Enjoy the benefits of a premium membership!
Upgrade Account
-
TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
Join free Log in
Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.
Interviewing bassist stories
- Thread starter Arthritic_Tom
- Start date
- Status
Mate, if you didn't write it, you wouldn't have let us down! This thread has been a great read and a privilege to have had experienced - but as I'm sure you know now, so many of us want to both hear the whole story, walk the journey and say thanks by buying your book - its your baby, but it's going to have a lot of unofficial aunts and uncles! 
It's Talkbass's book. Seriously. A month ago I had no plan whatsoever to do anything like this, and now I'm writing it for one of the biggest publishers in the U.S.Mate, if you didn't write it, you wouldn't have let us down! This thread has been a great read and a privilege to have had experienced - but as I'm sure you know now, so many of us want to both hear the whole story, walk the journey and say thanks by buying your book - its your baby, but it's going to have a lot of unofficial aunts and uncles!
Weird, weird, weird.
Sometimes we talk ourselves out of things and we just need to talk to others to allow them to talk us into what we really need for ourselves.
Quite true. If you understood how opposed I was to the idea of doing this, you'd be shocked that it's happening.
Not only that, you'd be shocked that I'm enjoying the hell out of writing it.
You know why I hadn't even considered doing this? Because here's what you get. This is the entire "rejection letter" I got from one agency. It's my own letter sent back to me, with the opinion of my writing written in blue ink.
Attachments
That ain't harsh, mate.Ooh ... That's harsh.
This is harsh. My own query letter sent back to me with this sticker.
Attachments
Betrayer_Bass
Profanity Fish.
- Sep 24, 2011
- 1,381
- 854
- Disclosures
- Endorsing: Spector basses, Winspear Picks, Spector Formula 603 strings
That sticker is just so.. inhumane. In the sense that it dehumanizes both the submitter and the company; "Here's a sticker that says no thanks, minimum amount of effort required!"
I'm anticipating this book more than any other. This thread has had me glued to TB since it started.
You know you're special when you get to 50 pages and just carry on to 51.
Congrats on the book deal. You deserve a big break. I hope this is it.
Congrats on the book deal. You deserve a big break. I hope this is it.
Tom, great thread. I started it yesterday and am to the point where you described your band in Japan, the rejected BP article. Your band sounds alot like one of mine except we gave only played a few gigs and don't fight much. Our motto is "no song is good enough to play the same way twice" And it seems our best takes are the ones where I've forgotten to turn on the recorder. Well I gotta get some breakfast. I look forward to finishing this thread later.
Great, great, great!
Its been absolutely brilliant to be a part of this. So inspirational on so many levels and we all get a prize at the end in the form of your memoirs! The rough draft is really compelling, Tom (still chuckling at the bit about looking like a 40 year old lesbian spinster!). If I knew nothing about this thread and simply picked that up while browsing in a book shop, I would buy it, no question. And I will definitely be recommending it to all and sundry when it comes out.
This thread also inspired a new song. Its not done yet, but Im very pleased with it so far. I spent hours working out the pre-chorus last night and crudely recorded the basic chords on guitar, mixed in a quick vocal take over top, and sent it to our guitarist (my main songwriting partner in the band). I waited. And waited. No reply. Hed gone to bed, apparently. The nerve! But when I checked my email this morning, I was treated to this reply:
Okay, that is freakin AWESOME! Listened when I got up and was immediately inspired to grab my guitar....I never pick up the guitar this early. I've already come up with a really cool part based on your progression. I think the vocal hook is so strong that this should be the chorus.
As the bands only lyricist, I become the bottle-neck for new material when I get too busy to write. The guys are patient with me, as Im also the main business person for the band, but I can tell its frustrating for them sometimes. Im way, way behind in my writing, with a number of great song ideas awaiting my attention. I needed something to get me back into the right head space. This thread was it. Ill send it to you once its done and weve got a decent recording of it. Just as you think of your memoirs as belonging to TB, I will always think of this song as belonging to you.
Thank you once again, Tom!
You're quite welcome.
I've finished the first anthology in the memoir, and all the other material is at hand, so I expect to finish this in record time.
I'll keep you posted, and I hope your song makes you giant buckets of cash.
You're as good a writer as your brother Pat is a singer-songwriter. And that's very, very good.
Hmmmmm...any one else sense a TB Song-writing competition coming on for the theme music to "Ghosts and Ballyhoo"?
I don't know why, but I thought this funny.
Tom, congrats on everything- been reading through this thread off and on since the start and I find it hard to believe that it's been almost a month since it's first post. Time flies.
Congrats again and I'm looking forward to the book.
I enjoyed your brothers style. Thanks for posting that.
Thank you for sharing the opening of your book. I signed up on the google group and I can't wait to read the book in its entirety.
I am glad to have read through the thread with you as you turned a horrible story into a new beginning. I appreciate the journey and wish you all the best Tom.
When you are on your national book signing tour, look me up in Houston TX
WOW I'm finally done. What an interesting thread. And now the Op has left us to go write his book. I'm always late. Like the last person to join a pyramid scheme so I can,t even get my $5 back. Lol. Tom if you tune back in I just gotta say you may have stumbled upon one of the greatest PR tricks ever. Wet your target audiences lips in chat room/bulletin board setting and capture an audience before even writing the book. Then show your publisher that a bunch of potential readers are just begging for it. Now if only I wasn't so ADD I might trythis myself. Oh yea I also suck at writing according to my HS English teacher. Good luck with the book I will be joining the Google group for updates. For now I have ton of you tubes to watch that you have referenced.
Thanks, everybody, for the recent comments.
The hilarious thing to me is how unplanned all this was. If you'd asked me five weeks ago to write a book about my experience in the field of music journalism, first I would've helped you up off the floor and passed you a handkerchief for the bloody nose I just gave you, and then I'd explain to you that no publisher in this dimension would want it.
By the way, just to fill you in, I finally sent a message to my bass idol, asking him if he would care to appear in the book. I explained the project and how I would use him as an example of how to deal with setbacks gracefully and with dignity.
His gatekeeper initially refused to forward the message, asking me if I might want to rephrase the letter, because I used the word "rage" twice, and my description of "my obsessive pursuit of Scott Thunes" made me seem like a psycho stalker. He said the message was too intense to send to someone I barely knew.
After much thought, I asked the person to forward the message as is, because I did feel such rage that it blew up my immune system, and I did "pursue" Scott Thunes, though not in a physical sense. I wasn't following him around in my car; I periodically asked him to let me help him write his memoirs, and I brooded about him.
Eventually the gatekeeper forwarded the message. We'll see what happens. I don't think I was coming across as insane, but crazy people generally don't know they're crazy.
Maybe I've been raving away like a lunatic for over a month now, and none of you have had the heart to tell me.
That's okay. I'm still having fun, crazy or not.
The hilarious thing to me is how unplanned all this was. If you'd asked me five weeks ago to write a book about my experience in the field of music journalism, first I would've helped you up off the floor and passed you a handkerchief for the bloody nose I just gave you, and then I'd explain to you that no publisher in this dimension would want it.
By the way, just to fill you in, I finally sent a message to my bass idol, asking him if he would care to appear in the book. I explained the project and how I would use him as an example of how to deal with setbacks gracefully and with dignity.
His gatekeeper initially refused to forward the message, asking me if I might want to rephrase the letter, because I used the word "rage" twice, and my description of "my obsessive pursuit of Scott Thunes" made me seem like a psycho stalker. He said the message was too intense to send to someone I barely knew.
After much thought, I asked the person to forward the message as is, because I did feel such rage that it blew up my immune system, and I did "pursue" Scott Thunes, though not in a physical sense. I wasn't following him around in my car; I periodically asked him to let me help him write his memoirs, and I brooded about him.
Eventually the gatekeeper forwarded the message. We'll see what happens. I don't think I was coming across as insane, but crazy people generally don't know they're crazy.
Maybe I've been raving away like a lunatic for over a month now, and none of you have had the heart to tell me.
That's okay. I'm still having fun, crazy or not.
- Status
