WHY AC/DC MATTERS

by Anthony Bozza

As a life-long AC/DC fan, former Rolling Stone journalist Anthony Bozza ponders why it took until the mega-selling Black Ice album for the band to begin to get some of the real critical success he thinks they've long deserved. His argument is a strong one, and in this book he dissects AC/DC's music into its constituent parts as if examining the workings of a car or the valves of the human heart. By doing this, and doing it with humour and an engaging spark to his writing, Bozza is somehow able to stretch what would ordinarily be a feature article into a 160-page book that even the doubters his argument is aimed at would enjoy.

Why AC/DC Matters is a good read, carefully examining the way a band has been able to use little more than five open chords to write close to 200 songs and sell more albums than everyone except The Beatles. Bozza's analysis is meticulous as he considers Malcolm Young's style of play and speaks with college professors about the vocal abilities of Brian Johnson and Bon Scott. It's a strange intellectualisation of a band that -- rightly or wrongly -- is widely considered by critics as an antithesis of intellectualism. Yet herein lies Bozza's point: for a band to have made such simple music so successful for so long actually requires real genius.

While he does make this point, and few readers could come away from it disagreeing with him, it's hard to see exactly who this book is aimed at. As a biography it's irrelevant in the wake of Murray Engleheart's colossal Maximum Rock n Roll and it really doesn't offer anything new to either fans or non-fans. AC/DC, he writes, have made the same music for almost 40 years. This is a fact everyone knows. Their music is simple, but lots of people like it. Everyone knows this too. And as a lot of people also know, outside the metal and guitar mags, music critics have never much liked them. Nothing Bozza writes about AC/DC is anything I didn't already know; it's almost as if he wrote this just to please himself and his agent sold it on knowing that people would buy it because it's about the second-highest selling band in history. Even so, unlike I did with Stephen Davis' Guns N' Roses debacle, I didn't feel gyped by Why AC/DC Matters. It might be ultimately rather pointless, but it is good fun.

WATCH YOU BLEED: The Saga of Guns N Roses

by Stephen Davis

Published by Penguin

In his autobiography, Slash basically calls Stephen Davis' Led Zeppelin chronicle Hammer of the Gods self-indulgent bullshit. Davis most likely read that as part of his "research" for this, his 400-plus account of the career of the 1980s' last great rock band, which could account for why he spends so much of this book slagging off the guitarist and the rest of his dysfunctional crew of egotists, control freaks, junkies and boozehounds. Guns N' Roses may well have been among the most selfish and dispicable group of musicians ever to sleaze out of a Hollywood gutter -- misogynistic, drug-addled, violent, unrepentent, obnoxious and disgraceful -- but a biographer's job should be to provide balance. Whatever their faults, and there are many, Guns N' Roses still stands as one of the greatest bands of all time, a band whose Appetite for Destruction album is still the highest-selling debut record by any artist ever. 23 years after it came out. So GnR may well be scumbags, but they deserve a much better biography than this.

Watch You Bleed, for all its readability and occasional jaw-dropping moments, falls down on a number of levels. And it falls hard: Davis, the man who co-wrote an Aerosmith biography, incorrectly identifies the release year of that band's Draw the Line album as 1979. He refers to Paul Stanley as "the bass player from Kiss", calls Skid Row a trio from Philadelphia with a Canadian singer, and claims that Slippery When Wet was Bon Jovi's debut. He gets dates wrong (like Axl Rose's birthdate), misidentifies locations and even suggests Hendrix burned a Les Paul at Woodstock. I do more fact-checking when I write a review than this guy did writing an entire book. Worse, every mistake I just listed should simply have not even been made by a dude who wrote books about Zeppelin and Aerosmith. But really, Davis didn't so much as author a book as string together a bunch of interviews and chapter-long personal opinion pieces about their work.

I loved Guns N' Roses (still do!) and devoured everything I could find about them, so re-reading masses of quotes from Kerrang!, RIP and dozens of other mags from the period was a nice trip down memory lane, but nothing I didn't already know. Indeed, there's almost nothing here that a long-time Gunners fan wouldn't have read or heard about somewhere else: magazines, Slash's and Mick Wall's books, TV. Davis tries to compete with The Dirt by dedicating a few hundred pages to the various members' debaucheries, but it rings hollow because The Dirt was actually written by Mötley Crüe. No one from Guns N' Roses had any input into this book at all.

Not only is this an unofficial cash-in, originally released in hardback around the time Chinese Democracy was released, but it's a lazy one. Even with the possibly that Davis was probably only given months to complete this in time to coincide with the launch of the most anticipated album in rock history, Watch You Bleed is pretty half-arsed. It did make me want to listen to Appetite for Destruction again though, so some good did come out of it.

NUMBER ONE IN HEAVEN: The Heroes Who Died for Rock N Roll

by Jeremy Simmonds
Published by Penguin

I've been away for a couple of weeks, and returned to find a big mountain of new CDs waiting for me to listen to and review. Since I've yet had time to give them more than a cursory ear, today's post is a book review I did a couple of years ago for a massive title called Number One in Heaven. Jeremy Simmonds' enormous volume is an indispensible resource for anyone with an interest in rock and popular music as one of the main cultural phenomonons of the last half-century. In its 500-plus pages, Simmonds collects hundreds of rock obituaries, presenting them in an easy-to-find month-by-month format for every year between 1965 and the end of 2005 and in doing so creates an engrossingly readable, occasionally humourous and often sad book.

This weighty tome unveils a lot of the mystery and myths surrounding the passing of some of the world's greatest stars and gives column space to many, many lesser known ones. It also reveals which group boasts the most dead members (doo-wop vocal group The Inkspots, as it turns out, although Lynyrd Skynyrd and T-Rex must come close by now), which group lost the most members in one go (Reba McEntire's backing band, who lost seven at once in a plane crash in 1991), and plenty of strange co-incidences, bizarre suicides, accidental deaths and murders. He also includes small snapshots of people who came remarkably close to death but somehow survived, like Nikki Sixx' monumentally stupid double overdose and Rick Allen's limb-severing car smash. The end of each year's section also features a small round-up of other lesser-known figures. This allows Simmonds to include even lesser lights who would otherwise be completely forgotten, but it also reveals a strange and confusing omission that will be elaborated upon shortly.

Often books like this will gloss over or even completely ignore many of the those who have fallen in the metal world, but Simmonds (for the most part) doesn't forget them either. From this perspective, most of the bigger names are included: Dimebag, Cliff and Randy, of course, the Mayhem pair of Dead and Euronymous, plus Steamin' Steve Clark from Def Leppard, Cozy Powell, Randy Castillo, Razzle from Hanoi Rocks, Gary Driscoll from Rainbow, and Piggy from Voivod. Paul Samson, Paul Baloff, Rhett Forester from Riot, Megadeth's Gar Samuelson, Somnium from Finntroll, David Wayne from Metal Church and all three of Body Count's growing body count also get space. Savatage's Criss Oliva and Dave Pritchard from Armored Saint even get mentions.

Simmonds loses significant Brownie points, however, for the incomprehensible omission of Chuck Schuldiner. That such a highly influential character from the development of metal could be totally ignored in such an otherwise excellently researched and all-encompassing book seems not only inexcusable, but inexplicable, especially when he's thought to include Steve MacDonald from Gorguts, two members of Hallow's Eve, a bloke from a band called Doom that even I've never heard of and some guy who was in Blue Öyster Cult for about ten minutes in about 1971 and never recorded anything. Even if Simmonds knew very little about Chuck, a music journalist of his reputation should have at the very least known both who he was and that he'd died, and when. This is Number One in Heaven's unforgivable flaw, and the thing that stop this otherwise brilliant book from scoring the highest mark possible.

NB: There's an associated website address given in the introduction that the author has included for readers to suggest corrections, but when I tried it so I could prod him about Schuldiner, it didn't work.

Rating: 90%

METALLICA - The Club Dayz 1982-1984

by Bill Hale
ECW Press

Bill Hale is a Hawaii-based rock photographer who was lucky enough to be where plenty of us probably wish we could have been 27 years ago: hanging out on the San Francisco metal scene. He got to see, and document, the birth of one of the greatest bands metal has produced. Regardless of your opinion of Metallica, without them it's unlikely metal would have become the institution it is today, and in this book Hale captures the embryonic days of a band that has since become one of the world's biggest musical acts.

The first few pages are reminiscences from some of the others who were there: John Strednansky from Metal Rendezvous, Ron Quintana -- the zine editor from whom Lars stole the name Metallica -- and Scott Earl from a band called Culprit, whose drummer got into a fight with Dave Mustaine at Cliff Burton's second ever Metallica gig: "Mustaine basically threw my guitarist's pedals into the corner in a big ball of duct tape. I guess we weren't getting out of their way fast enough." There's nothing from any of the members of Metallica themselves, so this probably hasn't been sanctioned by the band but even if it's not, the photos are Hale's and history belongs to everyone, so no one has any reason to object.

The tales of the band's early days, in which Mustaine features very prominently, are pure gold. But the good stuff - the great stuff, the stuff that really shows us how it began and what it was like - that all really begins on page 25, with a series of shots from a gig in September 1982, when Metallica was still based in LA and opening for Bitch. There's Hetfield, wearing a bullet belt and a Venom shirt, flipping the bird. Later on, there's a bunch from Burton's first gig, headlining over Lääz Rockit and Exodus, with Cliff in his bell-bottoms, clutching his Rickenbacker, another from backstage of Hammett and Mustaine side by side. Further on, Kirk's in the band as they open for Raven and near the end, a slightly blurry candid picture of Dave and Cliff, hanging out after a Megadeth show in August, 1986, six weeks before Burton was gone forever. What strikes you the most is how fresh-faced, fun-loving and rebellious everyone is: in a backstage shot with Burton, Mustaine's wearing an inverted crucifix in his ear, elsewhere there's Lars yakking it up with Gonzo Sandoval from Armored Saint.

There isn't much "art" to Hale's shots, and almost none that can be called "posed". Even the publicity pics were of shirtless, beer-swilling reprobates with cheesy, cheeky grins and enormous pitchers of amber fluid. Just like the music the band was making back then, Bill Hale's photos are raw, urgent, immediate and vital, capturing the young Metallica's very essence. For anyone who was there, or wishes they were, this is a great book.