GQ Magazine
July 2004

The Less-than-perfect life of a ‘90s rock star
By Genevieve Roth

The best books about a business are seldom written by its legends (ever read anything by Michael Jordan or Jack Welch?). So it makes sense that So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, one of the funniest, most incisive books about rock ‘n roll in recent memory, would come from a guy like Jacob Slichter—the nerdy drummer of the semipopular and never seminal mid-‘90s outfit Semisonic. A Harvard graduate, Slichter painfully chronicles the indignities that his band endured to break the Top 40. Semisonic was charged for its own limousines and tours, submitted to the predictable image makeover (Slichter’s thinning thirty-six-year-old hair was bleached), and racked up more than a million dollars in debt. They sucked up to radio and MTV, and when Semisonic finally broke through with the hit “Closing Time,” Slichter found the experience . . . less than glamorous. “The shine of my platinum record was dulled by months of multiplatinum expectations,” Slichter writes. Nice line we’ll send a copy to Limp Bizkit.

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