From Gene Simmons to Liam Gallagher, David Fagin Keeps Finding the Side Door to Rock History

David Fagin’s career has an unusual relationship with famous people. In Confessions of a Musical Masochist, he repeatedly reaches the edge of someone else’s major rock story, stays long enough for something strange to happen, then returns to the less glamorous business of keeping his own music alive. Those encounters give the memoir a backstage history told from an angle celebrity memoirs rarely provide.

Fagin recalls kicking a soccer ball around an empty theater with Liam Gallagher during Oasis’ first U.S. tour. He writes about sharing bills with Duran Duran, No Doubt, The Strokes, Supergrass, Echo & the Bunnymen, Modern English, Night Ranger and Big Star’s Alex Chilton. His behind-the-scenes work also put him around concerts for U2, The Who, KISS, Stone Temple Pilots, Beck, Beastie Boys, Sheryl Crow, the Allman Brothers and Neil Diamond.

The stories resist becoming a parade of famous names because Fagin is usually the least powerful person in the room. He tries to pitch his own music to Butch Vig while working a Garbage concert and nearly gets fired. He watches Bob Dylan disappear from a festival under circumstances that seem baffling from his vantage point. Bush’s first U.S. show becomes another opportunity that slips away when his band is removed from the bill.

Photo credit: Noah Arkwright

The Howard Stern episode may be the purest example. Fagin convinces childhood idol Gene Simmons to join a discussion about the record industry’s treatment of artists. The Rosenbergs wait for hours, finally enter the studio, and then see much of their participation vanish from the television edit. Even an appearance beside one of Fagin’s heroes becomes another story about being edited toward the margins.

That pattern gives the book its distinctive perspective on fame. Fagin knows what the center of the music business looks like because he has repeatedly stood close enough to touch it. He also knows how little proximity guarantees. A prestigious opening slot, a television appearance or a conversation with an executive can feel transformative for several hours and then leave the practical circumstances of a working band unchanged.

The Duran Duran connection turns the pattern into a running joke across decades. Fagin nearly destroys The Rosenbergs’ biggest gig by getting arrested for stealing supermarket sushi hours before their Jones Beach opening slot. Roughly 25 years later, his cover band The Counterfeiters plays a Duran Duran afterparty in Atlantic City. Rock history keeps returning, but never in the form he once imagined.

Confessions of a Musical Masochist is richer for that sideways position. Fagin can admire famous artists without writing from the protected distance of someone whose own career followed the standard ascent. His encounters become snapshots of an industry viewed by a musician who was inside enough to see its machinery and outside enough to keep being surprised by what it did.