Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair, with Music

By the author of the bestselling Five-Finger Discount, a hip, funny, and absorbing memoir of a journalist realizing a lifelong dream—playing drums in a rock band—as her marriage hits the rocks

Helene Stapinski took guitar lessons when she was a girl, but it was her brother’s drums that really held her interest. She used to sneak in and play them when he was away; when he realized what she was doing, he dismantled them each time he finished playing. But Helene figured out how to put them back together. She learned the classic drum solos and followed the careers of famous drummers.

As an adult, Helene put the drums aside and became a journalist. When she was thirty she interviewed Julie, the leader of a rock band, for a story. The band needed a drummer, and Helene’s long-forgotten ambitions came flooding back. She joined, and then she brought her husband aboard on bass.

Just as they started playing out at clubs, though, Helene’s husband quit the group. And as Helene’s involvement with her bandmates deepened, her relationship with her husband became distant and strained—and very nearly shattered.

Baby Plays Around reads like a novel but will ring true to anyone who has ever been in a band or just dreamed of it. Set amid the bars, clubs, and rehearsal studios of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, it’s an incisive exploration of the romance of rock and roll, and of the realization and relinquishing of youthful dreams—about ambition, freedom, and infidelity, about love lost and found again. Written with the same wit and insight that distinguished Stapinski’s uproarious memoir Five-Finger Discount—and a sense of humor as sharp as the crack of a snare drum—Baby Plays Around is a unique and deeply personal story of music and passion.