A Fabulous Disaster: From the Garage to Madison Square Garden, the Hard Way

Holt’s haphazard debut recounts, and only sometimes regrets, the drug-fueled excesses of his career as guitarist for thrash metal band Exodus. Raised in the “shithole” of San Pablo, Calif., in the 1960s and ’70s, an 11-year-old Holt was seduced by the heavy metal music in his brother’s record collection; by age 17, he was playing in the newly formed Exodus. The band embarked on relentless tours across North America and Europe, attracting a committed fan base. By the late ’80s, the group was “destroying everything in its path,” Holt writes. “We were also snorting it, drinking it, [and] smoking it.” When grunge rock began to eclipse thrash metal in the early ’90s, Holt left the band (they’d go on to reunite later that decade). His drug and alcohol addictions continued until 2003, when he’d finally sunk low enough to quit cold turkey. Getting sober restored his creativity: “I’d extinguished one flame—the crank pipe—and reignited another: Exodus.” Holt provides a few useful peeks into the birth of a rock subgenre, but endless, repetitive recollections of his drug use and braggadocious claims about the band’s current success (“We go out and smoke people. We will make your band look bad”) grow tiresome. Only diehard thrash metal fans need apply. (Apr.)