Heavy-metal expert Martin Popoff ponders his amazing career as a cranker-outer of books

By Steve Newton

When you’re a young, rock-obsessed kid living in a small town, anywhere you can buy music is like the ultimate candy shop. Fortunately for author Martin Popoff–Canada’s leading authority on heavy metal–growing up in the wee burgh of Trail, B.C. offered several places where he could slake his thirst for new tunes.

“We had like five record stores in Trail,” says Popoff on the phone from his condo/office in Toronto, “it was crazy. And occasionally we’d get to Vancouver, which was eight hours away at that time, but more so Spokane, Washington, which was two hours away–and had even better selection than Vancouver. So there was no problem gettin’ stuff.”

And when Popoff couldn’t find his musical goods at Trail outlets like the Rock Island Tape Centre and Kelly’s Stereo Mart, or Spokane head shops like Strawberry Jam and Magic Mushroom, there was always the old standby: the Columbia Record Club. He recalls that his first mail-order purchases, when he was nine years old, were Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Pendulum, a Three Dog Night live album, and Steppenwolf Gold.

“Lookin’ back, none of that stuff was very heavy,” he notes, “but it was the first step up from children’s music. I knew I wanted and liked the heavier stuff, so basically as soon as I heard Sabbath and Zeppelin and Deep Purple I was totally hooked, a crazy music fan.”

As a teenager, Popoff worked a lot to support his loud habit, babysitting and taking on the “heavy metal job” of tending the grass at a cemetery, going down there in the dark at five in the morning to turn on the sprinklers. By the time he was 15 he and a buddy were working at the Rock Island Tape Centre, running the record department and selling stereos.

That’s when he scored himself a sweet sound system that included a 40-watts-per-channel Yamaha amp and a high-end Sony cassette deck that cost him $800 alone.

“You were either an eight-track kid or a cassette kid,” he recalls, “and I was a cassette kid. Eight-track kids were a little wilder and a little skiddier, right? Eight tracks were always scattered all over the car, and the cardboard box was ripped or long gone. The eight-track guys were always the partiers, and the cassette guys were always just a little bit more civilized.”

Popoff says that he still owns about 30 or 40 eight-tracks that he bought from some old guy in Louisiana just as a lark. The vinyl collection that he started at around nine years old grew and grew and reached about 11,000 before he started slowly paring down and selling things off to friends. He’s now weeded it out to around 5,000 LPs.

“It’s a lotta crap,” he explains, “but a lotta good stuff too. And when I could get stuff signed by bands I would keep that.”

When it comes to the physical perks of the professional music writer, Popoff was a little late to the game to score himself mountains of complimentary wax.

“I never got vinyl for free,” he states, “but I definitely got in on the whole comp-CD situation. So I have a massive CD wall where most of that was free. That’s a seven-foot-tall wall in my office here that’s 31 feet long. A lot of the jewel cases were thrown out so things are in little plastic sleeves and stuff. That really started petering out around 2008, you know, and I don’t push anybody for freebies anymore. I don’t have any room.”

Popoff’s journey to becoming one of the world’s top rock writers–not to mention the owner of 18,000 compact discs–started nearly 30 years ago, with the November 1993 release of his first book, the self-published Riff Kills Man!, which saw an initial print run of 2,000.

“It’s crazy that I printed so many copies,” he says, “but when it’s your first book you just have a burning desire to make it a success. But that whole thing was kinda nuts. It was basically a record-review book, so it was just the idea of taking all of those stories and all of that trivia and just putting it on a page so you could pour it out of your head–and then have it chronological and alphabetical.

“It was just an orderly thing that I felt needed to exist,” he adds. “I mean at that point there were some record-review anthologies, but man, back then there was practically never anything on heavy metal. So I just thought it was such a cool thing to do.”

Riff Kills Man! was the jumping-off point for an amazingly prolific career that has seen the 59-year-old writer crank out about 115 books, with a few more finished and coming out soon.

“It seems like a lot,” admits Popoff, “but I’m one of the rare guys that basically, after the year 2000–so that’s now 23 years ago–was full-time in this. The first big step was getting on with Tim Henderson at [heavy-metal magazine] Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles, so that was me actually starting to interview people. So basically these other books came about because I would interview these bands, and I would interview them again and again, and eventually it got to the point where it was like, ‘Okay, I kinda have a book here.’

“And so the earliest books, besides the record-review book, were biographies of bands, and then it just started up. And I found I wrote pretty fast. There are people I know who are smart and they know about music and they’re good writers, but they write so slow. I remember hearing somebody call writers like that ‘stonecutters’, but you have to be fast to get this stuff done.”

While he’s conducted roughly 1800 interviews over the years that he can reference for his books, Popoff is also noted for his in-depth, almost professorial analysis of the elements of hard rock and heavy metal.

“I did Led Zeppelin: All the Albums, All the Songs,” he notes, “so that’s just writing about all those songs, like its non-interview intensive. I did the same thing writing about every single song for the Clash and the Damned. So it depends on if maybe the publisher has an idea that’s more analysis-based.

“It’s cool to do both analysis and interviews,” he adds. “I mean you want to be a deejay, right–you want to be someone who’s turning people on to stuff. So you have your job of selling these songs and showing how much you love them, and you want to have your own voice. But I don’t have an ego about any of this, so when I do those books on bands I just really want them to talk, because they are the artists.”

Popoff almost never seeks official authorization from his subjects to write the books, claiming that there’s no real reason to do that. “It’s just something that very rarely comes up because probably in most cases it won’t get off the ground.”

And as far as pissing off any artists with his published works, that doesn’t happen much either. There are exceptions, though.

“I remember [guitarist] Adrian Vandenberg getting his back up about something [producer] Keith Olsen said, but I can’t remember what he was upset about. Was it the hand injury thing in Whitesnake? Something like that. So there’s just the odd little thing like that. The funny thing is, if you write a whole book on a band, they can probably find 75 things where it ticks them off. I imagine anybody reading a book on themselves can find tons of things that rub ’em the wrong way, right.”

Popoff’s latest tome is AC/DC at 50, a $60 coffee-table book from British publishing house Quarto that examines the history of the Aussie ear-busters through the lens of 50 milestone events.

“Quarto does beautiful, beautiful layouts,” he raves, “so there’s a lotta pictures and memorabilia. You know, I’m forced to write very concisely, 400 to 600 words on these 50 career highlights, so I think you get my voice and some pretty high-end sentences from a real fan. Even though it’s this sort of glossy overview of the band, and it’s not a 300,000-word biography, I think anybody reading those entries would realize that this is a fan that isn’t writing down to a common denominator, so that’s cool.”

Popoff is obviously pleased with how AC/DC at 50 turned out, but he doesn’t hesitate when asked which of his books he’s most proud of.

“I really like the one I did called Who Invented Heavy Metal?, which is 120,000 words, so a fairly long book, but it ends in 1971, and it’s a timeline-with-quotes thing about the whole history of heavy metal leading up to 1971. So that was cool.

“I really like those ones where I got to analyze every single song by a band, and If I had to pick one of the three–which was Clash, Zeppelin, and the Damned–I’d say the Damned. It’s just a small little trade paperback–it’s nothin’ much to look at–but it’s my favourite in terms of the writing. The idea of writing 300, 400, 500 words on every song the Damned ever did was just hilarious to me.”

When it comes to pinpointing his most popular books, Popoff reveals that the most successful writing project he’s undertaken was a trilogy of books on Rush—Anthem: Rush in the ’70s, Limelight: Rush in the ’80s, and Driven: Rush in the ’90s and “In the End”–that came out first as hardcovers and then as softcovers. But he points out that it’s difficult to foresee which of his creations will catch on and become his bestsellers.

“I’m amazed at how well the Mercyful Fate book did,” he relates, “and the Blue Öyster Cult stuff always does well. The Max Webster did well, the Accept did well. It’s crazy. And then, some bigger books on bands like Megadeth and Metallica, those ones didn’t do that well. So it’s really been a weird sort of crap shoot. But it’s interesting to see when these bands have these dedicated cult followings around the world.”

Whether or not Popoff’s new AC/DC book will match the high-voltage selling power of his Rush entries remains to be seen, but it’s fair to say that he’s a massive fan of both groups. He has been heard in a YouTube video declaring that the interview he did with AC/DC’s Malcolm Young in the summer of 2003 was the highlight of his amazing career.

“It was the day after the big Toronto Rocks festival, so 400,000 people. AC/DC, one of their greatest shows of all time; it’s gonna go down as a legendary show because they start playing on this beautiful summer day, right when the sun’s going down. They’re the second-to-last act on the bill–the headliner is the Rolling Stones.

“So it’s the next day after the thing, in a nice hotel downtown in Yorkville, and I was there with Malcolm in person and got him to sign stuff. He was just a super-nice guy, very polite. And I saw Angus, got to say hi to him in the hallway as he’s walkin’ through the hallway in his little white hotel robe with a trayful of tea.”

One of the things fans of hard rock and metal appreciate most about Popoff is the fact that, as much as he loves writing books about established “rock royalty” like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Rush, he’s also jumped at the chance to pen titles about less celebrated acts like Thin Lizzy, UFO, Blue Öyster Cult, Max Webster, and Ronnie Montrose.

So does it give the author some satisfaction to turn people onto bands or artists that might not get all the credit they deserve?

“Yeah, definitely. I mean I’ve always thought…you go back to those old albums, they’re all recorded with the same big producers, they all took the same amount of time, they’re all recorded in the big studios, they’re all on major labels. All those acts are essentially doing the same level of art as anybody else is, right, and they just didn’t get as successful. You know, some of these bands I’ve written books on them 15, 20 years ago, and still no one’s written a second book on them.

“And I envisioned idealistically that these guys, when they’re sitting on their rocking chairs and stuff, and they never got around to writing their own biography or whatever, there is a book sitting out there for however many years there’s a planet that their ancestors will be able to pick up somewhere and read about their grandfather or whatever, right. So I always thought that was kinda cool.”

….with hundreds more to come