Rock and roll has always had two stories.
There is the story audiences see: the lights, the stages, the screaming crowds, the recording studios, and the excitement of hearing a song climb the charts.
Then there is the story nobody sees.
It is the story of what happens when the show is over.
Chris Dobry’s new book, Scars and Melodies: The Rise, The Fall, and The Reckoning, takes readers behind that curtain and into the real-life story of Jamie Fontaine & the Level, a band whose journey took them from the Midwest music scene to national recognition, including a Billboard Top 20 achievement, before personal struggles and internal pressures brought the band’s first chapter to an end.
For Dobry, the story is personal. He wasn’t watching the events from the outside. As the band’s manager and the founder of Stryker Records, he was there for the recording sessions, the shows, the long nights, the business decisions, and the difficult moments.
And he decided to tell the story exactly as he experienced it.
A Midwest Story With National Reach
Dobry is a Green Bay native who has spent decades working in the music business. He founded Stryker Records in 1997 and built a career around music, entertainment, artist development, and concert promotion.
His connection with Jamie Fontaine & the Level began in the Green Bay area, where he saw something in the band worth pursuing.
What followed was a journey that would take the group far beyond its early beginnings.
The band recorded music in Wisconsin and Nashville, performed across the country and eventually found itself playing major venues and sharing stages with established rock acts.
Then came 2020.
The band’s single “Save Your Life” became its breakthrough moment, climbing to No. 20 on Billboard and reaching No. 7 on the Foundations chart.
For any independent rock band, a chart position like that can feel like the payoff for years of work.
But the success came during one of the most turbulent periods in the band’s history.
When Success Isn’t the End of the Story
Scars and Melodies doesn’t treat the Billboard achievement as the conclusion.
Instead, it becomes part of a much larger story.
Dobry chronicles the band’s rise while also documenting the personal struggles developing behind the scenes. Alcohol, drugs, ego, pressure, strained relationships, and the relentless demands of the music business increasingly became part of the band’s reality.
The book follows those events chronologically, allowing readers to see how individual moments and decisions accumulated over time.
That perspective is one of the book’s defining characteristics.
This isn’t a fictionalized rock-and-roll story. It is Dobry’s account of events he witnessed and experienced while working with the band.
The highs are there.
So are the lows.
And neither is presented without the other.
The People Behind the Music
At the center of the book is the understanding that bands are made up of people, not just musicians.
Every performance, recording session, and chart position represents countless hours of work and a collection of personalities, relationships, and decisions.
Dobry’s story explores those relationships and the ways success can change them.
The book also gives readers a look at the mechanics of the music business, from recording and promotion to touring, radio campaigns and the push to get an independent band’s music heard.
For anyone who has ever wondered what happens between the time a band writes a song and the moment that song reaches an audience, Scars and Melodies offers a firsthand perspective.
The Music Left Scars
The title of the book comes from the band’s own music, and the phrase captures the contradiction at the heart of the story.
Music creates memories.
It creates opportunities.
It can change people’s lives.
But the pursuit of music can also leave behind experiences that are impossible to forget.
Dobry doesn’t shy away from those experiences.
Instead, he uses them to show the human side of an industry often portrayed only through its successes.
The result is a story about more than a rock band.
It is a story about ambition, loyalty, friendship, failure, survival, and the price of chasing a dream.
A Story That Continues
The story of Jamie Fontaine & the Level did not completely end with the band’s breakup in January 2022.
In 2026, the band returned to the studio and began releasing new music again, marking an unexpected continuation of a story that had appeared to be finished.
That development gives Scars and Melodies another dimension.
It isn’t simply a book about what happened.
It is also a record of where the journey took the people involved and what happened when they decided to pick up the music again.
For Dobry, the book provides an opportunity to preserve a chapter of his life and the music business that might otherwise have existed only in memories.
For readers, it offers something different: an opportunity to see what rock and roll looks like when the audience isn’t in the room.
Scars and Melodies: The Rise, The Fall, and The Reckoning is currently available on Amazon in hardcover and paperback editions. A full-color paperback edition is also available, featuring the photographs that accompany the story throughout the book.
It is, ultimately, a story about the people behind the music and the scars that remain after the melodies fade.
