Black and white photo of a weathered guitarist smoking onstage before a roaring crowd — image for the story ‘So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star’ by Terence Patrick Hughes.

So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star

By Terence Patrick Hughes

About the Work

Set in a fading mill town where the ambition is as threadbare as the factory floors, So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star follows the rise — and the shadow behind it — of Charlie Dibenidetto. The narrator looks back on the kid who escaped their sinking neighborhood with a guitar, a little talent, and the kind of single-minded hunger no one else could muster.

Hughes writes the story with a sharp, unvarnished tenderness: a portrait of a boy who “made it big,” and the quiet, uncomfortable truth about what gets left behind when someone does. It’s a story about talent, escape, envy, and the strange ache of realizing someone else lived the dream you never risked chasing.

Publication History

Excerpt

CHARLIE DIBENIDETTO HAD MADE IT BIG. That’s what we’d say in the days before any of us ever gave anything a real try, except for Charlie, who was always plucking and strumming away at a guitar when we were kids. His family lived the next block over, on the top floor of a roughly aged three-tenement apartment stack, one of scores that lined the streets of our town, once a textile-mill mecca, now municipal sinkhole.

Critical Notes

Hughes captures the long shadow of childhood talent with a voice equal parts nostalgic and unsentimental — a story that hums with the ache of roads taken and roads left behind.
— Rock Salt Journal Reader Response

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Inquiries

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Image generated using AI, art-directed to reflect the atmosphere of So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star.