CHICAGO — The rock ’n’ roll life can be a very hard life, and Michael McDermott knows that as well as anyone who is still alive and kicking, and writing: “Music is an amazing, time-traveling vehicle that glides atop the ether of our memories and dreams. Sights, sounds, and scenes come rushing back like a strong narcotic to catapult you into the stardust of your life. To untether you to swim in the beauty and madness of life. Music is that vast ocean that can carry you.”
Those are not the lyrics to any of the songs on his many albums. They are from his first book, an often harrowing, often hilarious and altogether hopeful memoir “Scars From Another Life.”
“As I was writing, I was getting physically ill reliving some of the stories in the book,” he told me. “There were such mood swings that my wife said, ‘This book is killing you.’ But it has been worth the effort. There are some things that just can’t be put into a song.”
