That Devil Music's 2018 Holiday Gift Guide

It’s not really a big secret that the world is filled with crapola and people trying to sell it to you. The Reverend isn’t above a little ‘bloato-hype’ of his own, thus the first (and probably last) That Devil Music 2018 Holiday Gift Guide. I bought all of the items listed below myself at some time over the past year or so and can personally attest to the quality of life they provide.

Most of these gift recommendations are music-related, but we do veer into fanboy territory with graphic novels and toys. It’s important to note that when you ‘click the link’ and buy these items from Amazon that the Rev gets a little piece of the action to help fund his rowdy rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle (i.e. buy more music).

Music Box Sets

The major record labels are depending, no…demanding that you shore up their bottom lines by reinvesting in music that you’ve already bought two or three times now. They’re flooding the market with expensive multi-disc box sets that revisit albums that you got tired of years ago, adding just enough flash (bonus DVD or extra vinyl to go along with lavish books) to convince you to part with your cash yet again. The Rev prefers checking out reasonably-priced various artist compilations for the multitude of music they contain, thus this list is heavy with cool boxes, but I’m also not above buying the odd artist-specific box set if the price (and content) is right. Anybody can gift a copy of the Beatles’ White Album, why not try something fresh and different for a change this holiday?

Mott the Hoople’s Mental Train: The Island Years, 1969-1971
Mott the Hoople’s Mental Train is a six-disc box set that collects includes remastered and expanded versions of all four of the band’s original Island Records label releases; an entire disc of unheard and unreleased material; and a full disc of raucous live and BBC on-air performances. Each of the original albums – Mott the Hoople, Mad Shadows, Wildlife, and Brain Capers – has been expanded by 8 or 9 tracks each, adding singles, demos, alternate takes, and much more. A fifth CD, The Ballads of Mott the Hoople, is subtitled “Unheard and Unreleased Music from the Island Archive.” That’s a lot of great music for the any Mott the Hoople fan!   BUY!

Frank Zappa – Zoot Allures! The Legendary Broadcasts
Yeah, the Reverend is a longtime Zappa fanboy, dating back to the Mothers of Invention and solo LPs like Chunga’s Revenge. This is a real find, though, a budget-priced four-disc collection of live performances culled from radio broadcasts featuring 53 songs spanning roughly a six-year period. One of those “copyright gap” releases of dodgy provenance (i.e. semi-legit bootleg), the set nevertheless documents vintage Zappa concerts like The Ritz, NYC 1981; Providence College, Rhode Island 1975 (with Captain Beefheart); Rotterdam, 1980; and the Capitol Theatre in Passaic NJ, 1978. Sound quality ranges from fair to fairly good, but it’s the rarity of the performances, the eras that they span, and the ‘cheepnis’ of the set that sells it.   BUY!

Various Artists – Gary Crowley’s Punk & New Wave
Much like the ‘New Wave of British Heavy Metal’ set below, Gary Crowley’s Punk & New Wave box tackles the difficult cutting edge of U.K. and American punk and beyond with 77 tracks spread across three CDs. Curated by legendary British DJ Gary Crowley, the set covers a lot of ground spanning punk, post-punk, new wave, and power-pop bands like Alternative TV, the Saints, 999, the Vibrators, the Fall, the Only Ones, Generation X, and John Cooper Clarke, among many others. Unlike other punk-oriented collections, though, Crowley doesn’t just feature the familiar ‘hits’ but rather delves into each band’s catalog to find the deep tracks. A number of tracks here originally appeared on limited edition 7” singles that are too pricey to consider (if you can find ‘em), and the box includes a nifty 40-page book with notes by Crowley and memories from members of the Skids, Altered Images, the Boys, and other bands.   BUY!   

Various Artists – Trojan Ska & Reggae Classics
Offering 60 red-hot tracks on three discs and running better than three hours in length, the budget-priced Trojan Ska & Reggae Classics set offers a lot of bang for the buck, the compilation preserving some of the finest reggae performances of the past half-century with even-handed re-mastering and pretty decent sound (considering that some of these songs were recorded almost 50 years ago on often primitive equipment). If you’re a newcomer to reggae, the set offers an instant lesson in the genre’s history; for us longtime fans, it collects some of our favorite artists and songs in a single package.   Read the Reverend’s review!   BUY!

Various Artists – Winds of Time: New Wave of British Heavy Metal 1979-1985
With a growing interest in the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” there are a number of compilation albums that have been released over the past few years, most of them featuring the same old track listing and bands. Leave it up to esteemed U.K. archival imprint Cherry Red Records to top everybody with their three-disc Winds of Time box set. Featuring 51 rockin’ tracks from both familiar ‘NWOBHM’ bands like Diamond Head, Samson, Raven, Saxon, Girlschool, and Tygers of Pan Tang as well as relatively-obscure outfits like Gaskin, Shiva, Witchfynde, Fist, and Rock Goddess, Cherry Red doesn’t offer up the ‘same old, same old’ but rather digs deep to find the gems in these bands’ catalogs for a collection truly representative of the scene.   BUY!

Various Artists – Try A Little Sunshine: British Psychedelic Sounds of 1969
Another great psych-drenched box set from Cherry Red’s Grapefruit Records imprint, Try A Little Sunshine is a three-disc compilation of groovy music from ’69 that offers up 73 tunes, some from bands that would be familiar to any serious fan of the rock ‘n’ roll including Audience, the Spencer Davis Group, Barclay James Harvest, the Move, Dave Davies, Status Quo, and the Pretty Things. There are more than a few real obscurities included herein as well, fab 45s from the likes of Fat Mattress, Freedom, Andromeda, Edward’s Hand, Nirvana (U.K.), Sam Gopal (with Lemmy!), and others that would cost you a fortune to buy on the collectors’ market.  BUY!

Graphic Novels

Ed Piskor’s X-Men Grand Design - Second Genesis
The artistic genius that crafted the brilliant Hip Hop Family Tree series of books turns his talents to re-imagining the Marvel Comics world of the ever-popular X-Men. Mutant super-heroes living in a world that misunderstands and fears them, the late Stan Lee’s characters were designed to represent the oppressed minorities and immigrants in our society, and Piskor does right with his re-telling of the origin stories of beloved characters like Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, and Colossus in this second book in the series.   BUY!

Also highly recommended: Ed Piskor’s first book of mutant origins – X-Men: Grand Design – which features tales of the heroic old-school X-group of Cyclops, Marvel Girl, The Beast, Angel, and Iceman. The two books stand well on their own, but if you’re a mutie-lover, buy ‘em both!   BUY!

Mark Bernardin’s Genius series
Mark Bernardin is the co-host of the popular Fatman Beyond podcast (with filmmaker Kevin Smith), and a talented writer for TV series and comics. His Genius graphic novels posit an intriguing question – what if the greatest military mind of a generation was a teenaged African-American girl from the hood? Destiny Ajaye is a strategic genius and charismatic leader who, in the first volume, takes on the LAPD’s SWAT forces with the backing of a rag-tag group of gang-bangers and pulls off the win.

In the second volume of Genius, Ajaye has been shanghaied by a shadowy government organization to fight a one-woman war against the Mexican drug cartels. Both books are fast-paced and action-packed, with Bernardin’s clever plotting and whipsmart dialogue and stunning artwork by Adam Freeman. Some film studio should option these books pronto and turn them into a starring vehicle for Letitia Wright. Get your fanboy groove on and buy ‘em both!

Genius, Volume One: Siege   BUY!
Genius, Volume Two: Cartel   BUY!

Gilbert Shelton’s Fifty Freakin’ Years of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
The Reverend has been a fan of underground comix for over 45 years now, and artist/writer Gilbert Shelton – along with Robert Crumb and Spain Rodriguez – has long been one of my “go to” artists for guaranteed entertainment. It’s hard to believe that Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers have been around for five decades now, but the ever-popular antics of Phineas, Freewheelin’ Franklin, and Fat Freddy have been published in 16 languages around the world and enjoyed sales of over 40 million copies…and that’s a shit-ton of comix! Fifty Freakin’ Years of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers celebrates the brothers’ 50th anniversary with a bunch of new strips, a gallery of Freak Brothers parody strips by artists like Crumb, and a brand new interview with Shelton. A ‘must have’ for any Freak Brothers fan!   BUY!

Toys

Funko ‘POP’ figures are possibly the hottest ticket in the world of toys, with rarer releases selling for hundreds of dollars on the collectors’ market. Personally, the Reverend likes to put ‘em on the bookshelves here at Conspiracy M.E.D.I.A headquarters as visually-stimulating ‘objekts de art’. Funko makes figures for a legion of comics, film, and TV characters but they’ve also begun cranking out a number of very cool rock ‘n’ roll figures that will spruce up your office, listening room, or wherever you want to sit ‘em down...

Jimi Hendrix “Woodstock”
Alice Cooper

Lemmy Kilmister (Motorhead)
Jerry Garcia

Joey Ramone
Prince “Purple Rain”

Music-Related Books

Disclaimer: I know most of the authors whose work I’m hyping below and, in couple cases, have had decade-long professional relationships with them. That doesn’t mean that these books aren’t brilliant – they’ve all been “road tested” and approved by the Reverend and would make a great addition to your music library.

Daryl Sanders’ That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound
Daryl Sanders’ That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound provides a fascinating and comprehensive history of Bob Dylan’s classic Blonde On Blonde album. There are a heck of a lot of Dylan-related books available – enough to stock a smallish library, really – but none of them have dug this deep into the making of one of the Scribe’s most creative, critically-acclaimed, and commercially-successful works. If you’re a Bob Dylan fan, you’ll want a copy of That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound on your bookshelf.   Read the Rev’s Review!   BUY!

Bill Kopp’s Reinventing Pink Floyd: From Syd Barrett to Dark Side of the Moon
With Reinventing Pink Floyd, his first book, Bill Kopp focuses his insight on the legendary British rock band, exploring Floyd’s early years “from Syd Barrett to the Dark Side of the Moon.” His efforts pay off, as Reinventing Pink Floyd provides a deep dive into the band’s years in the wilderness, as they forged a significant career in the wake of founder and guiding light Barrett’s departure, delivering all the minutiae and anecdotes that a Floyd fan demands, weaving a fascinating story of one of the most influential, pioneering bands in rock ‘n’ roll history.   BUY!

Steven Hyden’s Twilight of the Gods
Music journalist Steven Hyden is one of the best writers in the pop culture trenches today, and Twilight of the Gods is his first book. Providing an in-depth exploration of the enduring popularity and immense legacy of “classic rock,” Hyden also relates his own complicated history as a teenage fan of classic rock ‘n’ roll growing up in the grunge and alt-rock 1990s. He provides lots of insight and more than a few thought-provoking moments that will have you looking at classic rock bands in an entirely new way.   BUY!

Martin Popoff’s “Album by Album” book series
Rock writer and music historian Martin Popoff should be familiar to any regular That Devil Music reader. The talented scribe has written better than 80 music-related books to date (and counting), many of them self-published and leaving the reader neck-deep in band history. Martin’s (yeah, we’re on a first-name basis) coffee-table “Album by Album” series of books have been published by Voyageur Press, the music imprint of a larger publisher who is closing it down at the end of the year. That means that these gorgeous, informative, and highly entertaining books are going out-of-print and are destined to become rare, high-priced collectors’ items. You can still get some of them direct from Popoff’s website, or from Amazon via the links below.

Queen: Album by Album
Iron Maiden: Album by Album
Rush: Album by Album

Pink Floyd: Album by Album
AC/DC: Album by Album
The Clash: All the Albums, All the Songs
Led Zeppelin: All the Albums, All the Songs

The Reverend’s Personal Stash
Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t recommend a few of my own tomes as suitable gifts for the music-lover in your life. Here are a few good ‘uns to get you started:

Scorched Earth: A Jason & the Scorchers Scrapbook
Blues Deluxe: The Joe Bonamassa Buying Guide
Frank Zappa Buying Guide 
The Other Side of Nashville: An Incomplete History & Discography of the Nashville Rock Underground, 1976-2006

The Rock ‘n’ Roll Archives, Volume One: Southern Rockers
The Rock ‘n’ Roll Archives, Volume Two: Punk Rock
The Rock ‘n’ Roll Archives, Volume Three: Heavy Metal
The Rock ‘n’ Roll Archives, Volume Four: Cult Rockers

Surfing the New Wave of British Heavy Metal with Martin Popoff

Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles magazine co-founder and former editor, and the author of half a hundred books on bands like Black Sabbath, Thin Lizzy, and Deep Purple (among many others), Martin Popoff is, without a doubt, rock music’s most prolific scribe. Popoff’s knowledge of hard rock and heavy metal from the 1970s through the present day is unassailable, and his books are no mere commercial knock-offs designed to exploit current trends, but rather well thought out and researched tomes based on hundreds (thousands?) of artist interviews that Popoff has conducted over the nearly 25 years he’s spent in rock ‘n’ roll’s critical trenches.

Martin is also a friend of mine, and I’m happy to say that I have a bookshelf overflowing with his books, almost all of which I’ve parted with serious coin to purchase. A Popoff library is essential for hardcore music collectors, each book providing valuable insight into a band’s albums and career. A lot of Popoff’s work is strictly a labor of love, ‘cause you just don’t write books about obscure bands like Max Webster or Riot and expect to get rich…all of which makes my buddy Martin the perfect patsy, er…music historian to take on the Herculean task of putting the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” into proper perspective. Popoff has recently penned a trilogy on the NWOBHM – Wheels of Steel, This Means War, and Smokin’ Valves – the first two of which are oral histories of the genre, the last being a buyer’s guide to NWOBHM records.

Martin Popoff’s Wheels of Steel

For those unfamiliar, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was an influential, albeit short-lived musical phenomenon that exploded like a supernova in the United Kingdom during the late ‘70s, burning brightly until roughly the mid-1980s when nerf metal bands from L.A. began dominating hard rock. Just as punk rock emerged in the U.K. as a response to the self-indulgent state of mainstream music at the time, so too did the NWOBHM develop in parallel as an underground alternative to the pop charts for disaffected, working class white youth suffering from widespread unemployment and social inequality in the U.K. The term itself is credited to music journalist Geoff Barton, who first used the NWOBHM phrase in the British music magazine Sounds to describe the growing trend of homegrown heavy metal bands.

Popoff’s Wheels of Steel: The Explosive Early Years of the NWOBHM establishes the groundwork for the NWOBHM via timeline, interspersing quotes by artists, writers, critics, and DJs with important dates and occurrences to form a linear narrative, an intuitive manner of tackling such a heady chore. The early, informative years of the 1970s are tackled in the first chapter, and one could argue that the roots of the NWOBHM began in 1975 when the genre’s earliest bands – Motörhead and Iron Maiden – first formed, and DJ Neal Kay (an integral figure in the story) established a beachhead for hard rock at The Soundhouse, a club within a London pub where he would spin records by such NWOBHM musical influences as Thin Lizzy, Rush, Deep Purple, and Judas Priest. Popoff quotes liberally here from Kay and Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris, both of whom stood firmly in the eye of the developing NWOBHM hurricane and have plenty of memories to share.

From 1976 on, Wheels of Steel outlines the growth and development of the NWOBHM phenomena through the end of the decade, Popoff exploring the story with his usual keen eye for detail and respect for the music’s history. It’s a saga of hungry bands with a penchant for loud guitars that used heavy metal as a means to express themselves musically. Popoff fills the book with plenty of artistic insight, quoting from numerous interviews with members of NWOBHM bands like the aforementioned Iron Maiden and Motörhead, Tygers of Pan Tang, Saxon, Quartz, Diamond Head, Girlschool, Gillan, and others as well as music journalists, and even the odd punk rocker like the Damned’s Rat Scabies. Wheels of Steel does a great job in capturing the blood, sweat, and tears of the ‘70s decade as those artists who created the NWOBHM share memories of their hopes, dreams, and even some lingering bitterness over the era.

Martin Popoff’s This Means War

The second volume of Popoff’s trilogy is This Means War: The Sunset Years of the NWOBHM, which picks up the story in 1981, by which time the NWOBHM is in full bloom, creatively and commercially. Popoff uses 1984 as a cutting off point for the NWOBHM, appropriate enough for our purposes as the genre had largely run out of steam by then, the heavy metal flag captured by a greasy bunch of whiskey-swilling gutter rats from the City of Angels, U.S.A. Popoff uses the same narrative technique here as he did with Wheels of Steel, i.e. lots of artist interviews from musicians and others who had a bird’s-eye view from within the NWOBHM combined with a timeline of relevant dates and occurrences.

Where This Means War differs from Wheels of Steel is in the artists’ perspective. Whereas the early days of the NWOBHM provided a portrait of youthful enthusiasm, by 1981 the phenomenon had begun going mainstream and you had record labels, band managers, and other empty suits getting involved with, and often clashing with the young dreamers in the bands. As Hunter S. Thompson famously stated, “the music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” In reality, the music biz is a like an industrial shredder, grinding and gnashing good musicians and ruining careers more often than nurturing creativity.

Some of the artists quoted in This Means War are justifiably (still) angry over what they see as mismanagement or malfeasance in the way their careers developed, while others have left their bitterness in the past. Popoff greatly expands the roster of artists he interviewed for This Means War, with holdovers from the first book like Jess Cox of Tygers of Pan Tang, noted NWOBHM producer Chris Tsangarides, Diamond Head’s Brian Tatler, John McCoy of Gillan, and Eddie Clarke of Motörhead, among others, joined by such articulate NWOBHM players as Algy Ward of Tank, John Gallagher of Raven, Bernie Shaw of Grand Prix, and Kevin Riddles of Angel Witch as well as members of bands like Venom, Grim Reaper, and Def Leppard. In doing so, Popoff also expands the narrative, and it seems like This Means War offers more in the way of oral history that its predecessor, documenting the artistic apex and subsequent decline of the NWOBHM as a creative force.

Martin Popoff’s Smokin’ Valves

The actual first book in Popoff’s NWOBHM trilogy is the last – but not least – that we’ll discuss here. Smokin’ Valves: A Headbanger’s Guide To 900 NWOBHM Records offers exactly what the title promises, roughly 230 pages of one- and two-paragraph reviews covering hundreds of NWOBHM records. Popoff had previously penned the long out-of-print The New Wave of British Heavy Metal Singles, and he expands upon that effort with Smokin’ Valves by including NWOBHM albums as part of the mix. Popoff also draws upon the hundreds of album reviews he wrote for the 1970s and ‘80s-era volumes of his exhaustive The Collector’s Guide to Heavy Metal series, updating and revamping all of the reviews for this new guide.

If Popoff defined the lifespan of the NWOBHM as 1980 through ’84, with Smokin’ Valves he colors outside the lines a bit by including early, proto-NWOBHM recordings from 1978 and ’79 as part of the discussion, laying it all out for the reader in alphabetical order, and bolding the text of album reviews to differentiate them from reviews of singles and EPs. Much like its kissing cousin – British punk circa 1976-79 – the NWOBHM was very much a singles-oriented art form and, as former Jersey Beat zine publisher Jim Testa once said (or something like this), “not every band can record a great album, but almost every band can record a couple of great songs.”

While not all of them got to record a full-length LP, many NWOBHM bands got their first bite of the apple via 7” vinyl, creating a dizzying discography of bands and records that Popoff puts into proper context with his reviews in Smokin’ Valves. Many, if not virtually all of the singles and EPs listed here are highly-collectible slabs o’ wax that fetch premium prices from fanatical collectors with deep pockets, but many are also easily found on YouTube for those who just want a taste of the music. Albums and singles alike are awarded a numerical grade of zero to ten, similar to Popoff’s previous guides, and he includes appendixes to Smokin’ Valves that list those esteemed albums and singles receiving grades of eight or higher for those fans who wish to begin their collection with the best.

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Of the hundreds of NWOBHM bands that littered the landscape circa 1980-84, only three found a significant amount of commercial success and/or notoriety – Def Leppard, who would shed their NWOBHM roots with a series of multi-Platinum™ glam-metal albums through the ‘80s; Iron Maiden, which has steadfastly retained its unique musical identity throughout the decades; and Motörhead, the stubborn-as-hell hard rock outlier driven by the vision of the late, beloved Lemmy K. The relative lack of world-beating chart-toppers in NWOBHM does nothing to diminish the music’s influence and importance, however, as bands like Metallica, King’s X, and Pantera, among many others, would find inspiration in the NWOBHM.

As for NWOBHM “also rans,” bands like Angel Witch, Demon, Grim Reaper, Diamond Head, Quartz, Samson, Tank, Witchfinder General, and Raven, among all the other dreamers and schemers of the NWOBHM, their music lives on as part of the evolution of heavy metal, the records they made 35+ years again still impacting rock ‘n’ roll music to this day. As a chronicler of hard rock and heavy metal, Martin Popoff has done an excellent and thankless job in documenting the history of NWOBHM with these three volumes, providing a voice for these (mostly) obscure artists who brought energy and vitality back to rock music at a time when it was sorely needed.

If pressed, I’d give the edge to Wheels of Steel (Grade: A+) if only for the hope displayed in its pages, but one can’t experience the true breadth of the NWOBHM without also reading This Means War (Grade: A), with Smokin’ Valves (Grade: A-) complimenting both titles by focusing on the recordings of the bands featured in the other books. All three volumes are profusely illustrated – the oral histories by scores of rare and obscure label ads for albums, live show adverts, and other graphics while the “headbanger’s guide” offers dozens of photos of album covers and rarer-than-rare picture sleeves. If you’re a fan/collector of hard rock and/or heavy metal, Popoff’s trilogy is a “must have” for your music library. With these three deeply-researched and well-written books, Popoff has provided as complete and comprehensive a history of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal as anybody is likely to ever write. (Power Chord Press, 2015)

Get all three books, and many more, from Martin Popoff's website!