Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal »

David Konow has written for publications such as Guitar World, Creative Screenwriting, and Psychotronic. He is the author of Schlock-O-Rama: The Films of Al Adamson. Konow lives in Southern California.

“Bang your head! Metal Health’ll drive you mad!”
— Quiet Riot

Like an episode of VH1’s Behind the Music on steroids, Bang Your Head is an epic history of every band and every performer that has proudly worn the Heavy Metal badge. Whether headbanging is your guilty pleasure or you firmly believe that this much-maligned genre has never received the respect it deserves, Bang Your Head is a must-read that pays homage to a music that’s impossible to ignore, especially when being blasted through a sixteen-inch woofer.

Charting the genesis of early metal with bands like Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden; the rise of metal to the top of the Billboard charts and heavy MTV rotation featuring the likes of Def Leppard and Metallica; hitting its critical peak with bands like Guns N’ Roses; disgrace during the “hair metal” ’80s; and a demise fueled by the explosion of the Seattle grunge scene and the “alternative” revolution, Bang Your Head is as funny as it is informative and proves once and for all that there is more to metal than sin, sex, and spandex.

To write this exhaustive history, David Konow spent three years interviewing the bands, wives, girlfriends, ex-wives, groupies, managers, record company execs, and anyone who was or is a part of the metal scene, including many of the band guys often better known for their escapades and bad behavior than for their musicianship. Nothing is left unsaid in this jaw-dropping, funny, and entertaining chronicle of power ballads, outrageous outfits, big hair, bigger egos, and testosterone-drenched debauchery.

Publishers Weekly

In a book that never quite gets rolling, Konow, a writer for Guitar World, sets out to give a timeline of heavy metal while answering "three key questions: what went right, what went wrong, and what the hell happened?" He begins in Birmingham, England, which he argues is the birthplace of heavy metal, with its most popular statesman today, Ozzy Osbourne. As a revolt against the hippie movement and in part to save himself from a life of crime, Osbourne formed Black Sabbath. At the same time, Led Zeppelin formed from the "ashes of the Yardbirds," and after finally gathering enough members (Keith Moon of the Who turned them down, quipping that they'd sink "like a lead zeppelin," which is how Jimmy Page decided on the name), held a jam session. Konow continues in a chronological fashion, briefly sketching band bios, triumphs and downfalls. Without exploiting each band's debauchery or disintegration, Konow covers such other metal acts such as Alice Cooper, Kiss, Van Halen, M tley Cr e, Dokken, Def Leppard, Metallica, Bon Jovi, Guns 'n' Roses and many others. The portraits of Alice Cooper and Axl Rose are the most engaging parts of the book. However, the chapters read more like magazine articles than a coherent book. Hardcore metal fans will likely find the book a bit soft and too pop, and they're unlikely to learn any new stories. In the final pages, Konow attempts an analysis of the fall of heavy metal, but by that point, so many bands have risen and fallen that his curt summation is hardly satisfying. This is an inspired personal effort that won't chart. (Nov.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.