“Carefully choose your work. If you have not yet found something that satisfies you, continue to search for it. You must like your vocation if you expect to succeed”. For someone working multiple jobs, the words of the yogi Yogananda can spill over your body like a warm elixir in the throes of a seductive epiphany. Eyes once glassed over, sparkle in clarity and shuffling feet stop and plant, facing in the direction of a rising sun. It is what we all look for in life, that chance to know and love and succeed at a profession that you actually look forward to doing long past a retirement age. It feeds us when food becomes stale and preachers prove false. Love for our work and our family provides the sustenance for survival.
Lonn Friend did not set out to be a journalist. It was not embalmed in his membrane when he first heard The Beatles or Genesis or Madman Across The Water. Music was just something that infiltrated his pores and ran screaming & shouting in gleeful playfulness through his veins and imploded in his soul like that first taste of a minty ice cream. He did not take courses in college or pray to the altar of Lester Bangs’ Creem rantings in hopes of one day becoming the superior voice of rock & roll adjectives and verbs. He did not plan on talking to rock stars about their creative process. He did not foresee hanging out with Axl Rose. It just one day happened.
And although he did not give birth to RIP Magazine, he breast-fed it to a vivaciously notorious adolescence. Without Lonn Friend, the glossy-paged bible of hard rock music news may have deflowered prematurely and ejaculated in a hiccup of last gasp teeny-bopper silliness. Instead, he built thrones on which musicians could pontificate sordid tales of debauchery that young fans could drool over in starry-eyed envy, causing many to pick up guitars, grow goatees and buy Garden of Eden tickets to gaze upon idols they so hornily worshiped. Lonn Friend fed them words next to slick photographs. But most importantly, he fed them dreams.
On a cool Long Beach afternoon last month, Lonn Friend became human. His voice traveled through the digital phone lines and sounded like an old friend calling to chat. Except this friend had stories he wanted to tell about his life and adventures, his highs and lows, and his search for enlightenment in a world he feels is about to change. “We’re going to have one hell of a ride this year. Things are going to blow people’s minds, disasters, events, cultural events,” he foretells near the end of our conversation. However, “things will start to move in the right direction and that’s why in every medium you have to be expressing yourself at a higher vibration, at a higher level. Don’t write crappy, pandering songs. Write songs that touch people, that help move people to a higher place”. For the man who started out with nary a notion that he would help change the face of rock & roll journalism, Lonn Friend’s faith is still pure. “I think rock & roll, as Pete Townshend said, could save the world and I’ve always kind of believed that”.
If you think you know who Lonn Friend really is, you may need to readjust your whammy bar observations. If you think he is the notorious partying accessory of such rock nobility as Lars Ulrich and Jon Bon Jovi, then you have only read his first book, Life On Planet Rock. Last year, he wrote a sequel to that memoir, where he pulled off the bloodied bandages to reveal mental and physical wounds created by record company executives with ginormous egos, by fate, by his own egotistical shenanigans, by false prophets and by his own crawl across the jagged rocks of the reality of life. With Sweet Demotion, he shed one skin to reveal another.
And on this lovely afternoon, Lonn Friend enlightened this journalist to the boy he was, the youthful colt kicking his back legs to the sun, and finally to the gentleman who, although not 100% at peace with himself or the world surrounding him, has found his comfortable niche cross-legged on a floating pillow of past-present-&-future.
You’re like a God of rock & roll journalism. When did you start writing and what did you write about in those childhood days?
I have a clear memory of composing a short story when I was in sixth grade, when I was about eleven and a half. I believe it was the year that The Beatles released The White Album, because I was altered by that record as I was by all the Beatles records. But that one had me flexing my imagination and I wrote a story about a spoon with a brain, an inanimate living creature. And the whole story is through the eyes of the spoon (laughs). The spoon falls in the drain and gets cut up; the spoon goes into the mouth of the kids in the family; the wife takes the spoon out in the backyard and starts digging up the soil.
When I started at Hustler Magazine in 1982, I was writing reviews of products and interviews with odd people. It was like a baptism by fire. I immediately was doing adult reportage when I was 25, 26, years old when I started there, when I started my career. I never had a goal to be this kind of a writer, to be a journalist. When I was at UCLA, I never even took journalism classes. I took geography classes and geology classes and I changed my major three times. Eventually, I took something I knew well, which was sociology so I could just study people. In Planet Rock, I talk about my college days cause it was much less about the study than it was about the people who I hung out with and the music that we were all listening to. That proved to inform my writer’s voice over the next ten years. I started out doing adult magazine stuff but eventually I started to write about music.
How did the transformation take place?
My first music article was a piece that Althea Flynt, Larry’s late wife, assigned me on the loud, rude world of heavy metal for Hustler. She was enamored by Motley Crue and WASP and she wanted a story about the decadence of that Sunset scene, which was just starting to flower. So I went out into the streets of Hollywood and went to the Rainbow and ended up interviewing Nikki Sixx and Blackie Lawless and several people, a year and a half before RIP Magazine came about. But that was like a foreshadowing for the kind of writing I would do for the next several years of my life, cause you can’t really encapsulate RIP into a couple of sentences. It was an all-encompassing gig and my timing was pretty cosmic because I never did grow up on heavy metal music. I grew up on The Beatles and The Who and Pink Floyd and pop radio stations in LA that were playing Beach Boys and Gerry & The Pacemakers and Moody Blues. It was a job but then it became more than that. I sort of became, as Lars Ulrich called me in the forward to my first book, the Gatekeeper (laughs) and I’m honored. It was a squeaky, rusty gate that I polished with my great staff and people.
But to go back to your first question, I started writing when I was twelve years old and that was that.
Was it at Hustler that you started writing about music?
I went on staff at Chic Magazine at the same time as Hustler. It was a sister publication that Flynt was publishing. It used a lot of the same staff and photographers, but it had a little bit more pop culture voice, a little less middle-American hardcore Redneck and a little bit more coastal cool. I think it was about my third year at the company, my third or fourth year, and I took over as the Executive Editor of Chic Magazine. It was probably about the fourth year and we had a music column called “Music Notes” and in that column I began to assign reviews, do reviews myself, and that’s where I began to develop relationships inside the music world. I never liked being a critic so we just tried to talk about what was happening in rock & roll that the harder-edged audience might get.
To get back to your story of the spoon, do you still have that?
What happened over the many moves in the last eight or nine years of my life, I lost a lot of materials. I lost volumes of stuff from my childhood, a lot of writings, yearbooks, things like that. It’s not like I had to sell memorabilia or I gave gold and platinum records away or guitars. I literally don’t know what happened to several boxes of stuff. When you’ve moved as much as I have, since my divorce, things just disappeared. I know that I had a signed KISS poster and it disappeared years ago. I know I had this Peter Gabriel poster that my friend Jeff got me from Europe that was the coolest poster; it was like from Germany. And I had it on my wall in my office at Flynt and for the life of me I don’t know what happened to it. Somehow when I left RIP Magazine and went over to Arista Records and had all this stuff boxed up, something got lost. Someone out there owns some really good pieces of Lonn Friend’s stuff.
But I’ve been finding things. I had all this little stuff, tubs of it in storage for the last few years. I finally got all of my stuff out of storage and put it in one place here in Long Beach and I started an Ebay auction, a couple of Ebay auctions, with a friend of mine who is an Ebay expert. You should see some of these pieces. There is an autographed photo of Metallica from the very first time I met them all at the photo shoot at Neil Zlozower’s studio. Ross Halfin was doing the PR shoot for And Justice For All and this photograph all four signed it to me. I put it up on Ebay and I think the bidding is up to about $300 on that photograph already (laughs).
I never went out and got things because I wanted them because I was a collector. These things were given to me because it was the natural course of my career. I got all these treasures and gifts because of what I was doing and the people I was in contact with. I never consciously went, “Oh, I got to get that signed”. They just gave stuff to me. Therefore, these things are precious and letting go of them, it’s important to me that it goes to real fans, that they inspire people.
Like your writing inspires people.
You don’t know whether anybody cares, you really don’t. I don’t put my stuff out there and worry about whether anybody was reading it or liking it or hating it. We just did it. We did jobs and we expressed ourselves, both personally as a writer and as an entity as a publication or whatever I was doing. If you attach yourself to where your stuff is going, that’s the greatest downfall you can possibly incur, cause you get locked into other people’s approval and you worry about, “Oh, did I really do a good job?” Well, if you take the high road in journalism and you’re trying to bring out the expression of the artist and you’re trying to bring the fan closer to the point of conception, closer to the creative process, get them in the room where they can’t go cause they just can’t get there, but get them behind the curtain or on the stage or on the bus, then you’ve done your job as a journalist, as a writer, as a reporter. The most important thing is if you’re given access to these freaky, special, gifted people, tell the story and make sure that the audience is feeling, seeing, smelling, tasting what you are experiencing.
Where did you grow up and what kind of kid were you?
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles in Sherman Oaks. I bought my first record the day after The Beatles debuted on the Ed Sullivan Show. I walked across the street to the Bullock’s Department Store in the Fashion Square Mall on Riverside and Ranchito. My mom gave me some money and I brought home Meet The Beatles and that was the beginning. I rode my bike around the neighborhood with my album just showing everybody. “Look what I got. I got The Beatles”. That was my trophy.
It was sort of a geek child upbringing. My parents were divorced when I was six so my mom raised me and my brother. We lived in little places all the way through high school, little apartments, and my brother and I always shared a room and because we shared a room we shared our records. I was pretty much the one who turned my brother on to most of the music, until he was old enough to figure this stuff out. And then he would bring home something. I don’t know whether I brought Love It To Death home by Alice Cooper but somehow there’s a vague memory of maybe my brother got to Alice Cooper and Roxy Music before I did. I’m not sure.
I went to Grant High School, and this is important to my childhood too because my high school had musicians in it and a couple of them went on to become quite famous musicians. I was in a geometry class with a guy named Steve Lukather, who played guitar, and we would make fun of the teacher in the back of the room. He was a year younger than me but we had the same geometry class. He asked me one day, “You should come see my band play at the gymnasium. We’re inviting the whole school to come out at lunch hour”. So I went to the Grant High gym one afternoon and there was the band and it was Luke and Steve Porcaro and there was a girl, Laurie Stratton on vocals, whose father Gil Stratton was a sportscaster on KNX, the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles. But my memory of that, and it’s pretty clear, I was staring at this seventeen year old kid play guitar like, whoa. I was already into the prog rock guitar players. I was into Steve Howe by then and I was into Steve Hackett from Genesis. I couldn’t play an instrument but I was enamored by musicians. And I went, wow, this guy is really good.
So if you want to say, why did you do the things you did in your career or how were you scripted that way? Well, if you were born listening to music, your father is a piano player and you kind of heard it in the womb, and when your first album is possibly the most important pop record in the history of music because it was the introduction of the band that changed everything, there will never be another like them, then you can see why I’ve had the kind of journey that I’ve had. You start out that way. I didn’t play anything so I had to find another way to love it. So I would sit in my room after school and whenever a new record came on sale, like if I was really into a band, like I was into Supertramp, so hardcore after Crime Of The Century, then when the second record came out, Crisis? What Crisis?, I literally did not go to school the day it went on sale. I went to Moby Dick’s Records on Van Nuys Boulevard and I got there when it opened so I could have the first copy, so I could take it home and open it up and smell the album and look at the lyrics and then put it on my turntable. I did that for three straight Supertramp records and I was not in the least bit disappointed. Breakfast In America and Even In The Quietest Moments, are such remarkable records.
A lot of groups are like that for me. When Pink Floyd’s Animals came out, I rode around the neighborhood with that album. And then I went over to my friend Mark’s house and he had a better stereo than me. He had these big speakers and we listened to it more than once, over and over again. I grew up in the 70’s. My music came to me in the 70’s. I was a teenager, looking for pubic hair under my pits and on my nuts. When Who’s Next was being released I was wondering when I was going to shave. So my strength and connection to the world, to the universe, came by listening to these albums in my room.
I guess I was kind of a misfit in that I was reading Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke; there was so much of a connection between science fiction kids and prog rock kids and album rock kids. We had a clique. We didn’t get the chicks. We drove dumb cars. I drove a Mercury Comet. Like I said in Planet Rock, my car couldn’t drive 55 if Sammy Hagar was behind the wheel (laughs). Those were precious times and I think it’s why I love Almost Famous so much. It really starts with that scene where he’s going through the boxes of records. That’s my childhood in a nutshell.
What was your first concert?
I was 16, a senior or a junior in high school, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were playing at the Forum and I went with a girl named Lisa Burns and our parents dropped us off at the Forum and we were sitting far away. I would be in that building a hundred more times over the course of my life and career. On that stage I brought Guns N Roses out on my birthday in 1991. It’s in Planet Rock, in the opening where I’m introducing the band in my underwear wearing Slash’s hat and shoes. But that first concert, and they made an album out of that called 4 Way Street, I was just, wow. That was the beginning, that was the taste of the poison. I was hooked after that. That’s all life became was albums and concerts and finding ways to go to shows and finding the money. It was cheap back then. I think that concert ticket was $12.50 back in 1971.
Speaking of concerts, you went and sold t-shirts for Todd Rundgren. You just seemed to pick up and go one day.
Yeah, I wasn’t prepared emotionally for that cause I ended up three weeks later with my tail between my legs coming back to LA. And it’s funny cause just a couple of weeks ago I had dinner with Danny O’Connor at the Rainbow next door to the Roxy where he gave me that job 34 years ago. And he still works with Todd Rundgren in merchandise.
My brother and I got so deeply into it that we went out and got used copies of all the records. After Hermit Of Mink Hollow came out, we went back and got all the Utopia records and all the Todd records and that residency he did at the Roxy was unprecedented. It was 1979 and he did fourteen shows, seven nights, two shows a night. And I went back and I had money for the first two shows and then the third show I came back and I met Mario, one of the elders who is a white-haired Italian from Chicago. He’d stand out on the street and talk to the kids. He’s 85 now, not in the best health but you can still find him on the patio at the Rainbow every now and then.
So I’m at like the third show and he goes, “Hey kid, you were here last night and the night before”. And I go, “Yeah, I don’t have any money. I just wanted to kind of hang out here”. He goes, “Come here,” and he walks me in the side door. “Come back tomorrow night and I’ll take you inside again”. And I saw almost every show and by the last night I’m standing out in front just kind of glowing from the whole thing and this guy comes up to me and he goes, “Hey Man, I’ve seen you here every night.” I go, “Yeah, I love Todd”. I also had on the shirt that said Todd is Godd with two d’s on the back of it. He says, “How’d you like to come out on the road with me and sell t-shirts?” and I went, “What?” “I’m Todd’s merchandiser, I’m Danny O’Connor and I live in Michigan”. I was like, “I don’t know, man, I just graduated a few months ago”. And he goes, “Well, here is my number, give it some thought, and if you want, we’re in San Francisco coming up in a few days. Why don’t you come up and see the show up there and hang out at the merchandise booth with me”.
So I did. I drove up to San Francisco and I had a picture from that; I do, I found it, of me at the Todd merch tent with Danny in 1979. And I got back and went, wow, this is so fucking exciting. I’m going to do it. I flew to Michigan and then we flew to Ohio to do these big outdoor gigs and it was just awful. The humidity and the fans and the moonshine and Danny running the bootleggers off the site with baseball bats, it stunk and I said, this is not romantic, this is not what I envisioned. I talk about this in Planet Rock. I’m in my hotel, my allergies are bothering me, I’m just trying to sleep, and Eddie Money comes in my room and throws up in my bathroom (laughs). But of course that was my hazing.
I came home and I got a job. I looked in the classified ads and got on at Gambling Times Magazine. I was a publisher’s assistant, and I talk about that in Sweet Demotion, and my editor knows one of the editors at Flynt and there is a position open at Flynt, and this is after about a year and a half at Gambling Times. I get an interview at Flynt and three editors interviewed me that day, really four: Ed Dwyer from Gentleman’s Companion, Kelly Garrett from Hustler, Don Evans at Hustler and Bruce David, who is still there and still running the Flynt editorial. He left for a few years but then he came back. And he’s worked for Larry since they left Columbus in 1979. But Flynt was a publishing company and there weren’t many in Los Angeles and people stayed there, employees worked there for a long time. They stayed loyal.
And I got the opportunity to do this interview and they liked me. I kind of just faked it, cause I didn’t know shit about editing. I’ve had to rely on my personality and on charisma and transparency and that’s how I got the gig. It was a tough job at first because he hazed me, Bruce David did. I’d write something for Hustler and it wasn’t good and he’d go out in the hallway and scream, “Couldn’t somebody write this for me that has some talent on this staff?”
How did you get the RIP gig?
I was kind of getting tired of Hustler, so after Althea died I just went into Jim Kohls’ CEO office and I said, “This magazine, this RIP, has got potential”. It was in its sixth issue and it wasn’t really selling. And I said, “Give me that rock magazine and give me some resources to make it really cool, good paper, give me a good freelance budget, because there is some music coming out right now”. I just kind of felt it from the people around me. There was this band called Guns N’ Roses that everybody was talking about. And I had people on staff that had been hanging out with them in Hollywood. It’s really just kind of an alignment of how it came together.
I always wrote very sort of in the flow, spontaneous, didn’t over think things, and in those days I had a staff with a research department, fact-checkers. We were extremely professional. RIP Magazine was like the Rolling Stone of heavy metal. We took it very seriously. We knew we were the best after about two years, because we got access to the resources. The graphics were superior, paid the writers better and the photographers better than the other metal magazines. And if you respect your freelancers and your staff, they’re going to do good work. We were a unit and that’s why we had a lot of miracles and got to do what we did.
You’ve worked in A&R, you’ve worked in radio, you’ve worked for Larry Flynt, you’re a journalist, you’re a writer. Out of all those things that you have done in your life, what was the hardest one?
Well, here’s the thing. All of the jobs that I was successful at weren’t hard work. They were in keeping with who I was. Radio was effortless, I loved radio so much. Traveling with bands and editing the magazine, felt effortless. I’ll tell you something, and again you ask another good question, the most difficult thing for me has been the writing. I torture myself. I procrastinate. I will do an interview and leave the material and transcribe it in a day and write it in a day. I’ll make it hard on myself. I don’t sit down with a sense of great enthusiasm. I browbeat myself until I get into it and I finish it and it’s good. And it’s always good. It has to be good or else I don’t turn it in. I write bios for unsigned bands. They pay me because they want my name on the bottom of their website. They could have sold three records in a small town in Iowa, doesn’t matter. I take on the project as if I’m sitting with Trent Reznor at the Hard Rock talking to him about the Broken record that he recorded at the Manson house in Benedict Canyon so he could get into the darkness. I approach it the same way. I approach everybody in the same way as if they have something they have to get out and I try to help them get it out there.
You speak very highly of Peter Gabriel. What makes him and his music so special to you?
Peter Gabriel is one of the most important, iconic artists of our time. He is Bono’s hero. He is the reason why we throw altruistic festivals. He started in Genesis in 1969. He ushered in the progressive era in 1970. Left the band to go solo after The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, one of, if not the greatest, concept records ever recorded, in 1974. He is a multi-dimensional, elevated human being. He’s always experimenting, not just musically but he’s welcomed into countries by Heads of State. He has a higher purpose. He is one of the first artists of this generation to have a higher purpose to go out there and take his platform and utilize it for more than selling records and putting people in seats at concerts. Plus the greatest solo shows of the 80’s and 90’s were Peter Gabriel concerts and his concerts were just mythical experiences, they were so great.
When the Us tour was coming through LA, Extreme was huge and Nuno Bettencourt and I had become friends and we learned that each of us were huge Peter Gabriel fans so I took him to see Gabriel at the Forum. Walking through the lobby he was getting stopped by chicks left and right, and he says to me, “Come on, man, let’s get to our seats. This is about Gabriel tonight” (laughs). And we had the most awesome night. Ten years later, in the throes of divorce or just about to be in that, the worst year of my life, which is 2003, Gabriel is returning to Southern California for the first time in a decade with the Up tour. So I get two tickets and I call Nuno and said, “I got tickets for Gabriel at the Pond in Anaheim, the first show in Southern California in ten years. Wanna go?” “Yeah” (laughs) And we went and it was great. I don’t think I’ve told anybody that story but it was great.
It means a lot to me that I’ve had a personal encounter or two with Peter, because it humanized him to me. He was more a deity, he was more a shamanistic, hovering, angelic creature and that’s why I called that chapter [in Sweet Demotion] “The Angel Gabriel”. The Beatles, I was so young and The Beatles were the beginning, but my first true worship, adulation, of a magical artist was Genesis and Peter Gabriel.
You also talk about Elton John with such adulation in Sweet Demotion.
Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across The Water, those albums spoke to me, they were masterpieces. He made so many great records in a row, perfect records in a row: Captain Fantastic, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. All those albums are phenomenal. And that chapter is really special to me because it really kind of encapsulates what the theme of my life in the last several decades has been about. It’s serendipity. To be back on campus at UCLA to see Rufus Wainwright and ending up in the dressing room talking to Elton John about The Who and Guns N’ Roses. How do you plan that? What I tried to do in that chapter, “Tumbleweed Reflections”, which may be my favorite chapter in Sweet Demotion, what I tried to do there was somehow put people where I was. From talking to the elephant rocks out in desert and singing “Country Comfort” at the top of my lungs to nobody to being in that dressing room with one of my greatest heroes who is so humanized in that moment because I’m bringing up, yeah, I was there across campus at the other pavilion when you did “November Rain” with Guns N’ Roses at the MTV Awards. And he just opens up and starts talking about Axl and that he didn’t remember the piano chord. So he’s looking for Axl and can’t find Axl so Slash comes walking down the hall and Elton John says, “Hey, Slash, what are the piano chords to ‘November Rain’?” And Slash says, “I don’t know, man, I’m the guitar player” (laughs). It’s a great story but it’s great cause it’s Elton John telling the story and I’m listening to it. So I tried to tell that story with reverence when I tell it. And when I read that chapter, and I’ve read it a couple of times, I missed really nailing it. I don’t know why. I’m never kind of happy with anything that I’ve done.
There are parts of that book I’m very fond of, the Vienna chapter. It’s ironic too cause it looks like I’m going to be interviewing Ian Anderson on the 40th anniversary of Thick As A Brick, a record that I had when I was fourteen that I bought the week it came out. That night in Vienna where I go to see Jethro Tull and I end up leaving half-way through the show and taking a train to the end of the line, to the outskirts of the city, it’s so metaphorical with my life and the symbolism and I can’t be attached to whether it makes any sense to anybody but me. It really doesn’t matter but that’s like some of my best writing, that chapter. I don’t like to pat myself on the back but that one is special to me. I tried getting that chapter into Planet Rock. It was the last chapter and it was called “End Of The Line In Vienna” but my editor didn’t think it fit, it was like a b-side.
Your first book was a lot of rock & roll stories but your second book was more of a personal journey. Which book was easier for you to write and which one did you feel you exposed the most of yourself in?
Good question. Neither is easy. The first one I wrote I was going through a divorce and I wasn’t sure what the book was. It started out as Rock A Mile: Adventures And Observations Of A Music Journalist and it evolved into a memoir, which isn’t a linear memoir, it’s sort of like a camel’s back. That’s how Planet Rock came out. I touched upon some personal things, it’s not as intimate. Sweet Demotion is literally a cutting open of my insides for the last twelve years and trying to make sense out of what the fuck happened to my life; and having these iconic, mystical stories woven through metaphors of music and people and the cosmos and the change and the shift and the insanity and the clarity.
That book was not written as a commercial exercise. That book was written for me to somehow extricate myself from my mid-life. In July of 2009, when I got the phone call to reconnect with Steven Tyler cause he was unhappy with his manuscript for the book he was trying to write with David Dalton, who had been paid a lot of money to turn many hours of interviews with Steven into a book. I took a fee upfront and went back to New Hampshire and spent about three or four months, and that material just sat for a year after I left that project, when I was done with that time, before he went into rehab. And I was finished in the beginning of 2010. I didn’t touch that stuff for almost a year but then I went back and I had people who were close to me that had been reading all these documents that I’d resurfaced. We were calling it Life On Shuffle, that was my working title, with the metaphor of the iPod always being on shuffle in my life and playing the song I needed to hear to get me through the next moment and the next day. There’s this revelation that, wait a second, I should use some of this material and craft my own first person view of this time with this extraordinary rock star named Steven Tyler. And that was the end of it, that’s it.
I had in the beginning 38 documents and crafted them down to 22. Writing this book was an extraordinarily difficult process. It kept shifting and changing. When I finished the manuscript, it was close to 500 pages and I couldn’t really run out and start looking for agents so I decided I would self-publish it. I spent a nominal amount of money with a self-publisher named AuthorHouse.
In all honesty, I wanted to read your new book because I thought there would be some more real good rock & roll stories in it, like with Planet Rock, but got something else instead.
You’ve touched on the real reason why I wrote that book. I knew that what I went through regardless of my age or gender or lifestyle or career, I knew that it would connect with people who had had similar experiences. That whole eat-pray-love-rock-&-roll part of my life, it’s as important to who I am as flying on that plane with Aerosmith in the late 80’s. It’s just as important. So I didn’t think this book would have a wide audience but it’s the people that make that statement in messages to me that you just made that I feel like I got rich in a different way, which was important. That’s really why you create is to make somebody else feel like they’re not alone.
You speak a lot about your search for harmonic alignment and yoga and Zen meditation. Would you recommend yoga and meditation to people trying to find their own personal harmony?
I can’t recommend it, I can’t recommend anything to anybody beyond what their experience leads them to. It’s an impossible situation to urge someone to see things the way you see them. They must find their own path. And it’s through conversation or a book coming into someone’s life or something you read or hear. If that leads you into a new more expansive discipline or interpretation into the way things are, then that’s meant to be and you can feel good about, “Oh, I’m getting a message from the universe that I should maybe try this yoga or try this meditation”. But I don’t think it’s the right thing for everybody because I’m still evaluating what it has done for my life.
There is a lot of argument to where I got so deep in to all this freedom of expression and fog wilderness that I lost the desire to be successful. I went from making a quarter of a million dollars in 1998, 1997, the final year of my Arista contract, to almost making nothing the next three years. It’s been hit and miss ever since. I’ll never see money like that again; maybe I will but it won’t be because that’s my goal. It will be a by-product of my actions which will be authentic: something that I do. I always make this joke, the last time anything with me that went viral was the bronchitis in the summer of 2002 (laughs). I’m not waiting for my YouTube moment to become viral.
I don’t sleep well and I never sleep through the night, but I do have trust that I am who I am supposed to be and where I am supposed to be.
To pick up a copy of Lonn’s latest book – check it out on amazon
Mike Portnoy may no longer be a part of Dream Theater but with his band Adrenaline Mob releasing a new CD, he has brought his phenomenal drumming skills back to the forefront. Get to know this powerhouse drummer in next week’s edition of MY ROOTS.
