Music has always tied best friends Joel Samberg and Bob Buono together. Now it’s the central driver of books both are releasing this spring.
Samberg described his novel, Jackie Jester, as a fictional, seriocomic tale based on his grandfather, Benny Bell, who was a professional comedic musician. Buono’s is an educational guide to Class-D amplifiers, fittingly called Class-D Audio Power Amplifier Design.
The two met when they were juniors in Westbury’s W.T. Clarke High School in the early 1970s. Both self-described music nerds who raved about Chicago, they started a band they cheekily called the Long Island Sound.
“Our friendship is as strong now as it was then, and it still revolves around music. We still talk about bands, we still harmonize together, we still talk about the intricacies of songs,” Samberg said. “It’s just the wildest coincidence that we’re both coming out with books that have a lot to do with music within weeks of each other, 53 years after we first became friends.”
Samberg, a freelance journalist and novelist, and Buono, a mechanical engineer, both found music as a central thread in their professions perhaps somewhat accidentally.
Buono, who said he has long been passionate about music amplifiers and sound systems, started his career designing power supplies for medical equipment. However, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when a change in the technology used for power supplies occurred to make them more energy efficient, he realized it was the same technology used in Class-D amplifiers.
“This light bulb went over my head, like, ‘Oh my gosh, I know everything there is to know about designing a really good amplifier,’” Buono said. So, he called up Crest Audio, the closest amplifier manufacturer to him, and asked if they had any consulting work.
“I went in there, and I’m working on this amplifier, and another light bulb went off,” Buono recalled. “I said, this is what I have to do. This is what I have to do for the rest of my life.”
“So,” he continued, “I called the next day and I said, ‘You have to hire me as an employee.’”
Buono was hired a few weeks later. He still works with Class-D amps to this day but now through Crestron Electronics.
“It’s kind of funny, because it’s something I always loved and my path led me to that kind of through a back door,” he said, adding that his motivation in writing this technical guide is to educate others, hoping to infuse them with his deep knowledge and passion for the amplifiers through the pages.
“I want people to get an intuitive understanding of what’s involved in Class-D amplifier design,” Buono said. “I think people do their best designs when they have a gut feel for something.”
Similarly, Samberg’s path initially led him away from music.
“When I was in high school, I had dreams of becoming a professional musician,” he said. But he just couldn’t resist the pull of the written word.
“I have never not wanted to be a writer since I was about 6 or 7 years old,” Samberg said. “Everything to me sounded like it should be a book or a play or a movie or a TV show or a long form magazine feature. So, I started putting some of those ideas to paper.”
He started out as a stringer for the Westbury Times, his hometown paper, and continued on to find work as a freelance journalist for a variety of papers, including Connecticut Magazine, where he currently writes a monthly humor column.
He said he has always been drawn to writing about music and entertainment, publishing books on music called “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Almost Like Praying” and one on the late singer Karen Carpenter.
“Jackie Jester,” however, is more personal than just his own love of music. Its focus on his late grandfather, who he has worked to honor over the past few years by recording new verses to some of his songs, is one of his latest efforts to preserve his legacy.
“I thought it might be fun to show how some of his more famous songs could be adapted and updated and made current,” Samberg said, referring to humorous songs with tongue-in-cheek titles like “Grandpa Had a Long One” and “A Big Pile of Ship.”
“The book is loosely based on and inspired by a real person who had a career very much like the career that Jackie Jester has in the book. If they’re at all curious about that real life, then they owe it to themselves to read a fictionalized version of it,” he added. “It’s not merely for the entertainment value. It’s also an insight into the world of musical entrepreneurship. In the book, Jackie Jester started his own record company. He was his own manager, his own producer, his own publicity guy, his own artist, his own distributor. But this really happened.”
As he wrote the novel, he said he was constantly talking with Buono, who helped him record one of his grandfather’s songs. Both said they found it fitting for their friendship that they were both publishing related books in the same season.
But, both books – Samberg’s 10th and Buono’s first – ended up being even more connected than either imagined. Each has a place between their friend’s pages.
“We didn’t know we were going to dedicate our books to each other,” Samberg said. But upon opening up each other’s books, they saw their own names.
“I encouraged him. He encouraged me,” Buono said. “When I mentioned the idea of writing the book, he was 100% behind it. He would keep me on track whenever I started to get discouraged.”
“It’s really nice to have a friend who knows you for that much of your life,” Buono said. “There’s nobody else like that.”
Even though they now live in different states – Samberg in Connecticut, Buono in New Jersey – they meet up every month at a New York diner exactly in between their new homes to fill each other in on their lives, cheer each other on on their new projects and talk music.
“It started with music, and 53 years later, it’s still about music,” Samberg said. “He’s like the brother I never had.”
Both of their books can be found on Amazon.
