new book - three chords and blessed noise: a patti smith tour chronicle

The tl;dr - I wrote a short book about the five shows I saw on Patti Smith's Horses 50th anniversary tour and you can buy it now!

In November, Patti Smith & her Band went out on the road for the 50th anniversary of Horses. I traveled to the shows in Chicago, NYC and Boston, a total of five.

Of course, I wanted to write about these performances, but I wanted to write about them at length. I'm a big fan of the old-fashioned tour diary! So I decided I'd just write what I wanted and publish the end result myself. This is the era where / everybody creates, as Patti herself once said.

"Three Chords..." is 47 pages, about 23,000 words. More than a zine, less than a book. It is printed locally here in Michigan. I hired an editor but did the design and layout myself. (Quite understandably no one I wanted to work with was as interested as working over the Christmas holidays as I was.) Although 47 pages takes this out of zine territory, I definitely wanted the immediacy of the format. Write it, publish it, get it out there. The books went to print at the end of last week and will start shipping out the week of January 20th.

This is text-heavy. There are no photographs for a few reasons: These weren't club shows so I wasn't close enough to get anything worth using. And while I do know many talented photographers, licensing photos would have added to the overhead because I believe in paying people for their work, as well as making the book longer (and thus more expensive). Plus printing text is different than photos; if this book had been photo-heavy I would have had to move to a different printer and then this would have ceased being a quick and straightforward project.

"Three chords and blessed noise" is a Lenny Kaye quote from Patti's latest memoir, Bread of Angels. (I also almost called it "All the hipsters go to the movies," another quote I loved from the book.)

You can buy the book here. This is my own shop, I will be packaging and sending them out 1-2 times per week, more if I can manage it. This is US only right now; if you're elsewhere in the world, please fill out this form so I can see what the level of interest is. (I will warn you now that postage to Europe is ridiculously insane, it's like $20 per book. I am hoping to have a better solution for Canada.)

There is a limited amount of these because I funded the project myself. If the book sells out, I may do a pre-order for a second run if demand warrants. But this will not be available indefinitely.

I'm hoping this project goes well and if it does I'll publish some other zine-type books later this year.

Please tell your friends who might be interested!

To answer some questions:

• I know we all love walking into our local independent book or record store and buying IRL but this is a very small project and this setup is the easiest & most cost-effective way for me to manage all the things.
• This material will not be published on the internet, at least not any time soon.
• There is no local pickup unless we are IRL friends, in which case just text me.