Headbangers Book Club
Zach and Callie of Dystopian Dance Party make fun of hard rock history, one trashy paperback at a time.
Episodes
September 30, 2022 • 95 mins
At long last, we're finally concluding our two-parter on Pamela Des Barres’ epochal memoir I’m with the Band! In this episode, we get in some more digs at our nemesis Jimmy Page, with some bonus potshots at Don Johnson, and continue to gush about how nice it is to read a book where you don't end up hating the protagonist by the end.
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August 5, 2022 • 108 mins
This month's Headbangers Book Club Official Selection is a special one, as it's the first book we've read that's not a total sausage party! Pamela Des Barres may not have been a rock star in her own right (unless you count her brief stint in the Zappa-sponsored girl group the GTO's), but her memoir I'm with the Band is a vital counterpoint to the male-dominated hijinks of '60s and '70s rock; plus there's a couple of real questionab...
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July 15, 2022 • 90 mins
It’s #jhericurljune in July! After a brief delay due to COVID- and car theft-related trauma, we’re finally back with Part 2 of our deep dive on Morris Day‘s 2019 memoir On Time: A Princely Life in Funk!
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June 17, 2022 • 107 mins
It's a special #jhericurljune installment of the ol' Book Club as we dig into 2019's On Time: A Princely Life in Funk by Morris Day with David Ritz--so, slightly less headbanging than normal, but don't worry, there's plenty of the important stuff (i.e., cocaine).
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May 27, 2022 • 79 mins
Turns out Meat Loaf needed a little extra time in the oven, but we're finally back to discuss the late vocal powerhouse's 2000 memoir To Hell and Back. Join us as we ponder Meat's many concussions, his suitably operatic relationship with the also-recently-departed Jim Steinman, and how he's easily in the top five of anti-maskers we would have been okay catching COVID from.
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April 1, 2022 • 108 mins
Hey mothertruckers, we're Bach in the saddle with Part 2 of our series on Sebastian Bach‘s 18 and Life on Skid Row! This book really picked up in the second half, so please excuse the slightly flabby runtime; there's just too many good stories for us not to discuss them. Join us again in two weeks when we discuss the first half of the late Meat Loaf's To Hell and Back! Rock it up!
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March 18, 2022 • 95 mins
This month's official Headbangers Book Club selection is over five years in the making: Callie got her copy of Sebastian Bach's 18 and Life on Skid Row (signed by Sea Bass himself!) in late 2016, and we're finally getting around to reading it. This episode covers the first half of the book, give or take, and so far we're having a lot of fun with it!
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February 25, 2022 • 123 mins
For the inaugural episode of the new and improved Headbangers Book Club, we decided to go big with not one, but two books on Led Zeppelin: four entitled manbabies and borderline sociopaths who just so happened to write (or, in some cases, steal) some of the greatest rock music of all time. Join us as we discuss the Great Dane incident, shitting incidents (plural), and all the other depravities in this 120 Days of Sodom for the hesh...
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October 18, 2019 • 95 mins
Zach and Callie reconvene in (by our standards) record time for another Dystopian Book Club Official Selection: Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You? by Parliament–Funkadelic maestro George Clinton. Enjoy as we discuss our love of P-Funk and the book’s disappointing lack of hot deets on the Super Mario Bros. […]
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March 29, 2019 • 46 mins
It isn’t every day that an Official Dystopian Book Club selection gets adapted into a movie; so, for the first and quite possibly last time, we’re reconvening after just one week to discuss Jeff Tremaine’s biopic version of Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt. Spoilers: we liked it! But then again, we’re also garbage people, so maybe […]
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March 22, 2019 • 130 mins
After almost three years of ripping on trashy rock biographies with Dystopian Book Club, it was only a matter of time for us to get around to the trashiest of them all: Neil Strauss’ and Mötley Crüe’s masterpiece of filth-wallowing, The Dirt. The two-hour conversation we had doesn’t even begin to cover everything in the […]
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September 21, 2018 • 150 mins
September is kind of our unofficial Marc Bolan month at Dystopian Dance Party; so for this installment of our Dystopian Book Club podcast series, we thought we’d read the excellent 2006 biography Bolan: The Rise and Fall of a 20th Century Superstar by music journalist Mark Paytress. This one goes a little bit long (sorry ’bout […]
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July 27, 2018 • 138 mins
Heard ya missed us, we’re back! After a year-long absence, the Dystopian Book Club returns with an extensive look at Crazy from the Heat, the memoir/literary classic/deranged, barely coherent rantings of former Van Halen frontman, raconteur, and assless pants aficionado David Lee Roth. So limber up, slip into your comfiest Spandex, and maybe treat yourself to […]
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June 17, 2017 • 101 mins
It didn’t take a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for this year’s Jheri Curl June podcast. Rick James may be the most important architect of the genre we call Jheri Curl Music who we hadn’t already commemorated with a long-term feature. He also has a hell of a story: one he […]
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April 10, 2017 • 110 mins
The last installment of our Dystopian Book Club miniseries on the memoirs of KISS is finally here, and we’re going out in a big way. Paul Stanley’s Face the Music: A Life Exposed isn’t the best KISS biography we’ve read (or the second best…or even the third), but it’s certainly fertile ground for discussion. Join us for […]
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February 3, 2017 • 109 mins
Hey, Catfans! We’re now three-quarters of the way through the vanity-project-within-a-vanity-project that is our series of KISS memoir Book Club podcasts; and while it’s obviously too early to say for sure, we have a feeling that this month’s book was the peak. Makeup to Breakup, “written” in 2012 by original KISS drummer Peter Criss, has everything […]
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November 21, 2016 • 92 mins
Our series of Book Club podcasts on the autobiographies of KISS continues with No Regrets, the 2011 memoir by the band’s original guitarist Ace Frehley. Listen to us talk about Ace’s propensity for driving under the influence and analyze the similarities and differences between his and Gene Simmons’ sides of the story–or, put another way, just […]
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September 26, 2016 • 105 mins
38 years ago this month, the four original members of KISS did the unthinkable and released four separate solo albums on the same day. Now, Dystopian Dance Party is following in their footsteps, and doing something even less thinkable: we’re reading all four KISS members’ autobiographies and recording our thoughts on them in a series […]
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