Mark Twain is credited with giving this advice to fellow novelists: Write what you know.
Greg Anton, a musician and lawyer as well as a writer, does just that in his new novel, “It’s About Time,” a story about music and the law that revolves around a couple of rock musicians locked in a bitter courtroom battle over writing credit for a hit song.
In an odd mixture of real life and fiction, the song in dispute, “Stephanie,” which is fictitious in the novel, is an actual song that Anton wrote with the famed Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter.
The protagonist of Anton’s tale is Woody Harper, a gifted guitarist and songwriter who can’t seem to get out of his own way as he struggles with a cocaine habit while trying to come up with another chart-topper to match the life-changing success of “Stephanie,” a love song named after his long-suffering wife, a former topless dancer and mother of his baby daughter, Lily.
“Woody is roughly based on all the great guitar players I was lucky enough to play with,” Anton said one warm afternoon in his studio in Sebastopol, a carpeted space filled with drums and percussion instruments, guitars and memorabilia from his career as co-founder of Zero, a band formed in Marin that recorded eight albums and performed more than 1,300 concerts in its 40-year career.
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Famed drummer’s work in music, law inspires Bay Area-set rock novel
