by Danny Coleman
originally published on Rock On! This Week’s Sound Bites…1/2/2026 (NewJerseyStage.com)
“I’m playing with a friend of mine, Husky Burnette and he does sort of a heavy blues rock kind of thing. We don’t tour much but we just finished an album that is coming out some time in the Spring. I’m still at it, I don’t really know what else to do other than play music and write books,” laughed Douglas Bales, author, drummer and music man, whose recent book, “Rock ‘N’ Rolla Coaster” (Anxiety Press) details a life in music and its adventures as well as its misadventures.
Many books have been written about music, touring and life inside of both so, to understand what makes Bales’ newest effort different, let’s take a look into exactly who he happens to be. “I’ve been a musician for about 40 years now and have done everything from the bottom to the top and back again,” he began once again with a laugh. “I started out when I was about 19 or 20 years old back in the mid-eighties. I played with a number of bands over the years that saw little if any success; you know, the majority of us that play in bands, it’s a long hard road. I hooked up with this guy in 2016, a fella called Mark “Porkchop” Holder, I was the drummer for him. I mostly play drums, I did front a band for a little while but I’ve mostly been a drummer my entire career. We got to tour extensively in the U.S and short run down in Mexico and a two week run in France. I got to play in front of some pretty big audiences doing the international stuff but I’m a drummer and also an author. My first book called, “Maximum Taxi” came out about two years ago and my newest one called,”Rock ‘N’ Rolla Coaster” came out about three months ago.”
Bales states that the book is “Fictionalized” but only technically so because apparently, the names have been changed to “Protect the innocent.”
“It’s fictionalized because I changed all of the names of the people, the bands and the venues and all of that but honestly, it’s pretty much autobiographical, it’s based on every crazy and weird story happening in the book I’ve pretty much witnessed myself. Like I mentioned earlier, my first book, “Maximum Taxi” was based in reality as well. It was based on the few years I spent as a cab driver in Chattanooga and I had all of these stories in my head. I’ve always written, even when I started out in music, I wrote a lot of the lyrics for the songs in my first several bands. I’ve just always been a writer with all of these stories in my head, I like to kind of clear the space out from my mental filing cabinet so I have room for more (Laughs).”
“Rock ‘N’ Rolla Coaster” took almost two years to write and get it cleaned up,” he continued. “You don’t just write it, you have to go back and clean it up, edit it and all that. So, it took me almost two years to finish it and luckily, the publisher picked it up right away as soon as I was done with it. The main guy at Anxiety Press is Cody Sexton and I hit him up with an email and asked if he’d be interested and he said, “Hell yeah, let’s do it” and so, that was a big relief knowing that it was gonna be picked up and put out and it took a few months even after that because we have t go through and get everything straight on the page so it looks good and all that. So, it’s a process of writing; just like playing music, that’s one thing that a lot of people who don’t play don’t understand. They’ll go to a club, a bar or a big venue and they see the band and they say, “Man, what a great job, you only work like an hour a day” (Laughs) but the reality is, you travel four hours, spend a couple of hours loading in and soundchecking, not to mention time spent writing and rehearsing, it’s a week’s worth of work in every single show.”
The book’s forward pages highlight some quotes, one of which is from legendary member of The Clash, Joe Strummer; someone Bales greatly admires.
“Joe Strummeris one of my biggest musical heroes and influences. I think he was a great songwriter and he was just great. He was more or less the front man for The Clash, him and Mick Jones kind of split it up but I always just admired him for his intelligence and his humor, especially in his lyrics where his intelligence and humor come through. Ever since I was a teenager, he has been a really big influence on me; him and several others. I’ve got several other musical favorites but Joe has always stood out. I got turned onto them when I was probably around 12 or 13 years old, like the late ’70s was when I was turned onto The Clash and around the same time, another favorite was Blondie, The Ramones of course. I’ve always sort of gravitated to punk rock and hard rock but I listen to all sorts of stuff; everything from jazz to classical, to folk and punk but something about The Clash spoke to me.”
Did any of that speaking have anything to do with the book’s title?
“One reason I settled on the title is because of that quote from Strummer we discussed earlier which is from a line in The Clash’s “All The Young Punks” where he said, “Everybody wants to bum a ride on the rockin’ rollercoaster” but also, I’ve been doing this for 40 years and there have been a lot of ups and downs, twists and turns and it’s very much like a rollercoaster. I even mentioned it in the book, there was one point when I was touring with Mark “Porkchop” Holder, we played those shows in France and that would’ve been somewhere around 2017 or 2018 and a couple of those shows were in front of 20,000 or maybe 30,000 people and then we get back here to The States and we’re playing to like 12 people (Laughs), talk about a shock; it’s a crazy way to make a living.”
That very essence of “Crazy” is spot on because making a living in the arts has never been and will never be easy but yet millions around the world pour their heart and souls into doing so and Doug hopes that “Rock ‘N’ Rolla Coaster” will open up people’s eyes as to what the journey is all about.
“A lot of the book is trying to capture the crazy things that happen within a band that people who have been in bands can recognize or relate to and also for people who haven’t been in bands and travelled and stuff like that; just to let them know it’s a job, it’s work, it’s not all fun and games and backstage glamour that people perceive it as, it’s really rough sometimes. There are a few stories I touch on in the book, especially when I was younger; like I said, I came up listening to a lot of punk rock. So, I had a lot of angst and my leather jacket and all of that and somebody would come out and hand the band 50 bucks and I was like, “Man! What are you talking about?” Sometimes it was even worse than that and when I was younger I would get really angry about it. I’ve settled with it now but in my younger days it almost came to blows a few different times because I was so insulted by somebody coming up and handing you a pizza with 40 bucks for the entire band to split up and to me that’s terrible; art is worth more than that.”
Perhaps rightfully so, the book’s end takes us up to where blues music is widely considered to have begun; Clarksdale, Mississippi. Bales’ travels took him to this Delta town with a rich music history where things came full-circle.
“The book kind of winds up when my buddy Porkchop decided he needed a break from the scene because he had some physical and mental problems that he needed to take care of and he moved back to California where he could get better medical help than in the Southeast. So, it sort of winds up when I was basically stranded in Clarksdale, Mississippi. I was sittin’ in and playing with several cool people but it put on the brakes of the whole touring thing for a few years. As a drummer, I could pick up two or three gigs a week doing the blues shuffle, just sitting in keeping a beat. I played a few gigs with Deak Harp because his drummer, Quicksand had some heart problems. So, this book comes up from when I started out, when me and my brother formed a band in the mid-eighties doing sort of alternative rock and being in Chattanooga, we were really drawn to the whole Athens scene; R.E.M, B52s, Pylon and those sorts of bands. So, we were doing the alt-rock thing and we travelled around a bit, mostly in the Southeast and we were convinced we were gonna be the next R.E.M because we were 20 years old and didn’t know any better (Laughs) and after that band split up, I fronted a grungy-punk sort of thing, then a band that was more Americana like Creedence Clearwater or The Band and then with another punk-pop band, then back to another punk band and then I struck up with Porkchop. I love playing, I love travelling and when I’m not doing that, I love writing all of this crazy stuff down (Laughs).”
To Discover more about Doug Bales, his music and books, please visit https://www.douglasbales.com/