Are you ready for some Black Flack?

Corporate Rock Sucks turns six (months). The rest is history.

Greetings from Virginia! I’m at my brother’s house in Haymarket, which is about twenty-five miles west of where I grew up in Falls Church and just down the road from where Lorena Bobbitt chopped off and disposed of her husband’s penis.

I learned this grisly detail while watching a murder-show marathon with my mother last year.

Lorena got into her 1991 Mercury Capri with the weapon and penis still in her hands and drove off out of the complex down Maplewood Drive. At the intersection of Maplewood Drive and Old Centreville Road, she finally realized her husband’s severed penis was still in her hand and tossed it out the window across from a 7-Eleven in a grassy field in front of the Paty-Kake Daycare Center. Shocked and scatterbrained, she drove to the only place she thought of going — her work, a nail salon approximately four miles away in the Old Centreville Crossing shopping center. Nobody was there, so she deposited the bloody knife into the trashcan next to the nail salon and proceeded to her boss’s house. Once there, her boss, Janna Bisutti, called the police. She divulged to authorities where the missing appendage could be found. The police eventually found it, brought the small measure of manhood into the nearby 7-Eleven, and placed it into a hot dog container on ice where it was transported to the hospital and reattached on John. The rest is history.

At the time that we watched the show, I was putting the finishing touches on Corporate Rocks Sucks, which if you can believe it, came out six months ago today.

I “celebrated” this “anniversary” by spending the last few weeks fixing the book’s mistakes. At the end of Corporate Rock Sucks I invited readers to email me with comments, critiques, and corrections. The response was overwhelmingly positive and a few readers pointed out errors.

Naturally, I told them all to fuck off.

Reading copy of Corporate Ruck Socks

Seriously, I appreciate everyone who responded. The feedback was invaluable and vastly improved the new edition. Not a week goes by that I don’t hear from a reader of Corporate Rock Sucks, Do What You Want, and/or My Damage. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: punk rock fans are the best.

I also heard from some of the folks I interviewed for the book who corrected things I misunderstood. For instance, Ray Farrell pointed out that he arrived at Geffen after Sonic Youth, not before. During an event with Eugene Robinson earlier this year, he told me his mother was mad at me because I’d gotten the name of his high school wrong. Sorry, Mrs. Robinson. That error has been fixed.

Derrick Bostrom, Joe Carducci, Steve Fisk, and Dave Markey all had clarifying comments. I believe it was Dave who pointed out that somehow no one caught “Black Flack,” which is kind of awesome in an unintentionally comedic way. I changed “Black” to “Blag” and now we’re all set.

Finding a typo in a book you wrote is like learning that your child murdered someone. All you can do is look forward to a lifetime of sorrow and endless speculation about what went wrong. In my case, I get to play God and hunt the benighted typo down and eradicate it for all time so that it never existed.

What about the thousands and thousands of copies that still have the errors, you ask? Do I think about smug Gen X book critics, sitting in their ratty robes in their roach-infested apartments, chuckling darkly as they mutter “Black Flack” over and over again?

No, I don’t think about those schmendricks at all. Speaking of which, this is happening:

The Corporate Rock Sucks paperback is scheduled to come out on June 6, 2023, which is still a ways off. It’s not available for preorder but you can snag a copy of the hardcover for just $20.

It’s still in the works, but I’ll be bringing Corporate Rock Sucks to a music festival this summer that will also feature an SST band. More details to come.

In the meantime I’m working on some secret projects involving some old and new friends that I can’t really talk about right now, but more will be revealed later.

I’ll be in Northern Virginia for the rest of the week. If you’re still reading this, thank you. Every time I write about suicide or sobriety, like I did last week, I lose subscribers. I get it. I wish these things were outside of my experience, but they’re not, and it means a lot that you’re here.