Stairway to Hell (1991 / 1998)

Chuck Eddy's list of the 500 best heavy metal albums ("in the Universe," it says) is a monumental undertaking by any definition. Five hundred is a lot of anything—600, actually, because this second edition I've got updates the original list with 100 more albums released after the first edition, more or less. On one hand the book is a stone clinic in writing album reviews—from the materials of hustling freelance gigs for a dime and working zines for the outlet, this book honed Eddy's album review writing into an art form unto itself. He likely got the book contract in the first place because he'd spent much of the previous 10 years as one of the most tireless, prolific, and unique jukebox fountainheads in the annals of rock critic journalism. There was just one slight problem here. While Eddy's rampaging consumption of music made him an eclectic sponge for pop and rock music of many stripes, his taste in fact stands somewhat athwart of actual heavy metal currents. It made and still makes for some strange results, perhaps most famously putting a Teena Marie album (Emerald City) audaciously into the top 10, albeit at a judiciously modest #9, while entirely shutting out Iron Maiden and Judas Priest (from a list of 500!). The problem is not made better by Eddy's various terse put-downs and constant baiting, gleefully and cavalierly dissing hippie shibboleths as well as the intelligence of many of his review subjects and their fans too at alarmingly high rates. He's a bit of Moe to the rest of us Larry and Curly. It's no wonder they're mad in places like Amazon reviews and metal forums. He makes me mad too once in a while. He says, for example, the only worthwhile Jimi Hendrix album is one of those label-dictated cannibalized best-of jobs, but then proceeds to include most of the rest of Hendrix's catalog, including posthumous titles and albums even I don't like, though often with glancing insults. Hey man, which is it? Do you like Jimi Hendrix or not? (We know now, from a later book, that Eddy had little or no budget for this one and had to work basically with what he had on hand, which likely explains the Iron Maiden and Judas Priest MIAs. He wouldn't have liked them anyway, because he already doesn't like a lot of the albums he includes here.)

Still, if you take Eddy and Stairway to Hell on their own listy album-review terms, it's pretty impressive, mostly coherent, and often a gas to breeze through. He's plunged well into the physical pleasures of sonic assault and writes about it vividly, almost always with made-up words, e.g., "kaboomeration," that instantly make more sense than anything that overpraised lavender-suited nitwit Lewis Carroll ever came up with (as Eddy himself might observe of the British children's author). He's translating aural experience into words as well or better than anyone has ever danced about architecture. And anyone who's ever tried to be a rock critic can tell you one of the hardest parts of the job is describing the music and the experience of hearing it. He's often making it look effortless here. The book and all its referents are older now—there are lots of titles I just don't know and likely never will at this point (especially the cassette and EP releases). But as far as the eccentric picks I knew go, I had little problem with them. Prince's Purple Rain, for example, isn't only metal but it's certainly also metal. Ditto the Miles Davis picks Agharta, Pangaea, and Jack Johnson. On taste Eddy and I are widely separated, which has always been generally true. In this realm I like Motorhead, Slayer, Judas Priest, and Black Sabbath. He likes AC/DC, Def Leppard, Poison, and Guns N' Roses. He really doesn't like some of mine. I really don't like some of his. To each their own—the truth is that metal probably has about the same priority for both of us, which is not high. Stairway to Hell may be a little sour and constricted in some ways, but it can also be a blast, honestly laugh-out-loud funny like the best Three Stooges episodes, and full of amazing surges of writing.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.