SEBASTIAN BACH On '18 And Life On Skid Row' Autobiography: 'I Just Knew I Wanted It To Be A Fun Book'

Tony Tone of Vintage Sound 93.1 recently conducted an interview with Sebastian Bach about the newly released paperback version of the former SKID ROW frontman's autobiography, "18 And Life On Skid Row". You can listen to the entire chat below. A few excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On what readers can expect from the paperback version of his autobiography:

Sebastian: "This is the expanded edition with more unseen photos from personal archives, so it's pretty exciting. When we did the hardcover [version], I discovered that when it was done, I had put more pictures at the beginning of my childhood than the rest of the book, so I was, like, 'I need more in these other parts of the book.' I like pictures in a book. When I'm reading a book, I don't know why, maybe other people do this, I'll read a passage, then I'll go back and look at this picture and go, 'Oh, that's what's happening.' I think it makes for a better book. It's more visual in your brain of what's happening. I'm reading Bruce Springsteen's book ['Born To Run'] right now. There's a lot of similarities to mine. It's weird. I'm not putting myself in his category, but it's like the same, I don't know, the same kind of feel to it. Him being a teenager in love with rock and roll and then what happens from there. He did a weird thing. He put all of his pictures at the back of the book. I've never seen that."

On whether he had been thinking about writing a book for a long time:

Sebastian: "I had been asked to do a book years and years ago. The first guy was Larry 'Ratso' Sloman, who wrote Bob Dylan's ['On The Road With Bob Dylan'] or his big book that he had, 'No Direction Home', I can't remember the name of it. That was 15 years ago. He came into my house and said, 'We can do a great book.' But, I'm a bit of a control freak. I've read every rock bio there is to read and I was good in English. [Laughs] In school, that was my best subject by far. I'm horrible at math. In my job, all you have to do is count to four, so that's good. [Laughs] I just knew that I wanted it to be a fun book and I had to really reach back in my memory vault to remember all the stuff that happened, because it was before the Internet. Like, if I was writing a book about last year, it's all online. I could just go look, but if you're writing about 1985, that is hard to do. That's hard to do, to remember when I was a kid at the KISS show. I'm very proud of how I wrote that whole experience because I feel like I'm there when I'm reading it. That's '79, that's a long, long time ago. Accompanied with my dad's photos from the time period, which are black-and-white and really capture that time. I'm just very proud of how it all fits together."

On what life as a touring musician is really like:

Sebastian: "What people don't get when you're doing something like that is you're doing the show, you're going on at ten at night, you're giving 100 percent to twelve at night or whatever, then wind down, then you do a meet-and-greet after that. You get back to your hotel at maybe three, something like that. Then you have a lobby call to go to the airport at 7:45 in the morning to do a show that night, then do it again that night. That's where it gets crazy because your body wants to go to sleep after you do the show. You don't want to go to the airport, you don't want to deal with security. That's what we do. We travel all day, we get to the hotel at maybe two in the afternoon, grab an hour or two of sleep, and then start getting ready for the show."

The hardcover version of "18 And Life On Skid Row" came out last December via Dey Street Books (formerly It Books),an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.