Tour stories are a dime a dozen, but the number of bands on tour at any given time over the last forty years means the cache is never empty. Enter “Hell on Wheels,” Greg Jacobs’ book with a plethora of tour stories from a number of different bands, originally published in 1994. Jacobs has some pretty legit bonafides in punk rock, working for record labels SST, Cruz, Cargo, and Trust, along with managing bands such as Big Drill Car, Rocket From The Crypt, and others. With this new edition, Greg has compiled about fifty new stories and twenty from the previous edition. These are stories broken up into two sections: “New Releases” and “Greatest Hits – Remixed.” Both of these sections are broken up into different chapters grouping some of these stories into specific categories. Most of the chapter titles named mostly after songs that would make a pretty decent mixtape itself.
“New Releases” features the new stories for this expanded edition of “Hell on Wheels.” There are stories about bathroom accidents (“Accidents Will Happen”), drugs (“Chinese Rock”), and weather (“Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”). There are some stories about the early days of some of our favorite band members. Ian MacKaye tells the story of his pre-Minor Threat band Teen Idles’ first and only tour of Los Angeles. Joby Ford of The Bronx tells a story about a Mercedes-Benz landing in the middle of their van. The Jesus Lizard talks about the prank war they had on a tour with Six Finger Satellite.
Some of these stories coincide with a specific time in history, such as Scott Reynolds (All) and Joe Escalante (The Vandals) telling stories about being at the Berlin Wall shortly before it came down as part of the appropriately named chapter “Holidays in the Sun.” Some contributors, like Rat Scabies (The Damned) and Matt Pryor (The Get Up Kids), have multiple entries. In the chapter titled “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” Lee Ving and Ian MacKaye go over their versions of Fear’s infamous Saturday Night Live performance on Halloween 1981. Being a punk rock and SNL nerd, I can hands down say this was my favorite part.
The book closes with “Greatest Hits – Remixed.” This smaller section of the book, about a hundred or so pages, is dedicated to twenty of the best stories from “Hell on Wheels'” previous edition. Chapter “Thirsty and Miserable” features some more drinking stories. One particular story is told by Eddie Spaghetti of the Supersuckers, where their guitar player, Dan Bolton, and The Reverend Horton Heat got into a fight with some local band. In a separate section, Mike Watt talks about how the headstock of one of his basses broke after he had bought a copy of Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses.”
These were the stories that stuck out to me. For as many bands as I knew in this book, there were probably a good handful I hadn’t heard of or listened to before. The great thing about this book is the spectrum of bands it covers. Most of the contributors are from punk rock bands, but there are a few metal bands mentioned here and there. Greg Jacobs has compiled a fantastic collection of stories ripe for the picking. If you recognize half the bands in this book, it will be a buffet of content. “Hell on Wheels” is available for purchase through University of Hell Press.