Stephen King's literary rock band remains a top-shelf celebrity side project

The Rock Bottom Remainders, a musical troupe of bestselling authors, has been the gold standard for vanity projects by totally eschewing vanity.

By Matt Schimkowitz | October 28, 2025 | 10:00am

Photo: Jerod Harris/WireImage

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Stephen King's literary rock band remains a top-shelf celebrity side project

In the grand scheme of celebrity rock bands—a subtype that includes Johnny Depp’s Hollywood Vampires, Jared Leto’s Thirty Seconds To Mars, and New York Knicks owner James Dolan’s JD & The Straight Shot—the Rock Bottom Remainders might not be the most well-known. Or the sexiest. Or even the most skilled. But at least they know an unclear antecedent when they see one. For the last 35 years, Stephen King’s literary rock band has been the gold standard for celebrity side projects, neither outstaying their welcome nor pretending to be cooler than a band of bestselling authors could ever be. Self-deprecation and sincerity make strange bandmates, but at a time when transparent celebrity attempts at authenticity dominate our timelines and cynicism is ascendant, the Rock Bottom Remainders remain an ideal example of how someone who’s already on top should spend their free time.

The Rock Bottom Remainders are a charity supergroup of genre-spanning writers, and they are very much musicians second. But what they lack in musical ability, they make up for in enthusiasm. Since first gigging together to rock the 1992 Anaheim Booksellers convention, the Remainders’ numbers have expanded and contracted, with the lineup at times featuring Stephen King, Amy Tan, Dave Barry, Mitch Albom, Scott Turow, Ridley Pearson, Mary Karr, Matt Groening, and Alan Zweibel, to name a few. Over the last three decades, they raised more than $3 million for literary and First Amendment-related causes. Moreover, the project got a group of stuffy yet successful scribes away from their desks and onto the stage, pushing them to make fools of themselves as they strive for mediocrity.

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The Rock Bottom Remainders were founded by “honky tonk sweetheart” and amateur country singer Kathi Kamen Goldmark via fax machine in 1991, according to the band’s 1993 essay collection Mid-Life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America With Three Chords And An Attitude. (One of the benefits of a band of authors is that they have no trouble writing their own story.) Goldmark knew authors. It was a side effect of her day job, acting as a liaison for writers on book tours, driving them around San Francisco as they peddled their words and taking them to bars to decompress afterwards. Goldmark, a self-described “professional codependent,” would often find herself becoming an “exhausted author’s best pal for a day.”

“It’s an artificial intimacy, but every once in a while, some spark cuts through the book tour routine, and ‘my’ author and I become friends,” Kamen explained. One night, after witnessing humorist Roy Blount Jr. take a couple shots of bourbon and hop on stage for a rendition of Rockin’ Sidney’s jaunty hit, “Don’t Mess With My Toot Toot,” a lightbulb lit up. Over the years, Goldmark kept note of which authors she “believed to be musical” and fired off faxes to Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Ridley Pearson, Barbara Kingsolver, and more. “An invitation to join the Remainders was partly a way to say thank you to some of these people,” she wrote. Not all of them joined. Angelou, for example, was only ever an honorary member. Tan responded first, suggesting everyone wear wetsuits and flippers on stage. Even before their first practice, the band’s goofiness was its fifth (or 16th) Beatle.

The original Rock Bottom Remainders lineup featured Goldmark, Barry, King, Blount, Tan, Pearson, Kingsolver, Groening, Tad Bartimus, Robert Fulghum, Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus, and Joel Selvin. They broke the band into sections, with backup singers Bartimus, Goldmark, and Tan becoming “Remainderettes,” and the rock critics (Marcus, Marsh, and Selvin) and ex-rock critics (Groening) making up the “Critics Corner.” Selvin reached out to studio virtuoso Al Kooper—whose Super Session album basically invented the rock supergroup, and who was immortalized in A Complete Unknown as the organist who snuck onto “Like A Rolling Stone”—to be their musical director. He did his best. Armed with a setlist of rock ‘n’ roll classics, like “Midnight Hour,” “Leader Of The Pack,” and the Stephen King-crooned closer, “Teen Angel,” the band was ready to rock.

Pulling their name from industry lingo for unsold books destined for the dollar bin, the Remainders operated under a similar ethos. The clearance rack is the great equalizer, where all books eventually end up, so the band’s members, too, shed themselves of self-aggrandizement and ego. Sure, there were still clear delineations, fame-wise, among the members. Some authors had fans accosting them at gas stations at 3 A.M.; others required more googling than security. “I was coming into this as the weenie,” Ridley Pearson told The A.V. Club over Zoom. “I’d had a couple of bestsellers, but I was nowhere near in this league. This was the magic of Kathi; she recruited players. When people left, we added people who don’t have that superstar ego. It’s never there when the Remainders are there. We have our tiffs, but nobody ever pulls the ‘I’m so famous’ kind of thing. You just never feel it. Everybody’s equal.”

Still, despite the self-deprecation, the fame helped bring in crowds. “I don’t know why anybody came to see us other than the star power of Stephen King and Amy Tan, and a few people like that,” Pearson said. “We just suck. I mean, we’re barely danceable.”

That lack of ego and polish, however, was a big part of the charm—which appealed to luminaries who actually knew what to do with their instruments. The band played with legendary musicians like Kooper, The Byrds’ Roger McQuinn, Ronnie Spector, and Warren Zevon. Bruce Springsteen even hopped on stage once for an impromptu rendition of “Gloria.” Afterwards, Springsteen told the band, “Don’t get any better or you’ll just be another lousy garage band.”

Though one notch below “lousy garage band,” the Remainders’ loose playing and looser inhibitions gave the group a welcoming atmosphere where doing your best was an achievement in and of itself. Their willingness to break free of the black-and-white author portraits and make fools of themselves in S&M gear and propeller hats made the Rock Bottom Remainders a salve for an industry burned by ego and helped change the public’s perception of its authors. Before the Rock Bottom Remainders, people thought King was, as Pearson puts it, a “crazy murderer dude.” In the early ’90s, before people could spend all day enraptured by how weird Joyce Carol Oates was online, a project like the Remainders helped demystify and humanize these novelists, separating them from their work.

After rocking Anaheim, the Remainders booked 1993’s 10-day “Three Chords And An Attitude Tour,” which allowed them to let their freak flags fly in Aretha Franklin’s tour bus from Boston to Miami. At the end of the tour, Matt Groening, who opted not to go because the bus smelled like the sewage treatment plant he worked at as a teen, observed that time on the road brought the group closer together. “The Remainders weren’t at each other’s throats, as I’d expected,” Groening wrote in Mid-Life Confidential. “They were all lovey-dovey and huggy-wuggy, as if they’d somehow bonded in that fume-filled tour bus.” Maybe the fumes played a role, but the Remainders became an ongoing concern from that point forward, reuniting yearly for charity events and even popping up on television. In the 2000s, they played Good Morning America and were joined by guest drummer Craig Ferguson on The Late Late Show. Those bookings, Ferguson admitted on air, were simply an excuse for him to join the fun.

Goldmark died in 2012. According to Pearson, she was “the mama of the band,” the “one who was going to bring wigs and costumes and absurdism into the band, which was the only thing that kept it going.” When she passed, the remaining Remainders announced their last shows. But the legend of the Remainders could not end so easily. The following year, they were the center of a plot on Happy Endings, in a Thanksgiving episode that coined the phrase “Rock Bottom Remaindude.” In 2013, they released a follow-up to Mid-Life entitled Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (Of Authors) Tells All. Though they say any show could be their last, the Remainders reunited as recently as last year to play the Miami Book Fair.

Wrangling the Remainders, a band made up of famous people who spend most of their time alone, is a complicated task. Getting enough of them together for a gig is a logistical nightmare. It takes effort, which makes the willful humiliation—and the band’s enduring reluctance to hang it all up—all the more endearing. There’s beauty in their imperfections, an opportunity to watch those who won the literary lottery fail without fear. “The Remainders were about going back to the beginning,” King wrote in Mid-Life Confidential, “doing things the hard way, taking some risks, and making sure they pay off.”

There is no shortage of places for celebrities to embarrass themselves, especially now with social media. This mostly happens when they’re trying to appear authentic. But the Rock Bottom Remainders disregard those calculations. “For a bunch of the writers, it frees them up to be people, to be somebody that’s a pseudonym,” Pearson said. “It’s somebody they’ve never been. Scott Turow and Amy Tan wear these crazy wigs and act completely differently than you would ever get them to act in person, ever. In those 90 minutes, they let it all go.” Like seeing your life’s work sold at a deep discount, it’s a humanizing thing, being a Remainder. Sometimes they even play their songs correctly.