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Stephen King and Meat Puppets bassist Danny Dirtbag

UPDATED (Friday, 11:50 a.m.) to correct the ID in the top photo.

This past week saw the release of Stephen King's latest short novel of hard-boiled crime fiction called Joyland, by my count his 70th overall, not counting reprints and compilations. What fuels output like that? By King's own admission, at one point it was cocaine; nowadays it's just nicotine and caffeine. But he also consumes a steady diet of rock and roll music spanning the genre's beginnings to today's young bucks.

With the release of Joyland, I decided to look back at some of King's best rock references and fixations throughout his legendary bibliography, and even his best-forgotten foray into directing films.

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Photo by Groovehouse

Motorhead's Lemmy at Warehouse Live in September 2009

Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Heavy Metal
By Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman
It Books, 736 pp., $32.50

Damn, this book is big.

But then again, everything about heavy metal -- from its beginnings with the Stooges and Blue Cheer, through Black Sabbath to Exodus to Motley Crue to Slipknot, has been big. And, though no surprise to headbangers, there is a lot of territory to cover and subgenres to explore in what is considered "metal."

Authors Weiderhorn (senior editor of metal mag Revolver) and Turman (producer for the radio show "Nights with Alice Cooper") conducted interviews with more than 400 mostly musicians for the book. One-name wonders like Dio, Ozzy, Axl, Eddie, Vince, Lars, Lemmy, Trent, Phil, and Robs Zombie and Halford show both the evolution of the music and the bands' individual stories.

But Louder Than Hell presents an interesting embarrassment of riches. On one hand, it is the first person, one-volume book on the music that every fan should have.

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mysteryisland.net

Now here's a spooky cocktail party: Vincent Price, Alice Cooper, Mark Volman, Howard Kaylan

Today, when the 65-year-old Howard Kaylan looks back on the '60s, it's still hard to imagine the kind of commercial and chart success he had with the Turtles, and how by age 22, it was all over.

"They say that wisdom comes with age, and at that time, I had absolutely none of it!" he laughs. "I mean, I was a kid out of high school going into this thing. But if the Turtles had had that success later, then the book [Kaylan's autobiography Shell Shocked] would have been even crazier. But that that time, we didn't see much past the day after tomorrow."

And though he describes his band as sort of a "low-budget Byrds" in terms of funds, studios, and players they were able to get, he does miss the kind of potpourri quality of radio at the time that would cut across the board in terms of music.

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RockStar PR

Two Titantic Turtles: Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (aka Flo & Eddie)

Even the most voracious reader or rock-music biographies and autobiographies would be hard-pressed to find a better opening sentence than Howard Kaylan, lead vocalist of The Turtles, has in his new memoir Shell Shocked.

"I was snorting coke on Abraham Lincoln's desk in the White House," it reads. This sets the scene as the band -- hired to play Tricia Nixon's birthday party in 1969 -- finds them using Honest Abe's former crib as a dressing room. And this was after the Secret Service had confiscated a metronome, thinking its tick-tick-ticking was a bomb that the longhairs had smuggled in.

"It was a little bit sensationalistic, yeah, it was pretty much a panic reaction," Kaylan says from his California home at 8 a.m. Texas time, the end of his normal waking day. "Half of me was like 'Put that shit away!' and the other half was 'Yeah, up my nose! So I was conflicted."

And the sex and drugs stories fly throughout Shell Shocked in a way that you might not expect from the guy who sang on a bunch of classic pop hits like "She'd Rather Be With Me," "Elenore," a cover of Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe," "You Baby," "She's My Girl," and "You Showed Me."

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Apple Inc.

Don't they look happy? This shot, according to Gaar's book, was taken at the Beatles' last official photo shoot on August 22, 1969 at John Lennon's Tittenhurst Park home before they disbanded into lawsuits and rancor.

100 Things Beatles Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die
By Gillian G. Gaar
Triumph Books, 256 pp., $14.95

It's a good thing that we are living longer these days as a human species, because given the glut of books about movies to see, music to hear, art to view, books to read, and places to visit with the subtitle "Before You Die" is only getting longer.

This nifty little tome by music author/journalist Gaar (She's a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll) doesn't break any new ground from the hundreds of books on the Fabs or have a lot of content not gleaned from other sources.

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Photo by Groovehouse

Claudio Sanchez performing with Coheed and Cambria

We writers are a masturbatory bunch, if you don't mind me saying so. We love to talk about our own work, the works of others, and generally just get into a huge hubbub over the art of the written word. So I don't think it should come as any surprise that some of our favorite musicians are also acclaimed authors in their own right.

And hey, it comes with the territory. In every great lyricist resides a conflicted artist torn between two loves: writing and music. Well, why can't you have your cake and eat it too? Many have tried, some should probably just stick to music, but there's a good few who have a pretty good fallback career if they ever get tired of the whole music business.

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Photo courtesy of SXSW

Bruce Springsteen at SXSW, March 2012

Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters
Edited by Jeff Burger

Even editor Burger himself poses this question in his intro: Does the world really need another book on Bruce Springsteen? Especially in recent times when Boss Books have been flooding the marketplace (and Yours Truly would know, having covered most of them for this column...).

Well, the short answer is... no. But what makes Springsteen on Springsteen different -- and worthy -- is that it's one of the few tomes that mostly lets the artist speak for himself and in his own words.

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My Way: An Autobiography
By Paul Anka with David Dalton
St. Martin's Press, 384 pp., $29.99

Currently celebrating his 55th year in show business with this autobiography and the new CD Duets -- which finds him singing with artists like Celine Dion, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and (through the magic of tape) Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra -- Paul Anka is in the mood to look back.

While still a teenager, Anka had a string of charting records in the late '50s/early '60s, including "Diana," "Puppy Love," "Put Your Head on My Shoulder," "Lonely Boy," "You Are My Destiny." But what set the teen idol apart from the various Frankies, Bobbys and Fabians was that he wrote much of his own material.

It's a skill that would serve him well when the hits and the pompadour hair gel dried up after the British Invasion and when crooners went out of style.

Only Bobby Darin -- who had a similar skill at songwriting and appreciation for more adult singers -- similarly survived. And it is funny that Anka mentions how many people get him confused with Neil Sedaka still to this day.

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Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera
By Rex Brown
Da Capo Press, 304 pp., $15.47

Back in Pantera's '90s heyday, few fans would have guessed that the first guy to write a tell-all history of the band would be Rex Brown.

Though an indivisible component of Pantera's larger-than-life crunch, the bassist was always the band's most reclusive member, seemingly uninterested in the media coverage and controversy courted by the group's louder personalities.

Given the band's turbulent relations toward the end, however, maybe Rex was the only man for the job. He was there from the group's earliest days to its last, when band relations got so bad that frontman Phil Anselmo and brothers Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul found themselves unable to pick up a phone and call one another, let alone get together in the same room.

By his own assertion, Brown served as mediator and go-between through it all, giving him perhaps the most complete view of the band's greatest triumphs and most devastating losses.

In his new book, Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera, the bassist spills the goods on all of it, starting with the band's absolute nadir: the onstage murder of guitarist Dimebag Darrell at the hands of a mentally ill fan.

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Folks, recently one of my longest-awaited moments in music came to fruition: Pete Wentz, Fall Out Boy bassist and songwriter, finally decided to release his full-length prose narrative Gray. He first mentioned it seven years ago, and now we finally have our hands on the book.

With the recent reunion of Wentz's band, the book could not have come out with better timing. But truly, nothing could excite me more than reading the masterful writing of one of the greatest lyrical masterminds of our time. But could the novel possibly live up to the brilliance of songs penned by Wentz such as "Sugar We're Goin' Down," "I'm Like a Lawyer the Way I'm Always Tryng to Get You Off" and "Thnks fr th Mmrs?"

Unfortunately, to quote the Fall's "Cruiser's Creek," we only have this excerpt. It would be wrong for me to judge a book based on reading only an excerpt, especially when I could very easily simply buy the book, but that wouldn't be nearly as easy and fun.

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