In all of Rock 'n Roll, it was the least of all cool jobs, but everyone who did it, wanted no other job: Roadie. No show ended or started without them; they were there hours before and hours after a concert.

In the mid-60s, a group of studio musicians turned an Alka-Seltzer commercial into a novelty hit, "No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach's In)". Unwilling to go on the road to promote it, a new group was formed by Dan Hamilton, Joe Frank Carollo and Tommy Reynolds, who were then credited with the song. When its popularity waned, the three formed a new group using the name "Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds." Their first record resulted in the hit song "Don't Pull Your Love," and earned a Gold record, Reynolds unexpectedly left the band. Soon Hamilton, Carollo and Alan Dennison signed a contract with Playboy Records, with the stipulation they keep their original band name. They struck gold again with their first record for Playboy, "Fallin' In Love." It was Playboy's only #1 pop hit. This is the story about how this great soft rock group came to be. It looks carefully at the group's entire music legacy and explores previously unreleased songs that were discovered during research for the book.

"Jen offers up all the gory details of a life permanently in progress. She reassures you that it's okay to not have life completely figured out, even when you reach middle age (and find your first gray pubic hair). She talks about making unusual or unpopular life decisions (such as cultivating a 'friend with benefits' or not going home for the holidays) because you don't necessarily want for yourself what everyone else seems to think you should. It's about renting when everyone says you should own, dating around when everyone thinks you should settle down, and traveling alone when everyone pities you for going to Paris without a man"--Amazon.com.

When I wrote my first book, which I thought would be my one and only one I had plan on writing, came about through my experience from watching the artists over the years as they were inspired to write, gave me a "window" into the knowledge of how and when to move on these impulses, for lack of a better word. I knew that these rare moments of impulses must be captured immediately, or they would be lost forever. One morning about 3 am I got these impulses to get up and start writing.Just what the inspiration was driving me to even get up from a deep sleep, which at the very moment I knew the difference between the sleepy me, from the inspiration to write down what I was feeling. I guess to describe this "inspiration" is like when you climb a mountain and reach the top and look out over the view of where you just came from.That inspiration [feeling] is the same that I felt to get up out of bed and write down on paper. Being a Roadie, and having been in and around the world of music, and musicians, enabled me to move forward and eventually through hard work, rise above the pits of the abyss and become not only a professional Roadie but work for those that had hits on the radio.My first book is a mix of the original Rocky movie and the movie, It's a Wonderful Life with actor Jimmy Stewart, which is woven throughout the book.As I look back on those years and even now, I had no idea that what I was living through would become for me a legacy, my book, Life of a Roadie, the Gypsy in me, and my sequel Walk A Mile in My Shoes.

The son of the famous and eccentric ecdysiast recalls his life with his mother and her sometimes outrageous struggle to survive and to maintain her style of life, her menagerie of pets, and her teen-aged son