A biography of the Seattle grunge band, from its beginning as a trio to the present-day quartet that attracts eighteen thousand fans to Seattle's Memorial Stadium
I'm a novelist and music journalist, the author of many books set between the 1730s and 1950s in Leeds, as well as others in medieval Chesterfield and 1980s Seattle.
Above all, though, its Leeds I love, the people, the sense of the place changing with time. Yes, I write mysteries, but ultmiateoly they're books about people and their relationships, and the crime becomes a moral framework for the story.
Content itself is great, but about halfway through the paperback book, there is a massive misprint - starting on page 83, the book skips to page 86 of Michael Chabon’s book Wonder Boys. The misprint continues for about 40 pages, then New Metal Crown continues on page 119. All the content that should have been there is missing, it does not pick up where it left off prior to the misprint.
Not sure if this problem carries over to digital versions of the book, but it was extremely disappointing to get engrossed in the history of the band and find out a decent chunk of the book is missing.
I was expecting a starry-eyed slapdash hagiography, but got instead an excellent book that covers the history of metal, the history of Seattle scene that birthed Soundgarden in 1984 and an in-depth bio of the band dating from the very beginning. (Amazingly, it is over half the book before we even get to Badmotorfinger. Much to my delight, all parts of the band’s history up until the book's publishing are treated with equal importance.) Too many books have the band in question living in a bubble; this book only falls victim to this in regards to when Nirvana hit the mainstream.
An interesting book about the history of Soundgarden up until right after they released their magnum opus Superunknown. Goes into a lot of detail about the recent years, about which many (like me) might not know much. It's also fascinating to read how the very knowledgeable author imagined the future of the band before they went on hiatus until 2011.