The Book

Praise for "Off the Record"

Review
By Tony Fletcher
iJamming; “The Best of 2001: Books” (February 7, 2002)

Music journalists make lousy novelists, I’m all too aware of that. But David Menconi, music critic at the Raleigh News & Observer, proved himself an adroit storyteller with “Off The Record,” in which the Tommy Aguilar Band (TAB) break out of the North Carolina scene at a Nirvana-like pace, resulting in a Kurt Cobain-like drug overdose that takes a surprise twist as the book concludes. The story is told through the eyes of local music critic Ken Morrison — though wisely, Menconi places his alter ego in the third person — and it's enlivened by a highly believable and decent club owner and a less plausible and thoroughly amoral manager/promoter. Menconi’s strength is in the music and the local scene — there's nothing about the band dynamic or its musicianship that you would question. His weakness, as befits someone brought up on journalism, is in not veering far enough from fact into fiction. We get thinly veiled versions of Aerosmith as Arrowhead, Rolling Stone magazine as Rock Slide, Billboard/Cash Box as Cashboard, Polygram Records as Polydoroff, and so on. But what the hell, it’s his first time out, and it’s a roller coaster read. Credit goes to Menconi for refusing to take no for an answer; when he couldn’t land a book deal, he self-published the book and promoted hell out of it, including posting a web site as if TAB was a real band. Payoff of a kind came when Rock Slide, I mean Rolling Stone.com, rightly praised it as ‘the A&R that doesn't suck.’