Shadows of the Night

 by D. L Byron

I couldn't quite figure out the person at the heart of this auto-biographical book. He seemed a little arrogant, sometimes angry, sometimes confused kid and had a little of the self-destructive talent we think of when we imagine someone in the music industry. But. But there was something else, something more.

Among other things, his "voice" is deeply intelligent as a writer. The sentences flow like water, and what ever he is going through, from his own hard-partying behavior, to the often manipulative people he encounters in his days as a musician and writer, he is honest. Whatever he did in the chapter you just finished, however disreputable or unhappy the story, you keep reading. You want to know who he is.

I kept turning to his author's photo on the back cover, and studying his face: a direct gaze with, yes, a little anger, or defiance in it. But given his story, that's not surprising.

Until the last couple of chapters. I won't give that away, but I will start you out at the beginning. David  was adopted. He captions the book's cover "How One Man Survived the Trauma of Adoption, the Snares of the Music Business, and Found His Birthmother and Seven Sisters," and bills the story to be in large part about being adopted. Yet the actual adoption itself stays far in the background of the narrative. Or does it?

As a boy, he is deeply troubled, and for one principle reason: his adoptive mother is self-destructive and very unhappy. At some point in our lives, most of us wonder what might have been different if we had been born into another family; we wonder what of our tendencies, habits, and choices we inherit from our parents. Life can be good - perhaps sometimes challenging to live up to - if we're born into a happy, nuclear, successful family. But what if you're not? And then, if you discover as a young child that, in fact, these people, as Byron says, "weren't my people. They weren't the mom and dad that smiled proudly through the glass window of the nursery the day I was born..." 

Byron's solution is one choice: he escapes as soon as he can, which is upon graduation from high school. He doesn't, as we might expect, spend all his time searching for his birth family, but rather he goes searching for himself. He's found music, and it becomes the place where "I could breathe. I never struggled for air. No car had to take me to the hospital, no entity threatened to cut off my air supply." 

Eventually he qualifies to enter an elite boys' school, but his dreams lie in his music, his band, and being free of all the weight of his early years. His adoptive mother dies when he is nineteen, but he has already embarked on the life that he'll lead for the next large handful of years: music, bands, gigs, girls, drugs and drink, and an industry that treats its talents with the simple idea of "what have you done for me lately?" There is that scene in almost every movie depicting a writer, a musician, even a painter. The artist is on the phone with his producer or agent, and is making excuses about why the next chapter isn't there, the songs aren't ready to be cut, the sketches for the painting only half finished. Byron's life during this time is partly that, and it's also a kaleidoscope of the joy of performing, the bacchanal of lost nights, days, and weekends, and above all the deep satisfaction of writing music. But it's also about a musician who delivered. You can hear the thrill of performance in his writing as he talks about entertaining a crowd, about the energy the band puts out, but also the energy they get back from a happy, engaged audience.

His crowning achievement was the rock anthem "Shadows of the Night," specifically as performed by Pat Benatar, though his performing and song writing credits are numerous. Syracusans will recognize the name Benny Mardones, another of the many big-name rockers with whom he worked, and the labels like Arista and Crysalis who sought out his talents. Along the way, he discovers his "third eye," and is willing to enquire into his spiritual side, and he fights for the music he creates and performs - that combative creative genius we identify with those who must create art versus those who simply do. 

As with most stories of endurance and redemption, Byron does find his way forward in the concluding chapters. It's a satisfying time, like a nice hot bath after a hard day's work, a refreshing drink of cold water, a peaceful settling of the pieces into place. You finish the book feeling complete, content in the knowledge that he has found "home," it's a good place, and even as he continues his work, he will be doing it with a lighter heart, a grateful soul, and certainly more chapters to write.