A naked man with a pillowcase over his head comes into her office and pisses all over her desk. The first scene of this is hilarious and sad. The end of a career, and her soul, living in her mother’s house working at a Best Western. And for one glorious shiny moment, Sabbath was in her basement. She wants to play the riff from Sabbath, and she bleeds herself through the first chords until it sounds right. We Sold Our Souls starts with Kris early in life, as a teenager, confused, and all attitude.
“No one loves me! Boohoo! Guess what? We play fucking metal! I don’t want to sing about your sad feelings! I want dragons.” Kris is authentically herself, a metal-loving girl with bloody fingernails, sweat dripping down her face, and music that sings out from the dark parts of her. She is the shredding lead guitarist that gets on stage and apologizes to no one. Kris is to Dürt Würk as Slash is to Guns N’ Roses. Specifically the incredibly badass and beat-down Kris. In this case, the story revolves around the members of Dürt Würk, a semi-famous metal band from the 1990s. Even though Hendrix speaks at length about Metal music, you can substitute anything you are passionate about. It is not so much what type of music you like, but being able to connect with the music itself. You could substitute Klezmer music in for metal, and it will ring true for some people. Right from the start, you do not have to love thrash metal to appreciate any of the ideas in this book. Wrap all of those ideas up, loss, the love of music, passion, and the plight of the middle class into a pulsing metal package, and you have We Sold Our Souls. Losing that emotional part of you that vibrates from the energy of the music is one of the saddest things, and it is a kind of horror in of itself. But what sang for me in this book is losing that connection to music, the kind you have when you are 19. Grady Hendrix’s book, We Sold Our Souls is about a lot of things: love for music, love for horror, or the state of mental and emotional health in the US. But it never entirely is the same as when you were 19, which is a tragedy. Maybe when I am alone in the car, I might crank Metallica or Tool. I remember the moment when I let the music take me I felt the guitar howl through my head and the drumbeat in my very bones.
I remember thrashing my head to metal when I was a teenager.
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