COVENTRY — Singer-songwriter-actor-author Elijah Black’s engrossing new novel, “The Greatest Record Never Heard,” was never really meant to be a book at all.
“My manager, Randi Davis, worked at Showtime with a guy [award-winning filmmaker David Baugnon, known for projects like ‘The Messiah Project’] who was asked by Showtime for a rock ’n’ roll type story for an episodic [television show concept]. This was 10 years ago,” said Bill Elias, a Coventry Township native, 1985 Manchester High School graduate and current Californian, during a recent trip back to Ohio on the eve of the Nov. 25 release of “Greatest Record.”
Elias cut his musical teeth in the mid-to-late 1990s fronting the popular grunge-rock era local band Peace Tree and working as a staff writer for a Cleveland radio station before assuming his artistic nom de plume for several Elijah Black solo albums. When the music video for the Elijah Black song “Smile for Me” made the top 10 of MTV’s 2008 “New Now Next” list, Elias made his way to the Big Apple, where he lived for the next 15 years…