Rockin' a Hard Place (Hub City, paperback, $16.95) is the story of The Handlebar and its owner John Jeter, Greenville's own intimate "listening room" that has presented thousands of artists -- John Mayer, Joan Baez, Zac Brown, and Sugarland among them -- and hosted a quarter-million fans since its opening in 1994.

John Jeter is a burnt-out journalist living in Florida when the younger brother who once saved his life with a donated kidney telephones with life-altering news: he's found the perfect spot in Greenville, South Carolina, for the concert hall they've always dreamed of opening-a nearly abandoned cotton mill fluttering with pigeons . . . and potential.

A promoter's memoir, this is the story of a naive plunge into an industry that Hunter S. Thompson once called a "cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free."

With a wry and irreverent voice, Jeter describes the concert business from the bottom of its food chain, where one band's backstage demand includes "one hamster dressed like Indiana Jones, one dressed like a police officer," where a landlord seeks to evict him over an ice machine, and where he is reduced to standing with a decibel meter in the dark behind his club.

Singer-songwriter Livingston Taylor tells him at the grand opening: "Never book anyone just because you're a fan." But for this cantankerous club owner, it's often Art before Commerce, financial risk be damned. After all, it's the small clubs -- where the likes of Springsteen, Jefferson Airplane, and even The Beatles got their start -- where real music is made.

Before opening The Handlebar, John Jeter earned a Master's degree in Journalism from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in New York and worked as a reporter and editor for various newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, the St. Petersburg Times, and the San Antonio Express-News. Jeter, his wife Kathy Laughlin, and his brother Stephen opened The Handlebar in 1994, relocating in 2001 to its current location on East Stone Avenue. His first novel, The Plunder Room, was published in 2009.

If you cannot make the event, you can reserve a personalized copy of Rockin' a Hard Place by contacting Fiction Addiction in advance at 864-675-0540 or at [email protected].

(Image provided by Fiction Addiction.)

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