Give the Drummer Some — Mark Beauregard

Mouse Watkins is the leader of the Bad Apples, the funkiest old school soul band in St. Louis. For twenty years, he's been laying down smoking grooves, tasty rhythms, and gutbucket funk in dance clubs up and down the Mississippi, always one break away from the Big Time. But Mouse is starting to wonder if his break will ever come. His best friend has disappeared with the Bad Apples' last dollar, his tour van won't start, and a groupie stole his only winter coat at the band's last show. Now, with no stomach for starting over (again) and a bleak winter on the horizon, Mouse washes up in East St. Louis, exactly where he started two decades ago. His dreams have come to nothing. Or have they? Give the Drummer Some is an odyssey into the heart of pop music and the soul of St. Louis, a book about the choices all artists, even great artists, have to make when the brilliant spotlight of stardom fails to shine on them.