In 1978 a new style of music came
to America from England. It was rude, obnoxious and confrontational and the
band spearheading this new British Invasion was set to tour the South, the
least likely place they’d be welcomed. Anticipating a violent backlash to this
coming culture clash, the band’s record label needed to hire a security team
that could handle any situation that may arise. The man they chose for the job
was Dwayne Warner, a bouncer in some of the toughest biker bars in Los Angeles
County.
Paid To Die novel on Amazon.com
For twenty years after that historic
tour, Dwayne’s brother, Neal Warner, co-founder of the L.A. multi-media band
The Tooners, insisted Dwayne’s ever expanding and exaggerated stories of life
on the road needed to be recorded for posterity. But being a biker, the idea of
being perceived as a “rat” was unacceptable and as a professional bodyguard who
worked with bands such as Steppenwolf and Van Halen, telling tales about his
employers was unprofessional so he adamantly refused to write about his
experiences.
Neal, a professional cartoonist
and writer, decided an acceptable alternative could be to write Dwayne’s
stories in the form of a novel. Names,
except for Dwayne’s, would be changed and the “facts” of what happened on the
tour would be buried under a mountain of action-adventure movie-style scenes.
Dwayne had imagined his memoir being titled Paid To Die and Neal’s band, The Tooners, had already record a CD (Rocktasia) which included the theme song to
Paid To Die so that was chosen as the novel’s title.
The novel was written in 1999 and
was intended to be an elaborate joke for Dwayne’s eyes only. Stories of
experiences shared by the brothers were included in the book knowing that Dwayne
would recognize, and hopefully appreciate, this very personal novel which
included a lot of something the two brothers had in common; a very sick and
twisted sense of humor. However, the joke was ultimately on Neal, the author,
when his brother refused to read the novel citing plausible deniability fearing those caricatured in the book might
recognize themselves and sue. The joke fell flat and was locked away on a hard
drive from another 22 years.
Sometime in the year 2020,
fourteen years after the sudden death of Dwayne Warner at age fifty, Neal
Warner was self-quarantining in his home when he realized that if he were to
die from the Coronavirus pandemic, his finished novel, Paid To Die, the story
about his only brother, would die with him. And so, on May 30, 2021, the 65th
birthday of the late Dwayne Earl Warner, a limited edition printing of the
novel Paid To Die along with a release of the single Paid To Die from the album
Rocktasia by The Tooners will be made available for the first time.
