Best Thai Ashtrays

Can a fallen rock star rise again? That’s the question Lek is forced to ask himself on the night Joey Ramone died. Born on an American military base in Thailand and coming of age during what Francis Ford Coppolla called “the first rock and roll war,” the Thai musician has to confront his demons of addiction, his poisonous divorce, his deteriorating relationship with his musician son (named after Dee Dee Ramone) and his new career as a boy band producer, as he begins his journey on the rocky road to making a comeback. In the second interconnected novella, “The Genocide Girls and Boys,” he meets a younger woman from Norway who is fascinated by extreme metal and the Cambodian genocide. She inspires him to start working on a new album. Smart, pretty and deeply troubled, Edana will push both his creative and self-destructive streaks to the brink, in a tale marinated in drugs and liquor, and set to a soundtrack that melds everyone from Cannibal Corpse to Chet Baker, and the Carpenters to the Clash, the Replacements, Rolling Stones and the Jesus and Mary Chain. The first paperback edition of the book contains a new 130-page nonfiction section of "Rock Writings and Musical Memoirs" that mixes the author’s music journalism with tales from his own career as a trailblazer in Canada’s indie-rock scene. “When Punk Turned 40” denotes the movement’s backstory, while "My Close Encounters with Rock Stars," features Joe Strummer, the Pixies, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Ice-T, the Gun Club, Teenage Head, Jim Carroll, Leonard Cohen and "Assholes in Headlining Bands I Barely Met Yet Still Despise." The grand finale, "My Last Show and Worst Onstage Disaster," chronicles a near-death experience the author had during his final gig in Berlin.