Imagine this scenario: You're a dedicated, hard-working teacher dealing with students deemed "emotionally disturbed."

You walk into work one morning and tell your boss that you have an opportunity to work with The Boss, as in Bruce Springsteen. It may mean, of course, that you have to take off a few days here and there.

You might think that your boss, knowing you've been toiling away with a struggling music career for 20 years, would slap you on the back and say, "How much time do you need?"

Instead, during the making of 1995's "American Babylon," a rare collaboration in Springsteen's career, Joe Grushecky got a scolding and a warning.

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'A Good Life: The Joe Grushecky Story'

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

• Directors: Jim Justice and Steve Caniff.
• Details: It screens at the SouthSide Works Cinemas at 8 tonight. Tickets are $5.

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"I got the toughest kids in the school, and here I have a chance to record with Bruce Springsteen, and they're threatening to fire me ... it was like a thing out of a movie, like 'Footloose' or something, 'No dancing in this town!' It was incomprehensible."

That's just one of many revelations in the documentary "A Good Life: The Joe Grushecky Story" that exemplifies the life and career of a musician who never got the brass ring, despite having it within his fingertips.

"A Good Life," a film directed by Jim Justice and Steve Caniff of the fledging Ohio company Flat Broke Productions, tracks Grushecky's career from the formation of the Brick Alley Band in the mid-'70s -- "the world's worst cover band," as Joe calls it -- through the ups and downs of the Iron City Houserockers to more recent triumphs such as the Flood Aid concert at Heinz Hall in 2004.

They compiled plenty of vintage clips, including Houserockers footage from the Agora and on "Solid Gold," the cheesy video of "Pumping Iron," and Bruce and Joe sharing a mike at Nick's Fat City.

We watch Brick Alley become the Iron City Houserockers, a working-class bar band so good it got a contract with MCA and a Greil Marcus review in Rolling Stone calling its debut "A new American classic." At one point, the band was even called "America's answer to the Clash."

Grushecky has some good stories about recording the band's second album, "Have a Good Time (But Get Out Alive)," including how the notes from a daylong writing session with Little Steven were saved from a New York City trash can.

Steve Cropper, of Blues Brothers and Booker T and the MGs fame, who produced the third Houserockers record, "Blood on the Bricks," tells them, "Joe had all the ingredients, of Springsteen, of Rod Stewart. Who else can you name? He had it."

Sadly, MCA didn't know how to market the Houserockers -- "We were just off center from everything else," Grushecky says -- and the band's management was preoccupied with Meat Loaf (the singer, not the food), so the Houserockers split without ever getting to the level of the Heartbreakers or even Eddie Money.

Once Grushecky moved on to a life as a father and teacher (now in the Sto-Rox district), music, he says, "wasn't the main reason for living anymore." But, Grushecky kept his hand in it as a solo artist while working a day job and then tutoring kids for their GEDs at night to support the family.

"A Good Life" shows how he has come to terms with his dreams and disappointments while still enjoying respect from a cult of fans and a late-career burst that includes his many collaborations with Springsteen.

One of Grushecky's fans, California-based professional skateboarder and musician Mike Vallely, wonders how he's not more of a hero in his own hometown.

"I've been in Pittsburgh and seen him play and seen nobody at the show and been like, 'How could this town, how could these people not be rallying behind this guy?' He deserves so much more."

Of course, the reality for any aging musician is that the fans age along with them, and those old Houserockers fans, well, they met their wives at those bars and now they have families that keep them close to home at night.

Grushecky has managed to toil through this, as well, finding a steady gig on the Jersey shore and, even more surprisingly, in Spain, where there's a cult following for honest-to-goodness American bar rock.

Grushecky will probably be playing it until he dies, and he deserves a place in Pittsburgh lore right along with Iron City, Primanti's and the Steelers.