Out: Dave Brigham's (C)Rock Stories: Million-Dollar Tales Of Music, Mayhem And Immaturity

What you see above is the culmination of a lot of work performed by a guy who, truth be told, is pretty instrumental in this blog even existing. Dave Brigham is one of two editors we worked under during our alleged "professional" "writing" "career." His encouragement and editing, along with that of our mutual friend Ric Dube, transformed our writing from something we wanted to do into something actually worth reading, lo the many years ago when we all toiled in the news pit for sadly defunct dork-com Webnoize. And, in fact, there is some overlap in the chronology here, because when we were writing for Mr. Brigham 10 years ago, he was just getting started on the series of short stories that mutated, slowly, into (C)ROCK STORIES: MILLION-DOLLAR TALES OF MUSIC, MAYHEM AND IMMATURITY. We don't just give anyone all caps. Dave gets all caps. And NSync doesn't get that goddamn asterisk, EMusic doesn't get a goddamn small "e," and et cetera, because Dave said so, forever and ever, amen.

To hear Dave tell it (he appeared on Jay Kumar's Completely Conspicuous podcast to discuss the book last month -- part one, part two), the collection pictured supra has changed greatly over the years since he began ordering the words, but we recall reading early drafts and liking them a great deal. Does the finished product -- part fiction and part memoir and centered around one man's love of underground and hardcore music and attendant misadventures -- answer such age-old puzzlers as "how come you don't rock the stripe no more?" or address the irritated refrain "But I sent it to Dave Brigh-AAAAAm?" Perhaps it does. Perhaps it does not. We don't know, as we haven't read the thing. But our recollection of the early drafts is of a well-paced series of vignettes involving punk rock, van travel, drinking, punk rock, drinking, punk rock and Athens, Georgia. That's more than enough entertainment for one collection of short stories, if you ask us. But you don't need to ask us, you could just read the first two chapters, which are available as a PDF right here.

Purchase (C)ROCK STORIES: MILLION-DOLLAR TALES OF MUSIC, MAYHEM AND IMMATURITY from BookLocker.com right here in paperback or downloadable e-book PDF blah blah blah for your portable lightbox. And here's a tune by one of Dave's favorite acts to get you in the book-buying mood: MDC's "Corporate Deathburger."