Stairway To Hell

by Chuck Eddy

This irreverent and hilarious guide to all that's loud, vulgar, fast, violent, pissed-off, and adolescent in the music of the last forty years—the first book to prefigure the emerging "alternative" culture of the 1990s—has now been updated with the hundred best metal albums of the decade.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Reference

287 pages, Paperback

First published June 4, 1991

About the author

Chuck Eddy is an independent music journalist living in Austin, Texas. Formerly the music editor at the Village Voice and a senior editor at Billboard, he is the author of The Accidental Evolution of Rock’n’Roll: A Misguided Tour through Popular Music and Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe. Chuck Klosterman is a freelance journalist and the author of books including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto and Fargo Rock City.

Reviews

[Dan Fitzmaurice · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eddy definitely has an open mind to what qualifies as heavy metal and I appreciate that. However I found his writing to be somewhat condescending to the music. I get the impression that he doesn’t even like most of the albums in this book

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hi, my name is Kim. Some of you may know me and if you do, you might also know that I am the wife of a prog rock fanatic fan. Yep, and he's a musician to boot. And if you really know me, you know that I'm just a 38 yr old groupie. No, not in the Pamela Des Barres-fuck-me-in-a-closet-sort of way, more in the... um.... remember that girl from the American Idol/Sanjaya performance?

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(I have to give a shout out to my GR friend, Shelly for finding this photo...)


Yeah... that was me... except I, of course, had better tastes. (Duran Duran)



Step One:
Admit that you are powerless over alcohol a musician for a husband. That my life has become unmanageable. --- Okay, so not exactly unmanageable, but just try getting control over the stereo. It truly is amazing to watch a prog rock fan in his environment. Everything is 'hey, listen to the middle 8th, here' or 'this is in 17th time!' uh huh.

Step Two:
Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity --- Still looking for it. Maybe if I mastered time signatures...

Step Three:
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.--- 'God' being Chuck Eddy in this scenario. Am I willing to really do that? Not yet, I mean the guy has some great lines. ” hiccups away hard times like Buddy Holly in cahoots with Tiny Tim (Redd Kross 'Neurotica' # 217.) But, I'll save my will for a crooner with good shoes and caramel colored locks, thankyouverymuch.

Step Four:
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. --- I'm perfectly okay with ogling and if that might seem immoral, ahh.. Hell, I planned on seeing you anyway.

Step Five:
Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs ---Nope. Sting was waaaaay hot in that 'Don't Stand so Close to Me' video and if I ran into Trudie, I'd so take her down, I don't care if he's old enough to be my Dad.


And so on... I could have justifications for all of 'em. So, why the Twelve-step programmy beginning? I think that foundation is important. It's a 'get to know me' kind of move, so that you understand where I'm coming from when I review Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe by Chuck Eddy. So, let's begin:

I get the impression that Chuck Eddy isn't well-liked. I can't back this up, but if I ever bring him up, there's usually a sneer and a sigh as a response. Why? In a time when Chuck Klosterman is 'cool' and Lester Bangs is 'old school', I often wonder what people have against him. The guy is freaking hilarious! Okay, let me show you... in his description of Circle Jerks ('Group Sex' # 434) he says: 'These are protests against military-industrial tyranny from tiny suburban toddlers, lying on stomachs and pounding fists and feets against the linoleum 'cause mom won't give 'em no more root beer. They don't know shit about shit. That's what makes 'em bearable.' Huh? Huh?

You don't have to like the bands that he reviews, hell, you don't have to like Heavy Metal (and I have to say that I don't agree with his labeling of some of these bands as heavy metal, but that's just li'l groupie me.) to enjoy reading his musings. I've been flipping through this book since Christmas and it never fails me. His review of Nirvana's 'Nevermind' (# 74 in the 100 albums of the 1990's that were added into later editions) starts: 'Actually, I don't have a copy handy right now, but I can assume you're at least partially familiar with this one, right? It's got the “no I don't have a gun” song, the “I'm the one who likes all the pretty songs” song, some others I forget.'

Sorry, I enjoyed that. Color me simple.

My favorite has to be his review of Miles Davis' 'Jack Johnson' :

Miles takes the first couple rounds, McLaughlin takes one, Miles one, the road gets rougher, Miles fires five quick jabs at John's face, they both run out of steam, every thing's quiet and eerie. Sonny (I think it's him ) emerges from the bullpen (boxing's a stupid barbarian sport anyhow), or maybe it a tag-team. He starts dancing around, dance and punch, dance punch pounce, dance punch pounce, hammer-down vengeance. Blood's streaking out Mile's brass. But suddenly Henderson's doing all the work, and he's only supposed to be the floormat!......Sharrock wins, spew allover the ring. So on the B-side the whole gang goes out for a relaxing round of mint juleps and levitation tricks, and after a while Sonny starts cracking bottles over heads and rolling barstools around, and Jack Johnson reminds us why we're gathered here.'

And that's only his 171th favorite!

Okay, okay, I won't bother you with anymore of this. Wait, except for this spoiler alert!! On his #1 pick of the best heavy metal album, 'Zoso' by Led Zepplin:

Zep's zillions of fraudulent imitators, just like P-Funk's or the Velvet Underground's, only confirm their greatness. Yet, the splendiferous immediacy of the sound has never been matched, and never will be.'

What a great joining of words: 'splendiferous immediacy.' I may not be a fan of Kix (they show up 4 times on this list) or think that Rancid had the best album of the 1990s (really?) but I will always stop to read a Chuck Eddy review.

Good work.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chuck Eddy's definition of Heavy Metal includes Amon Duul II, Pere Ubu, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, not to mention Miles Davis's "Agharta," Sonny Sharrock, and James "Blood" Ulmer. Enlightening and confusing in equal measure, fueled by high octane prose that's frequently infuriating but never boring.

[Lucy Batson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I....just don't understand what Chuck Eddy was trying to do here. But before I get into discussing why this doesn't work, there are a few things I have to establish.

- What we think of as heavy metal was still pretty early days when this book came out: The Requiem Metal podcast dudes pin 1984 as the first year of "modern" metal, and I'm hard-pressed to disagree with them on that point. This came out in 1990, so there wasn't a ton of material there.

- Eddy is going off of his own definition of "heavy metal" here, which basically boils down to "music with some distorted guitar in it". A more accurate/less obnoxious take would have been to call this the "500 greatest hard rock records of all time", but he didn't do that, so here we are, and this creates one of the biggest problems with the book.

What works: In this book, Chuck Eddy seems (at times) to be championing diversity in genre by offering albums up as metal that clearly aren't metal at all. This is a good thing! There are some things he gets absolutely right (Billy Squier's Don't Say No and Accept's Balls to the Wall are good, actually), and he doesn't seem to care about what's cool at all.

What doesn't work: Try as he might get away from what a genre encompasses, that action makes a lot of his choices more glaring by contrast. Look, I'm a big metal fan and I don't believe in gatekeeping or policing taste, but Eddy's taste here is so weird it disqualifies him from talking about this stuff intelligently. Can a case be made that Kix was overlooked? Sure, I don't see why not. Can a case be made that Kix's debut record is the 5th greatest album heavy metal made, even at the time of writing 31 years ago? Abso-fucking-lutely not. I could overlook a lot of weird rankings and genre mainstays being completely omitted (no Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Dio, Rainbow, Ozzy Osbourne, King Diamond/Mercyful Fate, or Scorpions, Slayer's Reign in Blood is near the bottom of the list despite being the most influential extreme metal record ever made) if they had highlighted legitimately great and overlooked acts (stuff like Cirith Ungol, Manilla Road, Angel Witch, etc), instead of *checks list* Bryan Adams, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and aged-like-milk 80's bullshit like Junkyard and Faster Pussycat. But I suspect that there was a strong contrarian bent at play here, and the way I would sum this book up?

[Jonathan Eagle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love this, for the most part. His rambling, stream-of-consciousness writing reminds me of my own. But it does sometimes get a little stale. Great read and a good compendium for you dicks that don’t know shit about rock. Some entries will throw you, but give it time: they will all make sense eventually.

[Will · Rating 1 out of 5]

Absolute garbage. Run don’t walk away from this travesty. There where about 95 albums he forgot to put in the top 100 that came out before the first edition was published. If it is a joke it’s not funny

[Robert Lawson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loads of fun. My copy has a different cover.

[Jonah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely addictive. Introduced me to some great music I'd never heard, though not always really Metal. Totally the author's random opinions and often not even true, but that's part of what makes it great. Some of the greatest stoned-minded description of music I've ever read or heard.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chuck Eddy's one of the more fun music critics cause he has zany ideas and is completely on his own plane of existence. This book would be better to own and dip into now and again than to read straight through, like I tried to do, cause it gets to be a bit much.

[Anselm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic of a period.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was in my high school. Sonic Youth rated very low, Guns 'n'Roses very high. I loved to hate it.

[John Pecorelli]

Chuck Eddy is god for putting an Osmonds album in this list and convincing me it belongs there.

[Greg Fanoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really fun reference guide, even if you are not a fan of heavy metal as I am not (he has an extremely, extremely loose description of heavy metal).

[Jared · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wish we could give negative stars.

[Bruce]

Blasphemy at its best