John Jeter
Rockin' a Hard Place release

Please join us for the joyous release of Rockin a Hard Place: Flats, Sharps and Other Notes from a Misfit Music Club Owner, the story of The Handlebar Listening Room by Greenville author John Jeter. Jeter will read, sign books, and entertain with stories about his 18 years in the music business. The public is invited and the event is free.

Independent Publisher calls Rockin' a Hard Place "an essential read for music lovers." CelebrityAccess calls it "a splashy, starry memoir." Kirkus Reviews says the book is "a hard, sobering look at what it really takes to bring live music to the fans."

Jeter is a burnt-out journalist living in Florida when the younger brother who once saved his life with a donated kidney telephones with life-altering news: he’s found the perfect spot in Greenville, South Carolina for the concert hall they’ve always dreamed of opening—a nearly abandoned cotton mill fluttering with pigeons … and potential.

With a wry and irreverent voice, Jeter describes the concert business from the bottom of its food chain, where one band’s backstage demand includes “one hamster dressed like Indiana Jones, one dressed like a police officer,” where a landlord seeks to evict him over an ice machine, and where he is reduced to standing with a decibel meter in the dark behind his club.

Singer-songwriter Livingston Taylor tells him at the grand opening: “Never book anyone just because you’re a fan.” But for this cantankerous club owner, it’s often Art before Commerce, financial risk be damned. After all, it’s the small clubs—where the likes of Springsteen, Jefferson Airplane and even The Beatles got their start—where real music is made.

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