Tonight, Dan Kennedy is reading from his book Rock On at the Sunset Tavern at 7 pm. It’s free. He’s a pretty funny guy; he writes for McSweeney’s, and his memoir is about working in the dessicated husk of the corporate rock and roll industry.

Here’s book critic Christopher Sabatini’s review of Rock On:

If you’re thinking that it’s at least 35 years too late for a book about the death of rock by corporate hands, you’re right. It should come as a surprise to no one that the office jobs behind the commodification of popular music stand in stark contradiction to the ethos that very music is ostensibly pushing. Yet dramatizing this surprise is exactly the tack that Dan Kennedy takes in Rock On: An Office Power Ballad. Kennedy accepts a job in the promotions department of Atlantic Records and expects he is entering the black-and-white pictures in the album sleeves of his youth. He thinks he will be walking among the Stones and Zeppelin. What he gets is the Donnas and the Darkness. And even then it is the former doing public-service announcements, the latter at a board meeting.

All of which is to say I feel like I should not like this book as much as I do; it is unnecessary, not to mention easy to the point of cruelty, to mock a corporate giant’s signed talent. It is Kennedy’s voice that pulls it off. He has convincing innocence and expectation, the genuine elation of someone who has struggled through shit jobs for an entire early adulthood and believes he has finally found something real. Whether Kennedy’s innocence is a pose ceases to matter. What we get is a year-and-a-half behind-the-scenes assignment: a humor writer going undercover to show us that this really is as bad as we think it probably is, a bunch of oblivious and overpaid suits surrounded by the recurring question of how has this come to be.

The question quickly becomes irrelevant. One of the two triumphant points of the book is that corporate rock is dying from the terminal wound inflicted by downloadable music, and that it clearly had it coming. Live by the rock, etc. The dinosaur that stomped all over your youth is dying a slow and painful death and Kennedy is there to laugh at it. The other triumphant moment this book captures comes from an extracurricular Iggy Pop show, where the wiry old punk focuses his bile at the VIP seats: “Betcha wish you weren’t fat! Jump down here you fat fucks! I dare you to jump!”