Someone Counts to Four and Then You Start Playing

The indispensable guide for those who are about to rock

Someone Counts to Four and Then You Start Playing is Mike Edison’s bold call to return to the fundamentals of rock’n’roll: rhythm, rebellion, sex, and soul. Part practical guide, part anarchist handbook, and all fire-breathing sermon, Someone Counts to Four delivers a lifetime’s worth of hard-fought and incendiary lessons in blues, punk, and classic rock revitalism.
Edison offers raw insights and fresh inspiration for aspiring musicians at any level of the game, and for fans passionate for an uncorrupted worldview. It brings the dirt and grime back to rock’n’roll, rips the sheets off of traditional music theory, and celebrates America’s rich tradition of juvenile delinquency.
Across ten chapters on such varied topics as taste, technique, authenticity, and the failures of technology, Edison tears a path from Little Richard and Bo Diddley through the Sex Pistols, the Stooges, the Cramps, Nirvana, and the White Stripes, with occasional detours into existentialism, anticorporate politics, and quantum physics. It is a love letter with a happy ending: a self-empowering, life-changing book for anyone who wants to disturb the universe by opening up their hearts and having an unapologetic good time. This isn’t just a book about rock’n’roll. It is rock’n’roll itself—a manifesto that should be nailed to the front door of every music school and the local bar.