‘Scars and Melodies’

From playing local Wisconsin bars to charting at number 20 on Billboard, Jamie Fontaine and the Level’s rise and fall from stardom has sat as a story just waiting to be told.

This summer, that story will finally be told in the book Scars and Melodies.

Their band manager Chris Dobry commented on his inspiration to tell this story.

“Back in January I saw a post from Jamie Fontaine about an old Strykers Records repost and he was reflecting on those times. It really pulled at my heart strings, so I started talking to him again along with the bass player who I stayed in contact with,” Dobry said.

Founding Stryker Records in 1997, Dobry gained extensive experience from within the music industry, being ranked as the number four entrepreneur in the US Reporter’s Top 20 Entrepreneurs of 2020.

As their band manager, Dobry held all the triumphs and turbulences of the band very close to heart.

After the band pitched the book as a hypothetical, Dobry went to work immediately.

“I started writing it the next day from an off the cuff suggestion, I don’t think it was ever that serious. At first it was about documenting what happened. I spent a good eight hours of research between the concerts we did and some of the major events like when we got signed and when we charted on radio,” he said.
Establishing a timeline between Jamie Fontaine and the Level’s signing in 2017 to his departure from the band in 2021, Dobry quickly resurfaced old stories and details through the collective memory of him and the band.

“I roughly knew the whole story, I just had to get the timeline down and write the events in. After going through it two to three times I was remembering more and more details and was able to ask the band about what they remember,” he said.

The book covers the lives of modern rock stars and the dangers of that excess.

One example of this excess that Dobry shared from the book was a funny story of the band partying too hard alongside the singer of Saving Abel, leading the singer to puke and assume his spaghetti dinner was thrown-up blood.

“After the concert the whole place was alive, we were in the bar so long that the place was closed, there wasn’t even anyone in the bar. We exited the bathroom to total darkness everywhere, so we went to the bus and grabbed our guitars and went to the condos to party until about 11 a.m.” Dobry said.

“There’s hardly anything being held back in this story. It’s a real rock’n’roll story through and through,” he added.

Dobry hopes that Scars and Melodies functions as more than a callback to the band’s biggest hit, but as a cautionary tale for those pursuing music as a living.

“If you’re in music or the music business, I hope it’s a guide of what not to do. There’s things in there to learn from; the singer got a big ego and the partying became so excessive that it destroyed what we were doing. We hit number 20 on Billboard and we were wasted.

Granted it was over COVID and a lot of touring opportunities were wasted, but we weren’t helping ourselves with our excessive lifestyles. To any musician looking to hit the road, be moderate. You don’t have to be a straight arrow, but know where you are. Don’t get so wasted that you have to be carried out of the bar every night,” he said.

Preparing for a summer release date, the book is currently being reviewed by the publishing company. Even with the risk of spoiling the book, Dobry shared some recent developments with Jamie Fontaine and the Level.

“This may end up ruining the end of the book, but I did end up resigning Jamie Fontaine and the Level, but I only got the singer and guitar player. We currently have a release date for a song on May 15 — their first song since October 30, 2021. The band was a complete mess at that point, they were in the studio and had some bass and drums recorded, but now I got the other half of the band and we can finish the music,” Dobry said

Their new song “Hate” is one of five tracks recorded in their final studio session from 2021.

“Jamie didn’t even do a scratch [demo] take on it, but it ended up being good enough to put out and exist as a polished demo. The rest of the songs are being finished in a studio, but they were all tracked really clean and are being polished even more by a pretty top notch mastering company,” he said.

Find out more information about Scars and Melodies at chrisdobry.com/book%3A-scars-and-melodies.