Never Say No To A Rock Star

What does it cost to spend twenty years making yourself invisible so that someone else’s genius can shine?

At seventeen, Glenn Berger walked into New York’s legendary A&R Studios and learned the first rule of surviving inside a world of genius: disappear. Make yourself indispensable by making yourself invisible. Anticipate every demand before it is spoken. Never say no. Never take up space. Let the music get made.

For twenty years, he did exactly that. Under the volatile brilliance of Phil Ramone, he was present for some of the most important recordings of the twentieth century: Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years, Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, and sessions with Sinatra, Jagger, Bette Midler, and James Brown. He was good at his invisibility. Extraordinarily good.

But invisibility has a cost. And in the years that followed, when Berger left the music world to become a psychotherapist, he began to understand what that cost had been. Not just for himself. For anyone who has ever given their best years to something larger than themselves and emerged on the other side asking: who am I without this? What was it all for? Is it too late to find out?

Never Say No to a Rock Star is a book about three things at once: the charged, terrifying, beautiful world of the analog recording era. The psychology of what happens to a person who serves genius up close for two decades. And the harder, stranger, more important question of what it means to live fully at every stage of a human life.

It is written for the burned-out creative who has given everything and is trying to find their way back. For the person who has spent their life feeling slightly too much for every room they are in. For anyone who has stood close enough to greatness to understand what drives it, and what it costs, and has been quietly wondering what the whole thing was for.

Open your heart. Experience it all. Try not to gather regrets, but accept that you will have them. And above all, say yes to life itself.

Links to Reviews

Real Vinyl: In The Studio With Dylan, Jagger, Sinatra, and More

Oddballs and Angels: A Tribute to Phoebe Snow

My Recording Sessions with Bob Dylan: What it was like to be in the studio for Blood on the Tracks

South China Morning Post

The Vinyl Press

Record Collector Magazine

Interview with The Vinyl Press

Interview with Forgotten Hits Magazine

Glenn interviewed on the Australian Today Show

The Daily Mail

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Book Topics

surviving creative burnout memoir

psychology of serving genius losing yourself

coming of age memoir identity purpose meaning

books about misfit identity creative courage

say yes to life human flourishing self-cultivation

creativity madness perfectionism psychology memoir

courage to live fully at every stage of life