The release of a "Dimebag" Darrell biography by a Dallas journalist reminded us of an analysis of post-hardcore released last year by another one.
Black Tooth Grin: The High Life, Good Times, and Tragic End of "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott by Zac Crain (Da Capo Press, 2009)
Music fans outside the metal scene got a jarring reminder of how little we knew of Texas' role when Pantera's "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott was murdered onstage in 2004 by a former U.S. Marine. Thousands of people came to Arlington Convention Center to mourn the guitarist, and there to record the love expressed in large amounts of profanity was the Dallas Observer's Zac Crain, who's now at D Magazine. After years of waiting and no shortage of struggle on the part of the author, Crain's biography of the fallen figure is out. The metal community at large is less than thrilled. Seems this book is for the rest of us, anyway. Check out Crain's interview with Texas Monthly in the June issue.
POST: A Look at the Influence of Post-Hardcore, 1985-2007 by Eric Grubbs (iUniverse, 2008)
Former Punk Planet scribe and recently recruited Dallas Observer music reviewer Eric Grubbs wrote a book about a lot of the same bands anthologized in Andy Greenwald's Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers and Emo. Where Greenwald acts as an anthropologist, psychoanalyzing Jimmy Eat World on tour to some disappointment and conducting interviews over instant messenger with whiny, suburban Dashboard Confessional fans, Grubbs is a geneaologist, dissecting At The Drive-In's song structures and tracing trends -- he calls them "bloodlines" -- back to Dischord Records. Grubbs got his brain picked for Greg Kot's Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, released last month on Simon and Schuster.
