100 books like Fargo Rock City

I feel it’s important to note that I never liked this stupid band. But Mötley Crüe's book was all guilty pleasure for me: pleasure because I knew Seattle grunge had already killed their L.A. hair-band era, and guilty because (a) there turned out to be genuinely poignant moments, which revealed that (b) I’m a snob.

This book is a fast read of a slow-motion car crash, documenting the squalid, drug-sick lives of four self-consumed dingbats who stepped in success and somehow couldn’t scrape it off their shoe. I find this book revolting and recommend it highly.   

The first full novel by Hill—who I secretly recognized as Stephen King’s son—takes his father’s traditions to a whole new level. I fell immediately in love with Hill’s twisted yet insightful storytelling.

An aging rockstar protagonist who sets out to confront his unsettling past and weird addiction to odd memorabilia? Yes, please. I’m in awe of Hill’s ability to pack more into a single sentence than most authors do in an entire chapter. He balances the pace of a face-melting guitar solo with the gentle tenderness of vulnerability as his characters struggle to understand their place in the world.

This book had me clutching the covers one moment and reaching for the tissues in the next.

Nearly twenty years ago, I wondered why nobody had written about being a rock fan in the nineteen-eighties, and then I came across Seb Hunter’s Hell Bent for Leather.

Hunter’s story was very similar to mine (we’re of a similar age and based in the UK), but whereas I still love the music and look back on my ultimately futile rock star aspirations with a certain sense of pride and warmth, Hunter is dismissive of his more successful attempt, and embarrassed by his allegiance to the spandex and six strings.

So why recommend this book, I hear you say? One word – passion. His stories and opinions, though I may not agree with all of them, clearly come from the heart and cut through his often cynical but incisive narrative.

Stop. Before you say, “Spandau Ballet? Rock Stars?” let me, or even better, Martin Kemp (in his book) tell you that he and his Blitz Kid brothers gave Motley a run for their money in their eighties rock star behavior, so yes, he’s on my list.

He’s also not so different from Seb Hunter and I, in that he wanted to be in a band, just like his friends Steve Strange, Midge Ure, Boy George and George Michael (their names may be familiar). Again, it’s his passion for the era that makes this compulsive reading as he chronicles the rise and fall of Spandau as well as a lot of the same social histories that I cover in my book, but from the VIP side of the velvet rope.

If I gave you a script of Stephen Pearcy’s younger days as a potential movie of the week you’d laugh me out of the room for it being too far-fetched.

Pearcy caught the wannabe rock star bug early like I did, and being based in LA it was almost a given that he’d follow his heroes Van Halen to stardom. Then his mum moved them to San Diego, he discovered drugs, and he was hit by a car, ending up in a hospital bed for months. Game over, no? No.

His drive, ambition, determination and, yes, passion to become a rock star led to his full recovery and the formation of Ratt, who sold approximately eight million more records than I did in my attempt at stardom. Fascinating reading.

Chuck Eddy cartwheels onto the page like a stoned Bart Simpson with the complete works of Lester Bangs in his back pocket.

He sees “metal” as a broad church: not a genre but a mindset, an intent, an intensity level. As such, pop, rap, jazz, funk, experimental, blues, and contemporary classical albums rub shoulders with the rock, punk, and actual heavy metal you’d expect on such a list.

It’s a hilariously opinionated read, occasionally even perverse. He’s wrong on every page, but I’m with him that the 1974 Alice Cooper Greatest Hits album may be the single greatest slab of electric music ever pressed to wax. 

If Hunter S. Thompson’s work is writing as rock ’n roll, early Mark Leyner is writing as thrash metal.

And like most practitioners of thrash, he mellowed out and slowed down as he got older. But his early shit? Look out! Faster than a bullet and harder than algebra. Whopping great gobs of language, slanguage, lexicon, and terminology gush up off the page.

Not only are there no brakes, there are seemingly no limits at all, his mind doesn’t wander, it careens and chugs and screeches and free falls… and if you follow you’ll be rewarded: with laughter, shock, awe, poignancy, and something akin to a deep, ecstatic numbness. Leyner’s words sharpen the senses and push the brain into the red, just like thrash metal does. 

If you don’t know Poppoff, you should. He’s a genial Canuck Youtuber who also happens to be the world’s most prolific music reviewer.

An inveterate headbanger with an unquenchable thirst for loudness. In this—the book for which he’ll surely be remembered—Poppoff turns his eye on the whole prehistory of heavy metal, breaking the music down into component parts, and tracing those components backwards through time.

From psychedelia to early rock n roll, blues, jazz, classical music, all the way back to the Vikings, the Ancient Greeks, and the Battle of Jericho in 1250 BC. If there’s a better researched, more thorough, or more sweeping book about loud music on the planet Earth, I ain’t aware of it.  

This stunning, sprawling novel is anchored by the experiences of Thomas Wazhashk, the night watchman at a jewel-bearing factory in rural North Dakota.

It explores the strangeness of working the night shift and living with a semi-nocturnal schedule. The job and his tireless fight against a bill that will further dispossess Native Americans drive Thomas to a state of near-exhaustion.

Some of the most memorable moments in this compassionate and narratively ambitious book were the descriptions of Thomas’s lonely and occasionally revelatory experiences on the night shift, including his encounters with a white owl he finds pecking at the factory windows. I found this novel, like all of Erdrich’s books, to be immersive and enthralling.  

Gabe Brown didn’t set out to change the world when he first started working alongside his father-in-law on the family farm in North Dakota. But a series of weather-related crop disasters put Brown in desperate financial straits. He decided to quit the industrial model of food production and began experimenting with regenerative agriculture instead. He stopped using herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic fertilizers. He no-tilled diverse crops into his fields and changed his grazing practices. By doing so, Brown transformed a degraded farm ecosystem into one full of life. Brown has grown several inches of new topsoil in only twenty years and turned the farm into a diverse, profitable enterprise. This book is a great introduction for all readers.