Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal

“Bang your head! Metal Health’ll drive you mad!”
— Quiet Riot

Like an episode of VH1’s Behind the Music on steroids, Bang Your Head is an epic history of every band and every performer that has proudly worn the Heavy Metal badge. Whether headbanging is your guilty pleasure or you firmly believe that this much-maligned genre has never received the respect it deserves, Bang Your Head is a must-read that pays homage to a music that’s impossible to ignore, especially when being blasted through a sixteen-inch woofer.

Charting the genesis of early metal with bands like Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden; the rise of metal to the top of the Billboard charts and heavy MTV rotation featuring the likes of Def Leppard and Metallica; hitting its critical peak with bands like Guns N’ Roses; disgrace during the “hair metal” ’80s; and a demise fueled by the explosion of the Seattle grunge scene and the “alternative” revolution, Bang Your Head is as funny as it is informative and proves once and for all that there is more to metal than sin, sex, and spandex.

To write this exhaustive history, David Konow spent three years interviewing the bands, wives, girlfriends, ex-wives, groupies, managers, record company execs, and anyone who was or is a part of the metal scene, including many of the band guys often better known for their escapades and bad behavior than for their musicianship. Nothing is left unsaid in this jaw-dropping, funny, and entertaining chronicle of power ballads, outrageous outfits, big hair, bigger egos, and testosterone-drenched debauchery.

David Konow has written for publications such as Guitar World, Creative Screenwriting, and Psychotronic. He is the author of Schlock-O-Rama: The Films of Al Adamson. Konow lives in Southern California.