Andrew Marx took thirty years to start his first full length memoir, What Do You Say To The DJ?: A Slightly Phonographic Tale which he co-wrote with Dara Shifrer. A long-time opinion writer for various newspapers under the Smart ReMarx moniker, he finally went rogue and created his own space on the web called SmartReMarxcom.

The roots of What Do You Say to the DJ? were seeded when Shifrer and Marx created their first joint project Suedomsa the Magazine. Suedomsa was a monthly eight-page literary magazine that ran for two years and was distributed around the Las Vegas valley. It featured the stylized writing of Shifrer, editorials by Marx, artwork by Tabitha Worthington and articles by other contributors on topics as varied as lost loves and finding peace in Mexico.

The two collaborators reunited to create and contribute to the concert review website concert-central.com. Between the two of them, they are responsible for reviewing shows from some 600 bands at over 100 venues in 30 different cities over the last twenty years! It was, in fact, partly the creation of concert-central.com that becomes a central cog in the story behind What Do You Say to the DJ?.

The book is the real life story of the lives, loves and relationships of the authors during the time that concert-central.com came to life. It revolves around the theme of “surviving the time between the end of college and the I’ve-made-it moment…that never seems to arrive” according to their press bio, and there are times when the book is laugh out loud funny.

What Do You Say to the DJ? was released in an Expanded Edition on October 13. In addition to an introduction by Heather O’Connor, the new edition included twenty pages of new story material and an afterword by Marx. In his own words, “if you’re distracted by weird punctuation, angry at dangling plot points, and startled by ambiguous jumps in chronology, then the least we can do is try to fix it.”

Andrew Marx has finished a short novel Accidents Happen which will be published in the spring of 2010 and is hard at work on the follow-up The Dead Shells.