Boom! I found a publisher for my Saratoga music history book

After nearly a decade of researching and writing my book, it’s finally found a home.

My hometown, Saratoga Springs, NY, during its Gilded Age glory.

I started thinking about writing a music history book about my hometown, Saratoga Springs, New York, way back in 2018. (Jesus, that’s a long time.)

Back then, I was executive editor of Saratoga Living magazine, and working on a throwaway front-of-book piece entitled, “5 Most Memorable Music Moments in SPAC History.”¹ Like every story I’ve ever written, short or long, I threw myself into the research. What I discovered were the beginnings of a vibrant history no one had ever really attempted to write front to back. Sure, star local arts journalist Thomas Dimopoulos had self-published his Saratoga Springs: Magic and Loss in 2015, a collection of stories about Saratoga, some of which touched on the city’s music scene.² And of course, two years earlier, Skidmore College graduate Jocelyn Arem edited and compiled the extraordinary Caffè Lena: Inside America’s Legendary Folk Music Coffeehouse, which includes interviews with many of the, er, folks who performed at the historic Caffè Lena throughout the years and scads of cool black-and-white photographs from the Joe Alper Collection.

But neither book was a comprehensive music history, and neither author was a Saratoga native.

I at least had the native thing working in my favor. I was born in Saratoga in 1979, the son of a Skidmore English professor dad, who arrived at the college in ‘67 and whose specialty was Shakespeare (hence my first name), and a high school English teacher mom who wasn’t long for that role and ended up as the associate dean of studies at Skidmore. My parents had actually met at Skidmore in the early ‘70s, so it was a full-circle moment.

I grew up in the rarified air of college academia, with “fac-brat”³ friends whose parents were mostly professors, all of whom were working toward a shared goal of educating young adults and (hopefully) releasing them into the world to become thoughtful, intelligent world citizens. There were other spoils of growing up on the Skidmore campus: I bought junk food and played video games at Case Center, played touch-football on the Skidmore fields, took tennis lessons on the Skidmore courts, took swimming lessons in the Skidmore pool, and attended men’s and women’s basketball games at the Skidmore gymnasium.

Despite wanting to grow up to be Red Sox pitcher Roger Clemens, one of the things I excelled at early was music. In kindergarten, I started out on the piano; switched gears to the cello in third or fourth grade while at Lake Avenue Elementary School; and after my bar mitzvah at Temple Sinai, used $250 of my gift money to buy a lipstick red Fender Stratocaster Squire, which led to a 33-year romance with the electric guitar.⁴

I actually have music in my blood: My father was a violin prodigy as a kid growing up in the Jewish section of Pittsburgh and had performed, as he liked to tell his sons, in burlesque clubs and on the Mr. Rogers show. I’ll chalk it up to the wonders of chemicals and chromosomes, but I’ve always had the gift of being able to pick up any stringed instrument and play something on it, as well as a “good ear,” which allows me to pick up most songs after hearing them once or twice. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the gift of “practice makes perfect,” so I didn’t have the chops to get beyond the amateur level.

As a young music lover, I was almost immediately showered in recorded music, too, whether it be my dad’s enviable collection of classical LPs—family favorites included the The Makado and Oliver! soundtracks—or later, my mom’s influence, which included buying my older brother and me albums by The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Beach Boys or sharing with us the few Bob Dylan records that survived her Skidmore years. When my dad took our young family on a 10-month sabbatical to Qufu, China, my brother and I were afforded little space in the family luggage for our growing music collection, and we were stuck with about 10 cassettes—Genesis’ Invisible Touch, Huey Lewis and the News’ Sports, and the Top Gun soundtrack included—to get us by for the near-year abroad in a third-world country. (You’re damned right I know every word to those albums!)

By the time I became a teenager at the end of 1992, the music world had changed dramatically, with the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten, and the rise of grunge and alternative rock. It was an exciting time, especially for Saratogians, because one of our own bands, The Figgs (née the Sonic Undertones), were making a play for the big time and had released their major-label debut, Low-Fi at Society High (1994), which had gotten some airplay on MTV, the apex of cool at the time. It was an album I would later revisit as an in-depth feature for Saratoga Living. For it, I interviewed the entire band, their A&R guy and radio promotion person at Imago, and many others to tell a history within a history that only the true dyed-in-the-wool Saratogians really knew about. The transplants, who had started settling in Saratoga in droves during the aughts, wouldn’t have likely even known who The Figgs were and why their history was important in the context of not only music history, but also the city’s.

I made that my goal, again and again, while I was at the magazine: to uncover (music) histories that weren’t so much “hidden,” but ones that had fallen off the radar of the ever-evolving town and its constantly morphing population. I felt it was my responsibility to protect those histories from being lost in the sands of time—and “hallucinated” about by AI bots.

Between the SPAC piece and The Figgs story I knew I had the opportunity to write something special. I also knew that the Caffè had booked a pre-fame Bob Dylan multiple times in the early ‘60s; there was a decades-old legend that Don McLean had written “American Pie” at Saratoga dive bar the Tin & Lint and performed it the next day at the Caffè (a legend McLean “debunked” in a Post Star article written and reported by Dimopoulos); that Carly Simon had written Saratoga and its racetrack into her highest-charting single, “You’re So Vain”; and a co-founder of the Grammy Award–winning pop-rock band Train, Scott Underwood, had grown up in Saratoga. I saw the writing on the wall. Put all these moments and songs and lore in order, and you had yourself a chronological history.

After several attempts to get the book started, which in its infancy, had no real thesis, those stories and other ones eventually Voltron-ed together to form drafts of chapters. My earliest drafts started in the Gilded Age, gave way to jazz and classical music, and then exploded into folk and rock and indie and beyond.

But I soon realized that a truly comprehensive music history of Saratoga would take decades to write, and I’d made it a goal of mine to publish a book before I was 50. Even though I’d been raised on classical music, I didn’t feel close enough to it to write about it with reverence. So I stripped away everything except folk and pop music, the latter of which I broadly defined as including bubblegum pop, rock, hip-hop, and indie, among others. That was the breakthrough I needed to write what I felt was a Saratoga music history.

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Then again, the first draft ballooned to 250,000 words, mostly due to the fact that each of my chapters included a memoir-like introduction and then the music history itself, similar to how we used to write features at Saratoga Living. But that format proved to be a dead end. I shared the lengthy first draft with my Albany/Troy area writers group, Upstate Lit—that is, novelist and poet Kate Schmieding, meta-fictionist and former Times Union journalist Rachel Silberstein, former St. Rose English professor and many-times-published poet Daniel Nester, and pro screenwriter Dan Yates, who’d put in nearly 20 years in L.A.—and they all agreed it was way too fucking long, but that its length was a good problem to have: They agreed that the “introductions” could be excised from the manuscript and be published someday as a memoir (yes, that’s in the works, too, folks; I can’t help myself).

Things finally started coming together last year. In July, I completed what I believed to be a “real” first draft of the book. In August, I attended the Cape Cod Writers Center conference in Hyannis, Massachusetts, where I asked a literary agent about what the length of my manuscript should be in order to get it published, and she came back with 85,000–100,000 words (as she was saying this, I did a real-time word count of my manuscript and realized it was 250,000 words and that my friends at Upstate Lit were right). That November and December, I started querying book agents, including the one who had quoted me the manuscript length in Cape Cod. She responded, and although she thought the idea had legs didn’t think she knew enough about the subject matter to champion it.

This past February, I did an informational interview with comedy writer and Vanity Fair editor Mike Sacks, whom I met on Threads of all places, and he had some really helpful pointers about the publishing process and the lead-up to it. His best piece of advice: Just get it out there! Because of that conversation, I made the decision to cut out the middle-person and stop querying agents, and put all my energy into looking for an appropriate publisher. I reached out to several presses, only one of which responded. It went nowhere. I narrowed my search to university presses only, assuming that they would be the best champion for a music history book about a small upstate New York city that most well-intentioned people outside of New York’s Capital Region regularly mistook for Sarasota (Florida).

I finally started writing a formal book proposal to send to the State University of New York’s press, aka SUNY Press, completing and sending it off to the acquisitions editor who I thought was the best fit for my project. I was positive he was my guy. It only took five or so days (!) to hear back from him, and he told me I had a wonderful story to tell, but that I’d need to make some changes to what I’d sent him—that is, write a brand-new opening chapter and cut out a lot of the fluff from my now former opening chapter on Bob Dylan. To me, that was also editor code for “you need to go back through the entire manuscript again and cut out all the fluff from the other chapters,” too. But he told me if I was cool with following his lead that he’d be happy to read my revised proposal and new/edited chapters whenever I completed them.

Unbeknownst to this first-time author, it was a positive to be asked to “revise and resubmit.” I spent the next several months researching and writing the new opening chapter, which included reading Joe Klein’s incredibly thorough Woody Guthrie biography cover to cover, a big hunk of David Browne’s wonderful Talkin’ Greenwich Village, and re-reviewing many of the notes I took and interviews I did throughout the years, to pluck out some of the best unused morsels. And while I was working on the new opener, I came up with what I believed to be a tighter, clearer, crisper thesis, thanks to some great insights (and tough love) from my friend and former editor Mike Ayers, who himself had recently authored and published the impossible-to-put-down jam band oral history, Sharing in the Groove.

I completed a draft of the opening chapter, revised the entire manuscript twice, then revised my proposal, and sent it off to SUNY Press on July 7. Almost exactly one month to the day later, on August 5, the acquisitions editor sent me this response (this is a shortened version):

Hi Will:

I gave a look at your proposal and shared it with my colleagues here and we feel it would be a good fit for our list.

Thanks again for thinking of [SUNY Press] as a possible home for your project—I think it’s a good one and I hope we are able to work together to make it happen!

Shortly after, SUNY Press and I co-signed the contract, and if everything goes as planned, my book will be on bookshelves in the winter of 2028. It’s tentatively called Spa Rock City: How Saratoga’s Folk & Pop Explosion Sparked Its Second Coming, and I can’t wait for you to read it!

Interested in covering my Saratoga music history book for your local or national media outlet? Or inviting me on your podcast or video series to discuss it? Message me here or send me a postcard. Whatever’s easiest.

1. SPAC (pronounced “spack”) stands for the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, which was originally opened in 1966 as the summer home of the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York City Ballet, and welcomed its first pop act in 1967.

2. In its introduction, Dimopoulos mentions that the third verse of Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” the one that mentions Saratoga and its famous racetrack, was how he knew about Saratoga when growing up in New York City in the ‘70s.

3. That’s short for “faculty brat,” a term I first heard uttered by my friend Kerim Odekon, whose dad was an economics professor at Skidmore.

4. I’ve performed solo, as a duo, or in a band throughout the years. Two high-points: I performed with my buddy Zach at CBGBs Gallery in NYC before it closed and with my band Turnover Mule at Caffè Lena as one of the last bands to perform with masks on to no audience before pandemic restrictions were lifted.