Chuck Billy takes his memoir to a bookshop before it is even in the shops. On 29 October, at Changing Hands in Tempe, the Testament singer sits down with David Ellefson, now in Metal Church and before that in Megadeth, to talk about Holding My Breath: The Two Testaments Of Chuck Billy. Permuted Press publishes it on 10 November.
The pairing is better than a signing queue. Ellefson has written his own books and lived the same decade from the other side of the Bay Area story, so the conversation has somewhere to go beyond the anecdotes already in print.
What the book covers is also more than a band history. It starts with a Native American and Mexican American family and follows him into the thrash scene that came out of northern California, which is a line almost nobody in that scene has written down.
The furniture around it is already in place: Rob Halford opens the book and Randy Blythe closes it. A bookstore event two weeks early is how a publisher turns a metal memoir into a book that bookshops stock.