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The book is always better than the YouTube, but with a few weeks to go before Daniel Ekeroth’s Swedish Death Metal book is available, at least this video preview offers a quick fix.

Does the place where you hang out and listen to metal have a massive garish wall mural covering its entire fucking face, and make you feel like you live in a Sepultura or Iron Angel album cover from 1985? Unless you answered “Si!” — I don’t think so. Tyrant is one of several total metal clubs ringing the open sublevels of a housing complex northwest of downtown Madrid, Spain. Exactly across the courtyard is Club Lemmy, a hard rock bar open since 1980, boasting its own eight-foot tall picture-perfect Motörheadbeast mural.

Unfortunately for me, Spanish bars and restaurants open and close seven times a day — just in case the Moors decide to invade again. I missed the action at Tyrant several times, but I went on a 14-mile walk instead and watched a bullfight, found the squatters at an enormous street fair, took a nap in a park, ate fried bacalao and drank tiny beers and cava, and stumbled onto a mythically cool building that turned out to be the General Society of Authors and Editors [SGAE]. Madrid is a great sprawling maze of a city, an easy place to get lost and find a prize.

Thanks to Neil Daniels [author of the recent The Story of Judas Priest: Defenders of the Faith (Omnibus Press)] for posting a brief, to-the-point interview with me about my Van Halen book at GetReadyToRock.com. Somehow, he broke me down and got me to confess my burning desire to raise goats and bees. Man, I must have been in a weird mood.

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The demo digitization program has slowed a little lately while I prepare the the US edition of Daniel Ekeroth’s outstanding Swedish Death Metal for press. This is the first book through my new indie publishing house, Bazillion Points, and everything takes twice as long the first time through. I’ll unveil the appropriate hoopla in the next couple weeks–for now let me just say this is the best document of any underground music scene that I’ve ever read. More soon…

Most folks, including me, are probably more familiar with the name Crawldaddy than the actual contents of the late-’60s magazine of rock. Well the venerated title is back in some ghostly form, and they’ve dug up a 1994 interview I did with High on Fire/Burning Witch/Nirvana producer Steve Albini where he lays out his anti-bullshit spiel.

Here’s one of the astute things he said:

“…I think Candlebox’s fans hold them very loosely, there just happens to be an awful lot of them at the moment. In five years time, you’ll have as hard a time finding a Candlebox fan as you would finding a die-hard Huey Lewis fan, or a Quarterflash devotee. You do remember what a huge success Vanilla Ice was? Now, you could turn America upside-down and shake it, and not find a Vanilla Ice fan. I still run into people who are rabid fans of something as obscure as MX-80 or the Suicide Commandos. The fact that a band can be quite popular temporarily has nothing whatsoever to do with their ultimate importance.”

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Salut France, Quebec, Belgium, New Orleans, Haiti et les Suisse-Romands — the French translation of Sound of the Beast is finished and ready for release on Nov. 9, 2007. The book was delayed by almost a year when the original translator fell sick and couldn’t continue. In that time, I wrote a new few pages for the book, a “Brief Headbanging Mini-History of French-speaking Metal” covering Trust, Voivod, Treponem Pal, ADX, Antaeus, Cryptopsy, Gojira, and lots of others. I can’t wait to see the reaction, and can’t wait to see a copy for myself.

EDITIONS FLAMMARIONS [Publisher page with links to Alapage.com, Amazon.fr, and fnac.com]

My old high school has redesigned its Blue Devil team mascot using sophisticated computer rendering (see above). If you run a small semi-bootleg record label and want to use the image for your Venom tribute album cover, I can put you in touch with the Art teacher. I almost forgot that I grew up in a healthy, supportive community where drawing hellish demons was a sign of school spirit.  Go Mynderse! 

What beats all the Halo-inspired Master-whatever Halloween costumes in the works? I wrote a short piece in this month’s Popular Mechanics about MIT’s efforts to create a new space exploration suit for hopping, skipping, and jumping around on Mars. This lightweight, tight-to-body BioSuit uses mechanical pressure instead of gas pressure, so MTV may have to redesign the Spaceman award it gives to the best dancers and lip-synchers each year.

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Photo by Donna Covey

There they are circa September 2007 — the guy on bass is named Wolfgang Van Halen.

Like any self-respecting metalhead, I have lots of hobbies to suck up my extra energy, and for the last year one of them has been chronicling the rise and rise and fall and rise of Van Halen. There are several great Van Halen reference books out there, but nobody has had bothered to write a proper biography since 1984 — so I took the bait. This week Amazon.com has added a Search Inside feature to its page for my work Everybody Wants Some: The Van Halen Saga. You can click the “Surprise Me!” button 322 times and read the book in a totally exciting random order.

Here are some comments from the realer world:

“[Christe's] not fooling around. And his prose is always playful.” — Los Angeles Times

“A new biography of the band that made metal marketable doesn’t disappoint the fans.” — The American Prospect

“Christe is back with a shockingly clear view of life behind the iron curtain that is Van Halen. Through Everybody Wants Some: The Van Halen Saga, Christe gives his readers a chance to relive the glory days of Sunset Strip glam Metal, while exploring the complex relationships between the brothers Alex and Eddie Van Halen.” — BringBackGlam.com

“Do yourself a favor and buy this book before you buy a t-shirt at the reunion concert. Christe has written a book that is stylish, succinct, breathtaking and as dazzling as an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo. If you ever stared in the mirror and attempted to imitate David Lee Roth with leaps and splits from the “Jump” video, then this book is for you.” — AntiMusic.com

“Even if you aren’t a Van Halen fan, if you ever liked ‘Runnin’ with the Devil’, ‘Unchained,’ ‘Panama,’ or even ‘Poundcake’ you have to have to read this book. I’m recommending it to all my friends, I enjoyed it as much as Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt!” — GuitarNoize.com

Thanks! I also did interviews about Van Halen and the book on IGBlog.com and BringBackGlam.com, with several more in the works.

Thanks for passing this info around as best you can and checking out the book.

Greetings from the dungeons of Chateau de Chillon — wish you were here? The demo cassette spools have stopped spinning for a couple weeks while I march up a few mountains and wear out some train tickets. The Bang! Bang! queue restarts the second week of September. In the meantime, check the Demo Archive, visit Invisible Oranges, read a good book about Van Halen, or just duck and cover.