Never Say No to a Rock Star In the Studio With Dylan, Sinatra, Jagger, and More

What does it cost to spend twenty years making yourself invisible so that someone else's genius can shine?  At seventeen, Glenn Berger walked into New York's legendary A&R Studios and learned the first rule of surviving inside a world of genius: disappear. Make yourself indispensable by making yourself invisible. Anticipate every demand before it is spoken. Never say no. Never take up space. Let the music get made.  For twenty years, he did exactly that. Under the volatile brilliance of Phil Ramone, he was present for some of the most important recordings of the twentieth century: Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years, Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, and sessions with Sinatra, Jagger, Bette Midler, and James Brown. He was good at his invisibility. Extraordinarily good.  But invisibility has a cost. And in the years that followed, when Berger left the music world to become a psychotherapist, he began to understand what that cost had been. Not just for himself. For anyone who has ever given their best years to something larger than themselves and emerged on the other side asking: who am I without this? What was it all for? Is it too late to find out?  Never Say No to a Rock Star is a book about three things at once: the charged, terrifying, beautiful world of the analog recording era. The psychology of what happens to a person who serves genius up close for two decades. And the harder, stranger, more important question of what it means to live fully at every stage of a human life.  It is written for the burned-out creative who has given everything and is trying to find their way back. For the person who has spent their life feeling slightly too much for every room they are in. For anyone who has stood close enough to greatness to understand what drives it, and what it costs, and has been quietly wondering what the whole thing was for.  Open your heart. Experience it all. Try not to gather regrets, but accept that you will have them. And above all, say yes to life itself.

Glenn Berger, PhD was for many years in the 1970s and 80s a recording assistant and later engineer/producer for the recording studio A&R Studios. After 20 years in the music business, Glenn became a psychotherapist. Excerpts from his memoir have been published in Esquire, Rolling Stone, and SOS Magazine. He lives in New York City.