Metallica Book:

		List Price: $14.99		Publisher: It Books Salesrank: 22423 Released: February 17, 2004
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Editorial Review:

In this first-ever atlas of the heavy metal phenomenon, Ian Christe delivers a bird's-eye view of this dark and forbidden music. The ultimate headbanger history, Sound of the Beast reveals tales of concert hysteria, courtroom drama, and musical triumph with:

Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal Reviews:
A fanboy's tome, riddled with errors
2009-12-02 -
First, the good part: My hardcover version of the book is extremely attractive once the juvenile paper front was taken off. The fonts used in the book are large and clear, and there are extensive photos inside that, even though they are all black and white, enrich the reading experience. Secondly, and certainly more importantly, this book attempts to fill a gap in the world of books, an overview of all major sub-genres of heavy metal, from it's birth and up until today. The book therefore covers a very large amount of genres, a feat that obviously is a difficult thing to do objectively; heavy metal has sprung into a vast amount of sub-genres, many of which share little to no fan base with some of the other ones.

Now, for the bad part: Ian Christe is a freelance music journalist, and he certainly sounds like one: A lot of enthusiasm but little true understanding of music, a language of florid descriptions but little substance. This leads me to my next point: The book is riddled with inaccuracies that very often betray a clear bias on the part of the writer; as many reviewers have noted, Christe appears first and foremost to be a Metallica fan, and then a metal fan. And, like the deification of Beethoven probably set back Haydn scholarship with almost a hundred years, so does Christe's infatuation with Metallica pretty much redefine all of metal history so that Metallica becomes the sole focal point.

But do not take my word for it. I admit there's a few years since I first read this book; I've reread a few of the chapters that are of the most interest to me, and found that there were even more errors than I remembered. I'm going to update this review once I'll have the time to read through more of it (don't hold your breath), but this should be enough to give you an idea:

Prologue: Friday, February 13, 1970
Page 1:
1: Christe portrays Black Sabbath as the most important band in the creation of metal; the two other members of the early heavy metal triumvirate, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple are only written about later, and then rather briefly compared to Black Sabbath. This is historical revision at it's finest; Black Sabbath were the last one off the starting blocks, Deep Purple already having released three albums (In Rock would come later the same year), and Led Zeppelin 2 (including the vastly influential II album). Both of these acts were better sellers at the time, and although it's hardly a scientific approach, my impression both from older metalheads and band interviews from the 70s and 80s is that they were also the more important influences. This is not intended to downplay the role of Black Sabbath (I love them), but to show that Christe's approach hardly can be considered objective.
2: Naming the members of Black Sabbath, he manages to get three out of four names wrong. I quote: "John Michael Osbourne, aka Ozzy [...], Tony Iommi [...] Terry Butler, aka Geezer [...] Bill Ward". The fact that uses the stage names of Ozzy and Geezer implies that the names of the other ones are their birth names, which is not correct. Tony Iommi's real name is Frank Anthony Iommi, and Bill War is call William Thomas Ward. By the way, Geezer's full name is Terrence Michael Joseph Butler. Terrence/Terry may not be a big deal, but he did mention Ozzy's name in it's entirety, so one would expect the same for everyone. This stuff isn't hard to find out, the book was written after the arrival of the Internet. So if he can only get one out of three names right, what can we expect from the fact checking in the rest of the book? By the way, Ian manages to get another naming error as Page 2:
1: Another minor spelling error: "Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation" is called "Aynsly Dunbar's Retaliation". Not a big difference, but if you are writing a book on metal, Aynsley Dunbar is a large enough name that you should be aware of the slightly eccentric spelling. The error is repeated in the index.
2: It is said that Black Sabbath tuned down to enable Iommi to "bend guitar strings [...] without experiencing pain in his cropped fingers". Yet why his fingers are cropped are newer explained. Every Black Sabbath fan knows the story, but I would suspect that many people picked this up to get a better overview of the vast pantheon of metal genres, and in such a case detailed band history knowledge can't be taken for granted. And you have to take that into account when writing.
Page 3:
It is claimed that "[Ozzy's] schizophrenic vocal technique came from doubled vocals - one high and one low - spaced an octave apart". First of all, the word "technique" can't be used here, as it implies that Ozzy would change his singing technique to fit the vocal doubling being done. The word 'sound' would probably have been the best term (although the sentence would have to be restructured then). These are minor point however, what is not so is the claim that Ozzy doubled all his vocals. I am extremely curious to hear where he learned of this, because I sure can't hear it. Doubling an octave apart will give a very different timbre to the different voices, due to the difference in vocal strain that should be easy to hear. There are other reasons why this is unlikely as well: The prologue discussion is about the first Black Sabbath album, an album that, according to Tony Iommi:
"We thought we'd have two days to do it and one of the days is mixing. [...] Ozzy was singing at the same time, we just put him in a separate booth and off we went. We never had a second run of most of the stuff." Under such recording circumstances I find it highly unlikely that they would have done an octave doubling of the vocals that I, in any case, can't hear.
Page 4: Two minor infractions: Refering to Black Sabbath as the first heavy metal record by the first heavy metal artist is historical distortion; the movement towards the later style is far to complex to be summed up with such a simplistic statement. Secondly, the large crosses Black Sabbath wore were not made of silver, but iron (If my memory serves me right, Tony Iommi's father was a blacksmith). This is of course not a big deal, but it's sloppy and completely unnecessary.

Most of these are minor offences, but clear indicators of sloppy writing. Now, let us fast forward to chapter ten, "The Hollywood Glambangers". It is obvious from the very start that this is a chapter Christe is including because he can't get away with not doing it, and as one may suspect, the result is dreadful.
Page 155:
1: It is claimed that "Once Bitten" was the first album Great White wrote. Au contraire, Great White had released two studio albums "Great White" (alternative title "Stick It") and "Shot in the Dark", and one live album with some studio cuts "Recovery: Live", before "Once Bitten" was released.
2: "Where British heavy metal bands dealt mostly with tragic romance when it talked about love at all, sex was a major theme of glam metal". I won't object to the last part, but that British heavy metal dealt mostly with tragic romance is simply a feeble attempt at his part to explain why he likes the earlier bands better. All the way from Led Zeppelin's "The Lemon Song" and up to Judas Priest's "Eat me Alive", confirmation of the hegemony of masculine sexuality has indeed been a sales tactic throughout the history of heavy metal. In fact, I wouldn't claim that the glam bands took this any further at all; in fact, doing so would be very hard (one may claim Steel Panther managed to do so with their 2009 release "Feel the Steel", but that's another story altogether).

Page 156:
1: The seriousness of the introduction of Megadeth's "Peace Sells... but who's Buying?" video is attempted to be portrayed as a contrast to the videos of Poison and Warrant, "[showing] young, insecure males gaining supernatural power over women...". Once again I have NO idea what he's talking about. I think I've seen all the music videos by all the bands mentioned from the period (at least all videos of hit singles), and none of them show anything like the description over at all. For the sake of the argument, I'd claim that the Megadeth movie is no deeper than any Poison or Warrant movie: Apart from a few political and religious symbols shown at the beginning and end of the movie, most of the flickering images shows "action movie" use of violence that, coupled with the energic band on stage and the images of ecstatic fans perhaps are more appropriately interpreted as a third faced in the portrayal of masculine power. If this was the comparison he could make that would look thrash good and glam bad, I don't think he succeeded very well. In fact, out of the three bands videographies that I am aware of from the period in question, Warrant's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" are the only ones that have an actual story line. I need to point out that I love Megadeth; I'm just not conivinced by the author's attempts at justifying his own tastes (and prejudices).
2: Michael Sweet of Stryper fame is quoted first saying a few kind words about Metallica, then following "And then you had the glam thing that started to take off, with the big hair and the makeup and the shiny clothes. Not to be mean, but those guys weren't masters at their instruments. It was more of a show". I do not know in what context those words were uttered (if they were at all; I haven't seen that quote anywhere, and there are no references to any quotes in the entire book), but in the context of this book Christe makes it sound as if he's talking about the entire glam movement in it's broadest meaning; Whatever Sweet meant, this is what Christe want to have us read into it. This leaves us with a problem. Anyone who's ever peeked into the glam metal genre, regardless of whether they like it or not, know that it was full of top-notch musicians. Bands like Dokken, featuring monster guitarist George Lynch, have been mentioned earlier in a slightly redeeming light (there's no denying that Don Dokken isn't much of a singer, but from an objective point of view Dave Mustaine can't be said to be any better). However, Christe lambastes Winger multiple times during this chapter, yet they were arguably the heavy metal with the greatest all-round musical skills of the decade (all the members were famous session musicians before they formed the band). Considering Stryper's own musical output, I'm willing to put my money on Sweet's quote being pulled out of context to serve Christe's own purposes.

Page 160: This is my favourite! On top of the page, he is writing about the movie "Decline of the Western Civilization Part II" (1988), a documentary showing the life of LA rockers at the time; Christe does not surprisingly claim that Megadeth's performance in the video eclipsed the other bands (most of them glam metal) in the video. A few paragraphs later, he says that the corporate machine at the time ran wild, and that "[after] Vixen was discovered performing in the low-budget beach comedy Hardbodies [Edit: Released in 1984], EMI Records gave the all-female band of Midwestern transplants a glam makeover [...], sent them on tour with Scorpions, and promptly scored a gold album for the self-titled Vixen". This is hilariously bad research from Christe's side. The first Vixen album was released in 1989, five years after Hardbodies. What is even more shocking is the Vixen girls had quite a bit of dialogue in Decline of the Western Civilization Part II, four years after Hardbodies, at which time they hadn't scored a record contract yet. One may indeed question whether Christe bothers to check facts, or have seen either movie (Only two members of the band in 1988-89 remains from the 1984 line-up) or the band in question.

(These are just the errors I found after a quick reread of two chapters. I realize that Christe probably have very few kind words for glam metal in general, and that it's likely he's done better research in other chapters -this was where I remember finding the most glaring errors-, but I think the fact that he doesn't research the parts he's probably aware is his weakest says a lot in itself. More chapters will probably be dissected later.)

I wrote in the beginning of this review that I viewed this book as an attempt to provide an overview of the basic historical progress of heavy metal, and the speciation that has been so characteristic for the last 20 or so years. From such a point of view, this book must be considered a complete failure. Christe's love for Metallica should be well known, and it does indeed saturate almost every page of this book, while parts of the metal canon he does not care for is treated with a cavalier attitude to facts and no attempts at anything even closely resembling objectivity.

I suspect this book could have been much better had he dropped trying to make an overview of metal (something he in my eyes obviously is not suited to do. To put it nicely, one can say that he's too passionate about his own tastes to make a truly objective description of the material. I think this book would have been a whole lot more interesting if Christe rather tried to make a book about his own philosophies on metal, like Chuck Klosterman did with Fargo Rock City.

Unfortunately I cannot really recommend this book to anyone, apart from the fanatical Metallica fan who would like a confirmation on his/her opinion that the earth does indeed revolve around Lars Ulrich. To make matters worse, I cannot direct you to any books who succeeds where this fails; there is indeed written very little about heavy metal compared to the genre's popularity. Hopefully such a book will come one day.

A Good Primer, Slightly Metallica Heavy
2009-11-18 - Covering 35 years of heavy metal history in one book less than 400 pages long is an admirable and daunting task. I give Ian Christe all the credit in the world for taking it on. I, for one, discovered Cradle of Filth and Sleep through reading this book, and my life is better for it.

Yes, there are issues. I'm sure that many readers will want to see their favorite metal genres get more in-depth treatment; I was hoping for more on Norwegian Black Metal. But, once again, this book is covering a lot of ground, so deep explorations just aren't possible. This book is a great primer for the burgeoning metal fan or a fan wishing to get a glimpse of other metal genres and recommendations of bands and albums. As a metal music overview, it is an enjoyable read.

Then, there is the Metallica issue. I will admit that, at times, this book begins to read more like a Metallica biography than an all-inclusive metal history. But, I have to stand with Christe (for the most part) on this. Just as an author writing a history of Sixties rock would have to give much coverage to the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan due to their massive influence on that scene, so Christe has to give heavy time to Metallica. I don't fault him for that, but I do believe that he went a little heavy on the Metallica parts here and there. It's a minor complaint; however, a serious hater of Metallica may wish to avoid this book.

Overall, I am glad I purchased this book, and I do recommend it.

Flawed, but still probably the best overall book out there
2009-10-31 - If you're looking for a good overall book that hits the highlights of heavy metal and gives at least a shout-out to most, if not all, of its genres, this one is probably your best bet. Some of the other books I've read that purported to be histories of Heavy Metal were hardly comprehensive and instead focused on one scene, for example the 80s California "hair bands" and their infighting and gossip. Others make no bones about being an exploration of one genre such as glam metal or Swedish black metal or whatever. Bottom line, this book comes closest to being what it says it is: the history of Heavy Metal.

Now, that's not to say there isn't room for improvement. Quite a bit of improvement, actually. As others have noted, the book tends to devote inordinate space to a couple of bands (Judas Priest and especially, Metallica) at the expense of other bands getting about a page apiece or worse yet, a paragraph. Pioneers Blue Cheer are not even mentioned until about 100 pages into the book and then it's only about four lines to note that an album of theirs released by the same guy who released Metallica had little commercial success. Frankly, whether Blue Cheer sold a million copies of that album or not is immaterial to the influence they had on a lot of musicians - a fact that this author doesn't seem to quite grasp. Rather, he seems to be very focused on bands that were big commercial successes, including Def Leppard and Van Halen - both of whom morphed into more hard rock, even pop bands as they gained acclaim (something the author, to his credit, does note) - and of course, the omnipresent Metallica. Metallica were a great band and an important part of metal history, I'll grant, but they pop up on about every other page and it just gets tired after a while. It would have been better if the author had simply devoted one discrete chapter apiece to the bands he thinks most important and covered other bands in the other chapters, rather than constantly returning to what a particular band was doing at X point in time. And, Metallica, while it inspired a legion of fans and imitators, is hardly the be-all and end-all of heaviness in everybody's book (especially since their debatable opinions on file sharing and their rather silly documentary appearance) I see by the reviews that other people noticed this besides me. I also agree with the comments that said the discussion of early metal origins was overly focused on Sabbath, giving the erroneous impression that Sabbath was the one and only heavy band for a decade and essentially existed and evolved in a vacuum.

The slavish Metallica worship starts to get really out of hand in the middle of the book around the time of the "Black Album", where one would think, from the author's florid prose, that every single metal fan on the face of the planet was grovelling in Metallicamania similar to early Beatlemania. Um, no. There are plenty of metal fans who actually lost interest in Metallica about the time said band "went commercial" or just preferred other genres. If you read metal forums on a regular basis, you know this already, and the author's incredibly biased viewpoint just becomes that much more annoying. Fortunately, he did get on to death metal and other topics before I lost patience entirely and threw the book in the dumpster.

The author also includes some rather bizarre, out-of-place content at times, such as lists of the best "punk" and "hardcore" albums. I love both punk and hardcore and lived in a town with a big crossover scene between those genres and metal, but there are lots of good punk books already (and not so many good metal ones, sadly enough) and I would have rather had the pages in this book that talk about punk instead talk about mo' metal.

The book is at its best when describing the highly personal culture of metalheads that kept the genre alive through the early 80s in the good ol' DIY manner of tape trading and 'zines, and continues to love the music today. The same culture was also keeping whatever punk or post-punk ethos still existed alive at that point before it morphed into "indie". To Christe's credit, he also manages to mention most of the classic albums of metal at some point, and the lists of albums therein provide essential listening for anyone who's new to the genre or needs to fill in a few time gaps over the last 20 years. The writing style is decent enough and the author comes off like a likable fellow, not someone who's showing off or trying to be a "rock writer". It's a fast and fairly easy read despite being the size of a dictionary, and contains some cool pictures and graphics to boot.

This isn't the be-all and end-all of heavy metal books, and to be honest I'd love to see something written along the lines of "England's Dreaming" focusing thoughtfully on a few regional metal scenes that DIDN'T necessarily produce million-selling bands. (Anyone want to write the story of Maryland doom?) But this is a good general overview and probably the best thing in book form that's out there for now.

bias! bias! bias!
2009-06-16 - I have read many of the reviews and decided to write my own. One of the things that cannot be said about Ian is that his writing is bad or boring or anything depreciative. Although sometimes too poetic for my taste, the overall feeling when reading this book is of fluidity. The information, although biased to the extreme, flows smoothly in a well constructed text structure. I have to agree with many of the reviewers in the claim that this is not about the history of heavy metal let alone "the complete" headbanging history of heavy metal. I have been buying specialized magazines for over three decades now and I can safely state, based on the numerous interviews with the majority of bands in the scene, that Metallica is not among the three to five bands most cited as big influences in their careers. Undoubtedly, the most influential bands in the metal scene are Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Slayer, in this order. However, aside from Black Sabbath, which gets a wide coverage in the book (but only in the Ozzy era), Iron Maiden and Slayer are treated as if they were cult bands with a short career span. As a fan of black metal, I also think that there was a biased view and bands which are as big as they can get in this genre were left out with a single paragraph mentioning their existence: Dimmu Borgir. In conclusion, I recommend this book for its richness but with a warning for people who's been living in the scene for long.

The Title of this Book Qualifies as False Advertising
2009-03-22 - The biggest problem with this book is that is not about Heavy Metal, it's just an Ok-ish Metallica biography. I don't really mind the fan-boyish writing, since that's the way I'd probably write about any of my favorite bands. What really bothers me is that whatever happenned before Kill 'em All is only examined depending on the impact and influence it would eventually have in Metallica, and whatever happenned afterwards is discussed depending on how it affected the bands career.
I'm not a writer or a journalist, but i've been a rabid Heavy Metal follower and collector for more than 25 years now, and it never ceases to amaze me how much the author left out and how unimportant artists like Slayer, Helloween, Venom, Death, Napalm Death, Bathory, Kreator and Celtic Frost seem to be, at least according to this book.
Ok Ian, I get it, you wanted to write a Metallica biography but your editor told you the book would appeal to a larger audience if it covered heavy metal in general. At least you could've been honest enough to title it something akin to "The History of Heavy Metal as Experienced by Metallica". I would've bought it anyway, and wouldn't be as pissed-off, since I actually expected a book about the history of my favourite genre.