About The Road to Nowhere by Johnny Samson
So what’s it really like to play in a band? The budding rock star sets off on the road with high hopes of stardom, glamour and riches, but reality soon kicks in. The Road to Nowhere follows the trail of the journeyman musician – free from the chains of any degree of commercial success and able instead to dedicate a life to sending hundreds of unanswered emails in a vain attempt to get a gig at the Dog & Duck for $20 on a Tuesday night. A thread runs through it of the author’s own hilarious and (predominantly) disastrous experiences, and dogged refusal to learn from the lessons repeatedly presented.
Be it tales of learning to play, forming a band, the rehearsal room, the recording studio, playing live or doing a photo-shoot, anyone that has played in a band will recognise the places visited within these pages. If you’re not into travelling, but you’re curious about foreign lands, then this might answer some questions. And those innocent souls that are considering the idea of setting off on their own musical adventure may gain some useful advice – perhaps not enough to save them, but at least they’ll know what to pack…
Buy the book, and follow the author on social media:
Author Bio:
I was born in Salisbury, England, in 1973, eldest son of a sailor and a seamstress. I excelled in mediocrity at grammar school, where in 1989 I was voted most likely to have a commercially unsuccessful career in the music industry and write a book about it. I fulfilled this prediction with alacrity, which is why you’re reading this.
I was writing songs from an early age, and my love of both writing and music led me to producing an independent music fanzine in the early 1990s called The Bendy Pencil, that you’ve never heard of before now and never will again. I began playing in bands around the same time, which remained a constant as I hopped between dole cheques and temporary employment in Smalltown England.
I met my future wife and attended her wedding to somebody else in 1998, before her untimely deportation the following year. The upshot of this was the pair of us moving to Australia in 2000, where I continued to lose money hand-over-fist as a semi-professional musician in Melbourne for the next two decades. Despite writing more than 300 songs, playing well over 500 gigs, and releasing 14 albums I notably failed to attain any tangible success, and resorted to any number of part time jobs to support myself. Nevertheless, I continued to write, finding myself involved in some thrilling creative endeavours, including the writing and design of training manuals for business analysts, product catalogues for hydraulic component wholesalers, web copy for beauty therapists and proof-reading local council newsletters.
In 2019 I realised that I now had considerable expertise in what not to do to become a success as a musician, and decided to write a book about it – which proved both enormously rewarding and far cheaper than recording another album, not to mention much easier than finishing my first novel.