Jim
up his Jam Lab rehearsal
studios for some extensive chatting, but
even kept true to his appointment a mere
week after the incredibly sudden and
personally excruciating loss of longtime
Survivor singer Jimi Jamison to a heart
attack. Though the enlightening book
covers much of the above and then
wreck life that the other rock stars have
and it seemed like every autobiography I
read- and I read them voraciously- had
drama. I wrestled with it for a long time
thinking "you know, there's not that
much drama in my life." Well guess
what, as I started writing it, I realized
there was a whole lot more drama in my
life than I really thought! It's just that I go
into a cocoon called music and I bury
any kind of tension or any kind of conflict. I go off into a room and I put it all
into songs and it's kind of like a sheath
that shielded me from pain and conflict,
but it was still there…I would write from
six in the morning until nine or ten every
morning for two years. I started over a
bunch of times and I finally hit my
stride. I decided I'm going to start with
Photo: Andy Argyrakis
Jim Peterik
10•2014
some, Peterik took IE beyond its pages
for some extra perspective on an extraordinary career that's landed Top 10 hits in
four decades from a catalogue ripe with
over 1,000 songs.
Illinois Entertainer: Is writing a book
something you've been thinking about
for many years or did it just get to a
point where you got so many requests?
Jim Peterik: I think it was the latter.
There were a lot of people saying "you
should write a book of your life story,"
but I kept thinking, "nobody wants to
hear about me." I didn't have the train
maybe the biggest moment of my life,
the call from Sylvester Stallone [asking
me to write for Rocky], then I go right
back down to my roots in Berwyn and
then build it back up again. Once I got
the format, it kind of wrote itself.
IE: Why was it so important for you to
highlight your Chicago roots, perhaps
even more so than many other biographies?
JP: Well, I'm a Berwyn boy and when
you're from Berwyn, you have a certain
pride for some reason. Berwyn was a
very tight knit Czechoslovakian commu-
8 illinoisentertainer.com october 2014
nity. All The Ides of March came from
Berwyn. I've known Larry [Millas] and
Bob [Bergland] since second grade and
when I was a freshman we started out by
creating The Shondels. We went to
Morton West High School, and in 2012,
we got a street in front of the school
named after us, Ides Of March Way. So I
never lost those Berwyn roots and I think
that's part of the reason I'm still here.