Fans pick 100 books like White Line Fever

I am a huge Iron Maiden fan, like a devoted acolyte fan. Over the years, I’ve seen them multiple times, bought a closet full of concert shirts, and collected their beers/Funko Pops/album deluxe versions. Bruce Dickinson is the band’s second vocalist, and here he gives us the tales of his early days in Samson before joining Steve Harris and the Maiden crew. We get stories of his childhood and family in typical autobiography fashion, but it takes off once he gets into the meat of his time with Iron Maiden.

The book is captivating because he reflects on leaving Maiden to follow a solo career. The struggles he dealt with personally and professionally paint a picture of a man who had it all but wanted to try something new. The book’s final portion deals with his return to Iron Maiden and how he went through cancer. Cancer could’ve ended his… show more.

Adrian Smith is one of the lead guitar players in Iron Maiden. Adrian has a passion beyond the stage and his career; he loves fishing. When I first picked up the book, I wasn’t sure how the book would be at keeping me engaged and interested. I’m not a fisherman, and I don’t relish going outside much. The book begins with him recounting how he started his love of fishing near his childhood home when he was younger. The book then uses his touring and recording schedules to recount his fishing trips and most extraordinary catches spanning the globe. Each catch is part of a tapestry woven through his life on the road. In the end, I found myself in awe of how much Adrian loves to fish and how seriously he takes it as a hobby.

This was the true story of Rockstar Anthony Kideas and his struggle with an abusive childhood and then a drug addiction. I related to how he felt as a child and how low he felt during his addiction to drugs. Many of his childhood issues and abuses he faced gave me the strength to write about the abuse I had faced.

I saved the best for last. Rob Halford has lived the life of the Metal God for decades. In his autobiography, Halford doesn’t shy away from anything. The title is truthful; the pages are his confession for a life lived on the edge. Halford begins with his childhood and how he grew to love singing. He has one of the widest vocal ranges in metal, and his influence over the past fifty years with Judas Priest or his solo works is undeniable. Where this autobiography stands out is Halford speaking about how he hid his homosexuality from everyone. The pain he explains is genuinely heartbreaking, and I found myself surprised by how moving his words are. Don’t get me wrong; it isn’t a sad book because Halford has fun telling his story to the world.

By the book’s end, when he comes clean to the public about his life in… show more.

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.  

The cutest book I’ve ever read about being a fan. Warm and softhearted, Chuck’s writing is literary comfort food.

A music and sports journalist turned memoirist, this is his misty-eyed look back at childhood. Like an episode of The Wonder Years all about Hair Metal. You can substitute Hair Metal for anything chronically un-cool that you ever fell in love with.

It’s a gleeful defence of the dork inside, a reminder that taste is subjective, that fashions come and go, that when we poo-poo things we’re denying ourselves potential enjoyment. There’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure. Pleasure is pleasure, and there isn’t enough of it in this sorry world.

So, curl up with Klosterman and enjoy what you enjoy. 

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.

This is the coolest Hendrix book ever because it is all written by Jimi himself! Peter Neal has transcribed all know statements, letters, lyrics, interviews, audio clips or quotes into chronological order and makes it read like an autobiography. The lyrics and letters are included where they belong in the timeline. I learned more about Hendrix from this very personal account than from anything else. It’s a brilliant idea and a one of a kind read!

Some people consider this the second serious biography about Jimi Hendrix after David Henderson’s bio. Charles Cross had a great budget and the benefit of being based in Seattle. Since it was published in 2006, it also had the huge advantage of a treasure trove of updated information, culled from decades of numerous people doing research on Hendrix, who had a huge renaissance in the late ’90s, when his family won the rights back to his catalog. This Jimi bio was just a tune-up for his more successful bio on another Seattle Rock legend, Kurt Kobain, which was entitled, Heavier Than Heaven.

The most emphasized aspect of Jimi Hendrix’s life has always been his turn as a meteoric Rock guitar phenomenon. His exploits in Europe and his triumphant return to the US usually captures most of the ink regarding his existence on this earth. Many people thought that Jimi Hendrix came out of thin air and was manufactured in London. However, this book sheds light on Jimi’s musical foundation as an itinerant sideman on the Chitlin’ Circuit. This was where he honed his craft and developed his chops.

You can’t leave this aspect out and jump straight to Purple Haze and All Along the Watchtower. This book leaves no stone unturned, as far as it relates to his formation as a skilled guitarist. The colorful cast of characters Jimi encountered on the dusty roads of the South and everywhere in between, will have you amused and laughing out loud.