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1.0 out of 5 stars
Do Your Research, Dec 4 2004
Where to begin? This book is so poorly researched that it's embarrassing. There's basically a factual error every other page that I can spot without having to look it up, that it makes me question just how much else the author got wrong. One excellent (and totally inexplicable) example of his sloppiness is in his descriptions of the No Life to Leather versions of Jump in the Fire and The Four Horsemen (which wasn't called that on the demo in the first place) using the lyrics from the Kill'em All album! Even when the book was written, it wasn't hard to track down copies of the songs from NLTL and if you're going to write a book about something the band has released, at least make an effort to listen to the material available - especially something as pivotal as this was for the band. This error is further compounded in a later chapter when he mentions Dave Mustaine forming Megadeth and releasing a version of The Mechanix on their first album Killing is My Business, a song he claims Metallica only played briefly. Funny, The Mechanix was the early version of The Four Horsemen on NLTL. Metallica has played this song many times. Judging from the author's description of The Mechanix in the book (describing it as having a classical piano and bass intro), he confused it with Last Rites/Loved to Death. How anyone could get this confused and have it published absolutely baffles me. The writer is a moron. And there's a lot more where this came from. The quotes are probably the only reliable items in the whole book, but it seems that they mostly come from a couple of articles published previously in magazines (a lot from the Guitar Player Apr 89 issue in the first half of the book). It's probably not the author's fault that he couldn't interview the band directly, but in tandem with the poor fact checking, this comes across as pretty weak. If you want to read up on Metallica's early years, KJ Doughton's Metallica Unbound is superior in every way to this piece of crap. Nicer book, better pictures and at least he knew the band personally. The only positive note I can leave with is that at least Crocker didn't fall for the bogus tale that Metallica got their name by combining their two favourite things - metal and vodka. I can't believe that anyone seriously believed that one, even though it was printed in a few magazines in the early '90s.
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