This month’s Headbangers Book Club Official Selection is a special one, as it’s the first book we’ve read that’s not a total sausage party! Pamela Des Barres may not have been a rock star in her own right (unless you count her brief stint in the Zappa-sponsored girl group the GTO’s), but her memoir I’m with the Band is a vital counterpoint to the male-dominated hijinks of ’60s and ’70s rock; plus there’s a couple of real questionable relationships with preteen boys, so it fits right in with our previous selection in even more ways than expected! We’ll be back in a few weeks with Part 2. Thanks for listening!
It’s a special #jhericurljune installment of the ol’ Book Club as we dig into 2019’s On Time: A Princely Life in Funk by Morris Day with David Ritz–so, slightly less headbanging than normal, but don’t worry, there’s plenty of the important stuff (i.e., cocaine). We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with Part 2, at which point we’ll also announce our official HBC selection for July. Remember, don’t let us Meat Loaf!
Turns out Meat Loaf needed a little extra time in the oven, but we’re finally back to discuss the late vocal powerhouse’s 2000 memoir To Hell and Back. Join us as we ponder Meat’s many concussions, his suitably operatic relationship with the also-recently-departed Jim Steinman, and how he’s easily in the top five of anti-maskers we would have been okay catching COVID from. We’ll be back around the middle of next month for a special Jheri Curl June miniseries on Morris Day‘s On Time: A Princely Life in Funk!
This month’s official Headbangers Book Club selection is over five years in the making: Callie got her copy of Sebastian Bach‘s 18 and Life on Skid Row (signed by Sea Bass himself!) in late 2016, and we’re finally getting around to reading it. This episode covers the first half of the book, give or take, and so far we’re having a lot of fun with it! If you want to read along, there’s still time to catch up–we’ll be posting Part 2 by the end of the month! And if you want to get started early on next month’s book, we will be tackling Meat Loaf‘s To Hell and Back in April!
For the inaugural episode of the new and improved Headbangers Book Club, we decided to go big with not one, but two books on Led Zeppelin: four entitled manbabies and borderline sociopaths who just so happened to write (or, in some cases, steal) some of the greatest rock music of all time. Join us as we discuss the Great Dane incident, shitting incidents (plural), and all the other depravities in this 120 Days of Sodom for the hesher set. Please share your thoughts with us on Twitter, Instagram, or drop us an email; and remember to join us for our next book, 18 and Life on Skid Row by Sebastian Bach! We’ll be reading the first half of the book by Friday, March 11.
It’s an experimental episode this time around, as we try to kill two birds with one stone by watching Shrek the Thirdat the same time as we record the podcast. The results are… not great, especially since Zach sounds like he’s recording from a really large open bathroom (don’t worry, he’s not). Still, rest assured that the experience of listening to us watch Shrek the Third can’t possibly be worse than the experience of watching Shrek the Third alone! We’ll be back at the end of July with a more traditional (for better or worse) episode on The Love Guru.
We’ve talked a fair amount about Prince, who would have turned 63 today, as one of the architects of the genre we call Jheri Curl Music: Most notably in our very first Jheri Curl June Special back in 2014, but also in various JCJ entries and profiles on his former colleagues (Sheila E, the Time, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Vanity, Wendy & Lisa, Jesse Johnson, and André Cymone), rivals (Rick James and, depending on when you ask, at least half of the previous list), and even a few knockoffs (Phil Collins, Ebonee Webb). In fact, we’ve talked so much about Prince on here, you’d be forgiven for wondering if there’s anything else about the Purple One we could possibly have to say (and that’s not even mentioning Zach’s long-running, exhaustively-detailed blog about him).
The thing about Prince, though, is not only is his extant body of work both massive and exceedingly deep, but it’s also constantly growing, as more and more of his music is liberated from his storied Vault. Case in point: his version of “Jungle Love,” a 1984 hit for side project the time after its appearance in the Jheri Curl Cinema landmark Purple Rain, wasn’t even circulating on the robust bootleg market before 2019, when it was released on the posthumous compilation Originals.
“Jungle Love” is actually a Jheri Curl milestone in more ways than one. Aside from being penned by Prince and made famous by the Time, it was also based on an instrumental demo by guitarist Jesse Johnson, whose 1985 “Be Your Man” has the distinction of being the second song ever highlighted for Jheri Curl June. As for the song itself, it’s one of the greasiest of Prince’s early-’80s peak as Jheri Curl progenitor par excellence: an infectious workout driven by a lubricious keyboard line, squelching bass-synth, and rhythm guitar so clean it sounds like it’s still in the shrink wrap. So happy birthday, Prince; here’s to another five years (at least!) of more Jheri Curl gems being unearthed.
We’ll be back tomorrow! Spotify and YouTube playlists below:
After almost three years of ripping on trashy rock biographies with Dystopian Book Club, it was only a matter of time for us to get around to the trashiest of them all: Neil Strauss’ and Mötley Crüe’s masterpiece of filth-wallowing, The Dirt. The two-hour conversation we had doesn’t even begin to cover everything in the book, but we think it will give you a good idea of what to expect from the movie adaptation that just premiered on Netflix. Thanks to our YouTube subscribers Bruce Gaskins and Tony Bernardo for recommending we cover this book–I think it’s obvious that it gave us a lot of joy.
Heard ya missed us, we’re back! After a year-long absence, the Dystopian Book Club returns with an extensive look at Crazy from the Heat, the memoir/literary classic/deranged, barely coherent rantings of former Van Halen frontman, raconteur, and assless pants aficionado David Lee Roth. So limber up, slip into your comfiest Spandex, and maybe treat yourself to a powdered doughnut or two (wink, wink)–this may be our most fun book club since Peter Criss. Thanks to Matt from Toronto for sending in a question and making sure we didn’t take our shirts off for nothing.
