E-Mail This Article to a Friend GARAGE ROCK Old band, old record, new novel          BY MIKE MILIARD

Like so many adolescent American males in the mid 1960s, Bill Scheft’s brother Tom was in a band. As a student at Andover, he formed a group with five friends called the Rising Storm. They bashed out covers of "In The Midnight Hour" and "Big Boss Man," and scribbled a few of their own songs. Before graduating in ’67, they pressed a vanity record, called Calm Before ... Then came graduation; the guys went on to college and thence to responsible adulthood.

"Cut to 15 years later," says Scheft, over the phone from New York City. "My sister is reading an article in the Phoenix, and finds out a guy in Italy just paid $3000 for the record. So she called the guy that wrote the article. He gave her the number of a collector, and they got the group back together again. Every five years or so, they get back together. The great thing is, because none of them are professional musicians, they sound exactly the same way they sounded in ’67. The album is now worth $5000."

Scheft’s new novel, Time Won’t Let Me (Harper Collins), makes this true story the basis for a funny, well-observed look at what happens when five teenage garage rockers — grown into dermatologists and divorce lawyers, and bogged down by steep mortgages and bad marriages — reconvene decades later and try to reignite their rock-and-roll abandon. His believable characters (the guy hiding his drums in the attic from his disapproving wife, "the way most guys hide porn"), his New England in-jokes (the way "Hoodsie" is used as a mild epithet at the fictional prep school), and his feel for the liberating power of badly played rock and roll make the book more than just another exercise in boomer nostalgia.

Scheft’s comedic sense was honed during the 11 years he spent as head monologue writer for David Letterman. How does writing 50 or 60 jokes a day for a late-night legend affect his feel for the novel form? "The smart-ass answer is that you use the word ‘Lewinsky’ a lot less," he laughs. "It’s a completely different discipline and a completely different experience, but what I did learn from writing for Letterman for all those years is that it takes a lot of jokes that are less than good to come up with a good joke. So you should never be afraid to write long, and keep writing."

The former Sports Illustrated columnist is an inveterate rock fan, who was hooked on music long before he was hooked on sports. We can even forgive him for referring to the Phoenix as an "erstwhile hip tabloid" in the novel thanks to the reverent and passionate way the Newton native (and Deerfield and Harvard grad) writes of legendary Boston bands like the Rockin’ Ramrods, and Barry and the Remains. "This book, if it’s anything, is a love letter to Barry and the Remains," he says. "They were a huge influence on my brother’s band and a huge influence on me. [Lead singer] Barry Tashian has actually read it, and offered to play at a book party — for a reasonable price."

In the meantime, the reunited Rising Storm, five of ’em at least ("it’s always rare to get all six of them together"), will play Scheft’s reading at the Sit ’n Bull pub in Maynard on Thursday, along with blues-rockers Crisis, who are also written into the novel. Scheft himself might even guest on a few rave-ups. "I’ll sit in on two or three," he says (referring to another author who moonlights as a guitarist in a ’60s-chestnut cover band). "I’m not gonna be like Stephen King and start booking dates or anything, but I’ll look forward to that."

Bill Scheft will read from Time Won’t Let Me between sets by the Rising Storm and Crisis on Thursday, December 15, at the Sit ’n Bull Pub, 163 Main Street, Maynard, 978.897.4663.