When Lincoln author Roger Trott tells you his new book rocks, it’s not because he has a big ego. It’s because the guitarist and former music critic’s first novel is steeped in his rock ’n’ roll past.

“Getting in Tune” will make its Lincoln debut at the Book Cellar Saturday, where Trott will sign copies from 1-3 p.m.

“Roger is not only a student of song, but of the character that goes into the music business,” said Ken Bogdan, who shared the stage with Trott in the 1990s Sacramento band King Joe. “It totally didn’t surprise me when he said he was going to start writing a book.”

Trott’s novel follows his 20-year-old main character, Daniel Travers, on a rock adventure largely based on the eventful road trip on which Trott’s own first band embarked in 1976.

As in the book, the mayhem began when an agent booked the Redding-based band for a week-long gig at a hotel in Port Angeles, Wash.

On arrival, the idealized venue turned out to be a biker bar in a rundown hotel with a sleazy owner, where prostitutes occupied nearby rooms and a massive fight erupted on the last night of their stay.

“It was right out of a movie,” Trott said. “And we’re just a couple of guys, 19 and 20 years old, thinking, ‘How are we going to survive this?’ It was like hanging out with my best friends playing music – but in a war zone.”

Fun as it was, the experience would forever alter the band. Just as they teetered on the brink of success, the young musicians began to drift apart, eventually breaking up.

“It’s amazing what success does to you,” Trott mused. “If forces people to make decisions, is what happens.”

As the band struggled with its own drama, rock seemed to be fighting for its life in the background – a feeling Trott said he attempted to capture in the book.

“The ’60s were a great time for popular music in a rock sense, and the (early) ’70s still had bands like the Who and Led Zeppelin …but by 1976, big corporate bands like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac were getting huge and they just sucked the air our out from rock,” he said. “That, and disco was coming on.”

“Getting in Tune” began as Trott’s own musical memoir, but morphed into a fictional account after the author found the first draft too close to his own life for comfort.

“Once I came to the conclusion that (Travers) needed to be his (own) person, it was easier to let him go off and do what he needed to do,” he said.

Besides, fiction allotted Trott creative freedom he wouldn’t have otherwise had, such as his character’s pursuit of the Universal Chord, a set of notes that – as The Who’s Pete Townshend whispered in Travers’ ear during a dream – has the potential to unify humanity.

However, the book’s major themes – a quest for fame, tension between band members and the protagonist’s search for an identity – are all real, Trott said.

After ties were severed with his first band, Trott worked as a music critic, then graduated from college and took a position as an environmental economics consultant – a job he didn’t love, but felt would offer financial security. He returned to the Sacramento area in 1981 and, later, to his hometown of Lincoln.

Inspired by New Wave in the 1980s, Trott remained in the Sacramento music scene through the mid-1990s, but eventually gave music a rest – that is, until his past experiences began to formulate into a novel in his mind.

Today, he doesn’t play live, but mentors a teenage band not much different than his own early group.

“They’re going to eventually dump me to do their own thing – and that’s good,” he laughed.

Keeping in touch with up-and-coming musicians and sounds is refreshing, said Trott, who counts Radiohead, Wilco, Aimee Mann and Steve Earle as his current favorite artists.

“People get to the point where they stop listening to anything new – say, after high school or college – and it’s frustrating,” he said.

Not that he’s forgotten his angst-ridden adolescent roots – and the music that accompanied them.

“I still listen to the Who once in awhile – when I’m writing, especially,” he said.

For more information or to find out where to purchase “Getting in Tune, go online to www.rogertrott.com.