"The first and last words in heavy reading."
Hard Rock, Metal, Now Available
With hundreds of candid, live, and studio shots, Lew and Oimoen celebrate the unique wild-eyed spirit and atmosphere of the historic S.F. Bay Area heavy metal scene. “Before they played the Bay Area, Slayer wore makeup onstage—after that first Bay Area show they never wore makeup again. This book will show people why.”
One day in 1975, 19-year-old Aussie rocker Mark Evans walked into a local bar to check out a band. His life would never be the same. Within days, he played his first show as bass player of AC/DC. The first band bio by a band insider during the early years, the book details the struggles and personalities behind the rise of hard rock’s most successful group.
Founded in 1985 in Sarpsborg, Norway, Jon Kristiansen’s Slayer Mag quickly became a gospel for the fledgling extreme metal underground, combining eye-ripping graphics, brutally honest writing, and a relentless and sick sense of humor. As black metal rose to prominence in Norway in the 1990s, Slayer Mag remained the final word on those dark moods and motivations.
Hard Rock, Metal, Now Available
From the blazing stovetop of Montreal’s Annick Giroux comes an inspired international heavy metal cookbook. Appetizer, meat, seafood, vegetarian, dessert, and drink recipes from members of Thin Lizzy, Mayhem, Anthrax, Kreator, Sepultura, Destruction, Obituary, Accept, Doro, Gwar, Toxic Holocaust, Saint Vitus, Amebix, Uriah Heep, Budgie—100+ bands from over 30 countries!
Swedish films are associated internationally with the success and high quality of Ingmar Bergman’s reputable films. Another breed of Swedish film is notorious for their laissez-faire attitude towards nudity and relaxed sexuality. Others are simply too strange and Swedish to ignore.
“Hellhammer arose in early 1982 from the rural outskirts of Zurich, Switzerland, disinterred from the remnants of an embryonic and completely haphazard post-high school four-piece band… Hellhammer changed our lives forever. It has profoundly affected anything we have ever done, it has made us who we are, in spite of the fact that the band only existed for a very brief two years.”
Touch and Go fanzine was the brainchild of Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson and was launched in Lansing, Michigan in 1979. Major fanatics of the new punk happenings in the late ’70s, TV and DS set out to chronicle, lambaste, ridicule, and heap praise on all they arbitrarily loved or hated in the music communities in the US and abroad.
Revered former Metal Maniacs editor Jeff Wagner analyzes the heady side of metal in this exhaustive narrative history of a relentlessly ambitious musical subculture. Fighting a tide of tradition and conservatism, progressive metal has proven to be one of the most viable, malleable forms in all of modern music; here its preeminent scholar tells the tale.
Film, Hard Rock, Now Available
Mellodrama, a documentary by Dianna Dilworth, explores the rising and falling fortunes of the Chamberlin and its better-known successor the Mellotron—the first musical keyboards to play the pre-recorded sounds of other instruments. “An insider’s view of the history of the Chamberlin and the Mellotron, which isn’t always pretty.”—Echoes
Hard Rock, Metal, Now Available
The Finnish bestseller by Mape Ollila has been revised and corrected for U.S. publication. Hailing from the tiny hamlet of Kitee, Finland (pop. 10,000) Nightwish has captivated the world’s imagination with magical million-selling releases like Once, Century Child, and Wishmaster. Their saga is a heavy metal fable as dramatic and tumultuous as their epic symphonic music. [...]
The ultimate blow-by-blow account of Sweden’s legendary death metal underground, based on exclusive interviews with members of Nihilist/ Entombed, In Flames, At the Gates, Dismember, Grave, Hypocrisy, Opeth, Unleashed, Marduk, Morbid, Mob 47, Deranged, Edge of Sanity, Merciless, Therion, Liers in Wait, Carnage, Carcass, Tiamat/Treblinka, Afflicted, Repugnant, and the Haunted. [...]
“My dad beat my mom, my mom beat my big brother, my big brother beat me, I beat my sister, my sister beat the dog, the dog beat the cat, the cat beat the hamster, and the hamster beat whatever bugs he could find. That was our family’s version of the natural order.”
“Mudrian ha creado algo especial aquí. Esta es una lectura obligada para cualquiera que desee un libro exhaustivo del tipo ‘quien-hizo-qué-y-cuándo’. Pulgares arriba”. —Philip Anselmo, Pantera/Down
Hard Rock, Metal, Now Available
“The first book to chart the vector of not just metal’s origins, but the myriad mutations through which it continues to infect the planet. Your children will not be spared.”—LA Weekly, Best of 2003
Some people bring a bible to church. Others bring a box full of rattlesnakes.