Joe Vitale’s new biography, Backstage Pass, ships this week, hot on the heels of his new album Speaking in Drums which was released in mid-December.Backstage Pass is a compilation of road tales gleaned from Joe’s four decades in the music business big-leagues, as told to Susie Vitale, his wife of 35 years. His experiences filled over 20 sixty-minute tapes and resulted in over 488 pages of text, including some 750 personal photographs (96 of which are in color), each one selected and sorted for publication by Joe himself.

It’s a real-life inner sleeve spanning a playing, recording, writing and producing career shared with the likes of Joe Walsh, the Eagles, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Dan Fogelberg, Peter Frampton, Ted Nugent, John Entwistle, Rick Derringer and Boz Scaggs among many, with the stories continuing up to the most recent tour with Stephen Stills in October 2008. Stills, along with David Crosby and Graham Nash, penned the book’s forwarding page.

“I hope everybody enjoys reading the book as much as I did writing it,” Susie Vitale tells us, “and when you finish it, you’ll feel like you had a really great time. There are many things in the book that even his friends don’t know, and I hope the fans of all of the stars Joe has played with will get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of their personalities and how sweet and kind – and funny and crazy – they are.”

“The guys have always been really wonderful to Joey and me, so I have tremendous affection for all of them,” she continues.

The project itself was, in fact, a family affair. Susie was responsible for transcribing and texting a year’s worth of recordings, while son Joe Vitale Jr. provided the graphics and technical assistance, even down to shooting the photo for the dust jacket.

“Joe Jr. and I sat and formatted the book, choosing and inserting each of the black and white photos in the stories and sizing each one to fit the layout, for what seemed like forever,” Susie explains. “His computer and graphic skills were a really important part of making this all happen.”

“It sounds ironic, but the worst part was seeing the book actually be put up for sale in August. I wasn’t nearly finished! That really put the pressure on,” she admits. “But I couldn’t rush – it had to be right. And we’re really pleased with the result.”

>Book and CD signing: Jan. 23rd at the Blue Olive Jazz Club in Canton, Ohio from 8-11 pm
>Product information: Hit records
>Joe Vitale Jr.

German-speaking fans interested in Don’s life story can now read Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles in German instead of having to Babelfish our site’s excerpt.

Mein Leben mit den EAGLES 1974-2001: Durch Himmel und Höllehas now been released by Hannibal Verlag, an Austrian publishing company specializing in German-language adaptations of recent music and pop culture books.

The German edition can be ordered from the Hannibal site or from Amazon.de