A Conversation with Survivor’s Jim Peterik – HuffPost 9.22.14

Mike Ragogna: Jim, your latest book, Through The Eye Of The Tiger, isn’t just about your time with Survivor, it’s also about your personal life and observations.

Jim Peterik: Actually I’m a huge fan of rock ‘n’ roll and a huge fan of rock ‘n’ roll biographies and autobiographies. I eat those things like potato chips. One comes out and it’s eaten in a day and a half. My latest one is the Bruce Springsteen book by Peter Ames Carlin. I eat these up. They always bring me inspiration, especially heroes like Springsteen. Keith Richards still has the best autobiography out there. So I go, “Why not?” Why not write my story? I think there’s enough stories behind me to make an interesting book. Certainly stories ahead of me. When I’m 85 I might do the second book. But I thought it was time. It’s nice to kind of put your life in perspective for the writer. One of my biggest fears was that I wasn’t going to have enough conflict in my life to be interesting. I’m reading about the Mötley Crüe people, a train wreck of drugs, the whole bit–I didn’t really have that–so I’m going, “What is going to sustain the interest in this?” As I was writing, I was really shocked by how much conflict there really was in my life and how much pain there really was. A lot of it was just glossed over because I talk about a creative cocoon that I go into, no matter what’s going on if I have a guitar and a notebook I’m writing a song. I realized I was sheltered from a lot of that pain. As I was writing, it really all came out. It was really cathartic.