Mark Twain is credited with giving this advice to fellow novelists: Write what you know.
Greg Anton, a musician and lawyer as well as a writer, does just that in his new novel, “It’s About Time,” a story about music and the law that revolves around a couple of rock musicians locked in a bitter courtroom battle over writing credit for a hit song.
In an odd mixture of real life and fiction, the song in dispute, “Stephanie,” which is fictitious in the novel, is an actual song that Anton wrote with the famed Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter.
The protagonist of Anton’s tale is Woody Harper, a gifted guitarist and songwriter who can’t seem to get out of his own way as he struggles with a cocaine habit while trying to come up with another chart-topper to match the life-changing success of “Stephanie,” a love song named after his long-suffering wife, a former topless dancer and mother of his baby daughter, Lily.
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“Woody is roughly based on all the great guitar players I was lucky enough to play with,” Anton said one warm afternoon in his studio in Sebastopol, a carpeted space filled with drums and percussion instruments, guitars and memorabilia from his career as co-founder of Zero, a band formed in Marin that recorded eight albums and performed more than 1,300 concerts in its 40-year career.
As a seasoned rock drummer, Anton, who turns 76 in August, has been lucky enough, as he modestly puts it, to play behind and study the habits and rituals of some of the Bay Area’s most revered and masterful lead guitarists, among them Zero co-founder Steve Kimock, Quicksilver Messenger Service’s John Cipollina and the great one himself, Jerry Garcia.
Anton has succeeded as a professional musician despite losing his left hand in an accident when he was 13. He’s been playing drums with a prosthetic device in place of that hand since he was a teenager. While he’s passionate about drums, guitar would have been his instrument of choice.
“Everywhere I look in my career I’ve seen a guitar player,” he said. “I’m in love with electric guitar music, and I’m fascinated by their gear, their hands and how they do everything. If I had two hands, I would have been a guitar player, no question.”
Woody’s antagonist in the novel is an arrogant rock star named Ray Bell, lead singer on “Stephanie,” who sues to get co-writing credit for Woody’s song. Portrayed as a rock-world sleaze, he also has designs on Woody’s wife.
“Ray is a showy kind of person,” Anton said. “I’ve met a lot of musicians like that who are full of themselves and prance around onstage. As Woody says, ‘All hat and no cattle.’ I’ve known musicians like that.”
“It’s About Time” is a sequel to Anton’s 2014 novel, “Face the Music,” which introduced the characters and the song. Like its predecessor, “It’s About Time” is set in the Bay Area music business of the late 1970s and early ’80s. Because Anton had been a part of that scene, once living on a ranch in West Marin with his wife and five kids and playing more than 120 gigs a year with his band, he writes with authority about a time when sharp lawyers negotiated lucrative deals with record companies that shelled out big budgets for bands to record albums in plush recording studios. (Think Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours.”) With scenes in Sausalito’s Record Plant, the original Sweetwater in Mill Valley and Woody’s redwood-clad digs on Mount Tamalpais, Marin is like a character in a period piece about a bygone era in our rock history.
Kirkus Reviews hails it as “a riveting insider’s tale,” and actor and author Peter Coyote calls it “a crackerjack book about the music business, so much truer, funnier and wackier than any of the stories that are starting to peep through the mulch of Netflix.”
As a practicing lawyer, Anton has been a champion of marijuana rights. Representing Lynette Shaw and the Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana, he won a landmark 2016 ruling that the federal government does not have the authority to block medical marijuana clubs from operating within California law. In his novel, the court case over “Stephanie” forms the centerpiece of the story, with Ray hiring an unscrupulous lawyer to argue that he deserves a share of royalties for adding some vocal lines and flourishes to Woody’s song.
Before writing the court scenes, Anton researched a couple of prominent legal disputes over music copyrights. One was a battle over Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” which ended when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision that the band did not plagiarize the song’s signature opening guitar riff from another song by the band Spirit. Anton also dug into a case in which the organist for the band Procol Harum sued the composers of the classic hit “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” winning a share of past and future royalties.
It would be a spoiler to reveal the disposition of Anton’s fictional case. Let’s just say it has a vengeful and unexpected ending. But there’s a lot more to this book than music and the law.
While the court scenes are fascinating, Anton also writes from personal experience about the often unglamorous life of a touring rock musician. At the same time, he delves into loftier thoughts about the spiritual power of music on listeners and the hold it has on the artists who devote their lives to creating and performing it.
He has been obsessed with that subject since he was in college. While playing drums with bands on nights and weekends, he graduated with honors in philosophy from Ohio University. His undergraduate thesis, “A Phenomenological Analysis of Music,” was published by the university’s press. Saving you from having to Google phenomenology, it has to do with the study of how things, like music, appear in our conscious experience.
“What is this thing, this music?” said Anton, still sounding mystified by the question. “What is it that makes people drive for six hours to hear one hour of music? What makes musicians practice for thousands of hours? What is this thing that’s so attractive to everybody? I decided that I’m going to try to figure it out and write about it.”
Details: Anton will discuss “It’s About Time” with music writer Joel Selvin at 5:30 p.m. July 31 at Book Passage in San Francisco’s Ferry Building. Admission is free. More information at bookpassage.com.
He will also talk about the book with author and actor Peter Coyote at 7 p.m. Aug. 15 at Copperfield’s Books in Sebastopol. Admission is free. More information at copperfieldsbooks.com.
Contact Paul Liberatore at [email protected]