Power Chord
Thomas Scott McKenzie
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Thomas Scott McKenzie was once a normal, hardworking mid-level software project manager living in Columbus, Ohio. When he couldn't take one more day of spitting out digital code, he turned to his first passion: music. As a wanna-be rock guitar god, Mckenzie set out on a legendary quest to track down and chronicle the lives of the world's greatest guitar players, including Eddie Van halen, Judas Priest's Glenn Tipton, Ratt's Warren DeMartini, and the iconic ex-Guns N' Roses musician, Slash.
This is a fun book written in a "Can you believe I'm standing here with my guitar idol?" gushing type of prose.
McKenzie loves his characters and talks like a star-struck fan about Kiss, Def Leppard, Stryper and others.
Here he talks about how he set out to write the book and contact his heroes:
That evening, my inbox had not exactly been inundated with guitar players clamoring, "Yes! Yes! I'd love to meet you and share all my deepest, darkest secrets." In fact, I actually received zero responses to my queries.
Over the coming days and weeks, a few notes trickled in. One challenge, I learned, was that publicists do not always partner with a musician permanently. Instead, they work for a given period of time to promote an album or a tour and then they move on. So the obscure publicity contacts that I dredged up from some two-year-old gossip page might no longer be relevant.
It's a charming passage from an obvious neophyte. Power Chord may be a bit too gushing and sycophantic. But for anyone who ever dreamed of putting an electric guitar around his
or her neck, stepping out onstage in front of 3,000 screaming fans and turning it up to 11, this will give you a small taste of what that might be like.
Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Steven Rosen, 2014
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