’t gotten there yet… and from my experience in the music scene, there are thousands of them… thousands of us! We’re pretty good; we put CDs out, we play clubs and colleges… and we haven’t quite gotten there yet. We’re not riding around in limousines… we’re not even at Spinal Tap level yet. So this is Charlie’s story and Charlie kind of has a rough two weeks and it’s about how he changes over the course of those two weeks.”

He adds, “One of my goals was to create a character to give voice to those guys—and women—who just slog away in bands or in any creative process, and have day jobs and drag their sorry asses out of bed at seven o’clock in the morning and go off to work.”

Tom felt the novel form was the best way to write about his experiences, because, as he says, if he wrote his own memoir, “No one would buy it because no one wants to read a memoir about someone who hasn’t made it.” As he puts it, his own life doesn’t have any sensational “media value.”

Instead of signing with a traditional publisher, Tom Hauck chose to self-publish this book through Booklocker.com. For one, he says that the novel doesn’t fit an established genre in the publishing world and traditional publishers generally don’t put out books without a defined demographic. But Tom sees a similarity between selling a record independently and selling a book. He compares the potential to market his own books to how “Lonelyhearts,” the Atlantics’ local hit and arguably their biggest song, became successful: “After we left MCA records, we went back to the studio to record a single with two sides, “Can’t Wait Forever,” and “Lonelyhearts.” Our manager at the time said “Lonelyhearts” would never sell. ‘It’s too aggressive, it’s too punk, they’re [radio stations] never going to play it’… We left our manager, and sold the single out the back of the car.”

Likewise, you’re probably not going to see Pistonhead at your local bookstore anytime soon. Instead, it is available for sale on Amazon.com. Tom admits that the Internet is “a huge marketplace and like going into iTunes, there’s a lot of good stuff, and it’s all there [presumably meaning not so good stuff] and hopefully the cream rises.”

Much like that of a short story writer, Tom Hauck’s writing style is concise and pithy. Pistonhead checks in at a fast-paced 174 pages. “I try not to bore people,” he explains. “As a reader, I’m very easily bored… It could be my ‘training’ as a pop music songwriter where you have three minutes and you’re on your own. If you don’t hook the listener in the first ten seconds, you’re done.”

Nonetheless, writing a relatively short book is more difficult than writing a long one. The editing process is tedious. Tom says, “I went over this book probably 50 times. I kept cutting stuff. I cut a lot out. It’s hard. It’s very, very hard. That’s why it takes time. You should NEVER write something and put it out right away. Put it away, come back to it six months later, look at it again, and if you do that, you’ll be amazed at how awful it is! Time is your friend.”

Admittedly very busy, Tom Hauck is constantly writing and has plans to write a series of intelligence/spy type novels. He says that in the first book, the protagonist battles a group like Blackwater, “one that has a legitimate side but underneath there is a vicious, corrupt evil empire and they’re American-based.” Another book in the works deals with the hypocrisy of a truly evil evangelical preacher. On the music front, Tom no longer plays guitar publicly, but seeing the success of synth-heavy bands like the Killers, he was inspired to create a MySpace page for Ball & Pivot. “We’ll see what happens,” he says. 

SPLENDORS AND MISERIES OF A PERFORMER

Review of Pistonhead by Thomas A. Hauck
(Paper; BookLocker.com, Inc.; 2009; 174pp.)
Review by Francis DiMenno

In a straightforward chronicle that reads more like an ingeniously compressed memoir than like a work of fiction, Thomas Hauck, formerly of the Atlantics and Ball & Pivot, sets out to describe an event-laden week in the life of a rock musician who is almost, but not quite, a star.

The novel’s greatest strength is to be found in its descrip-tion of the protagonist’s character and how he responds to his milieu. Hauck shrewdly chooses to open the novel with a telling scene in which his everyman rock star, Charlie Sinclair, is faced with every musician’s worst nightmare: It’s show time, and the band’s chronically fucked-up dust-head vocalist is nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, the mobbed-up club owner is off fuming and raging in the wings.

Many people who have lived the life of a struggling entertainer will readily identify with Hauck’s precisely delineated descriptions of the various hazards and pitfalls in the world of low-level show biz that stand as obstacles to success. The dead end jobs. The disastrous gigs in front of downright hostile arena audiences. The unsympathetic family members. The resentful, pushy mooks from the old neighborhood. The grasping girlfriends. The venal groupies and junk-peddlers and promoters and, worst of all, the fucked-up band-mates. Those who are new to the racket and have not yet encountered these life-lessons could with profit study this book as a worst-case scenario. And those who are unlikely to endure this path but who are curious about what a person has to do to make it in this perilous world will find many of their questions answered.

Hauck’s aims are modest. This is a short book. It is not particularly complex in its plotting. And, from a literary standpoint, the tale of The Boy Who Sets Out to Make Good But Who Eventually Realizes That Perhaps There Are Better Things Than Stardom is a rather hoary one. But the novel has the one great thing that separates good narrative fiction from an indifferent phone-it-in: it is meticulously, convincingly, and evincingly detailed. Superfluous passages are few.

Occasionally the descriptions of the hapless handicapped souls with whom Charlie Sinclair works at his dreary, temporary, assembly-line day-job seem a bit too calculated to tug at our lapels and keen for our sympathy. But the workplace characters, and their dialogues, are nonetheless memorable. Another disconnect I noticed was that although the novel is ostensibly set in the 1990s, one is left with the slightly unsettling feeling that much of it has been transposed from the early ’80s and merely spruced up with some contemporary references (e.g., cell phones; The Simpsons). Another thing that troubles me is that, although the book is written in the third person, there seems to be little, if any distance between the implied narrator and the protagonist. The book could just as easily have been written in the first person.

These reservations aside, I have seldom encountered a more interesting account of the life of a working musician. Furthermore, there are few, if any novels I have read which manage to render with such painstaking detail and accuracy the sensations of performing, both on stage and off.

As a novel, Pistonhead is an odd duck. It’s not a strictly literary work (but who would want that, anyway?). It’s not an exploitative genre exercise (which would be of no lasting, or of barely even more than ephemeral, value). Rather, it’s cross between a journalistic expose of Entertainment Babylon and a quasi-documentary account of a rock ’n’ roll musician—one with a great many very thinly disguised music business and local color flourishes. I read it in one sitting. It was that kind of book.