Janiss Garza

Axl Rose performing with G N' R at Music Machine in Santa Monica on September 13, 1986

Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal, by Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman comes out today.

It's an amazing account of the four-decades-old genre -- more than 700 pages long, with hundreds of interviews, many of them with essential players.

It gets into everything from the murder of Pantera's Dimebag Darrell to the, um, cannibalism in the Norwegian death metal scene.

There's also plenty on L.A. metal, and a really fun chapter on the glam scene, part of which is excerpted below.

It focuses on the early days of Guns N' Roses, before they had a record deal. When they weren't being wined and dined by labels, they were causing absolute mayhem and, in the case of Axl Rose and drummer Steven Adler, beating the shit out of each other.

Enjoy!

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flickr/Dave Robinette

Alan Freed

Henry Stone is one of those legends in the music biz; he ran ventures including the mega-successful, disco-heavy TK Records (responsible for KC & The Sunshine Band and many more), and helped pioneer the way popular music is distributed and promoted. Hint: In all the sleazy ways you can imagine.

In any case, he's now 91, has squandered most of his fortune, and has a billion stories. Many are collected in his new book, The Stone Cold Truth on Payola In The Music Biz, co-written with Miami New Times scribe Jacob Katel. The below excerpt focuses on Alan Freed, the legendary DJ whose career included stints at Los Angeles stations including KDAY, before he was brought down by the '60s era payola scandal.

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Big news! There's an album called 50 Shades of Dubstep. It's got, you guessed it, 50 songs of goddamn dubstep. Amazon says it came out in August, but it just arrived in our mailbox this month. And so, we did what any logical person would do: We listened to all four hours of it.

Except, that wasn't X-treme enough for us. We got to thinking about the erotic novel that "inspired" the album, Fifty Shades of Grey, and wondered if the two might be related somehow. You know, like what happens when you listen to Dark Side of the Moon and watch The Wizard of Oz at the same time. Surely the bass and somebody's panties will drop simultaneously, right?

So, we did it. We read the book while listening to the album's three discs. Fuck our life!

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Like any girl who came of age in the early 90s, we knew some basic facts on the New Kids on the Block.

We knew Donnie was the leader; Joey and Jordan, the cute ones, and the lead singers; Jon, the shy, sensitive one; Danny, the one who looked like a monkey. We knew that our best friend in grade school was utterly convinced she was going to marry Jordan. And we knew that when the New Kids, now known by the acronym NKOTB, made their triumphant return four years ago, a surprising number of our friends bought tickets and shrieked all the way through the show.

So maybe those friends -- the diehard fans -- knew everything there was to know about the band already. But for those of us who just knew the basics, Nikki Van Noy's new authorized biography, New Kids on the Block: Five Brothers and a Million Sisters, contains a surprising number of revelations about the boy band that practically invented the genre, at least for white folks. Here are the ten we found most surprising.

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Paul T. Bradley

Yesterday afternoon, before a crowd of media types and clean-cut Sunset Strip'd hard rockers at the Viper Room, Kiss debuted their new book, Kiss Monster. It is huge -- 3 feet x 2.5 feet, and nearly 50 pounds.

The thing costs $4250.

Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer fielded questions about the tome. They weren't wearing makeup, but they did have salty quips at the ready.

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Whether you believe he's the world's greatest living music artist or a twisted sexual deviant who eluded justice, there's much to be gleaned about R. Kelly in his new autobiography Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me. In the thick (377 pages!) tome, Kelly is incredibly candid about his tumultuous childhood, as well as the various titillating highs and depressing lows of his career.

But you're probably wondering: Does he shed any light on how he thought to compare a woman to a jeep, or his dick to a remote control? We pored over Soulacoaster to examine the key moments in Kelly's life, and mined the most interesting nuggets. We've also provided some of his videos as a soundtrack to your reading.

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Slipknot

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Nine-piece metal outfit Slipknot begins their headline run on this year's Rockstar Mayhem tour this Saturday in San Bernardino. Their percussionist M. Shawn Crahan -- also known as Clown -- meanwhile has recently released his first art book of photography, The Apocalyptic Nightmare Journey, as well as launched a film imprint with Slipknot vocalist Corey Taylor called Living Breathing Films. (Production will begin on their debut films after the tour is completed.)

We spoke with him about the band, his planned retirement (it involves his wife being topless) and the effect the death of Slipknot bassist Paul Gray two years ago had on him.

During live performances you often put yourself at risk of physical injury by doing insane stunts on-stage. Has your recovery time gotten longer as you've gotten older?

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Mike Watt

Mike Watt mastered the art of playing the bass in punk with his group the Minutemen and kept alternative rock weird with fIREHOSE. In recent years he's been playing with Iggy Pop's band the Stooges. In his downtime, he's also a pretty-serious photographer, and his new book of photography, Mike Watt: On and Off Bass, comes out today, May 1. He took many of the photos of his native San Pedro from his kayak; the book also contains bits of his poetry and diary entries. We spoke with him about the project, and you can see more exclusive photos from the book below.

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