What was the division of labor when it came to writing the book? Did you work together?
Katherine: You know what? You are the first to ask that, which is awesome.
Jon: You know… we just worked together on it and got it done.
Katherine: Oh come on. Well, we did our separate interviews and we did our separate transcribing.
Jon: We had lots of late nights working together and lots of late nights working alone.
Katherine: I think towards the end we did everything together in terms of the final read, the final edit, the photo selection, the captioning. Towards the end, we did everything together working side by side. Of course, the actual interviews, we only did a few interviews together. We did Brian Johnson of AC/DC together, we did Phil Anselmo together. Other than that, we did interviews separately, transcribed separately.
You were saying, Katherine, that being in LA and being into the hair thing – did you write most of the hair metal stuff?
Jon: I don’t think you can break it down like that, because I did all of the Ratt interviews and the Queensryche interviews. We each did a lot in different areas.
Katherine: I would say Jon did more thrash and I did more hair metal. Proto-metal we both did a lot on. You (Jon) were definitely more black metal. It was divided pretty much according to interest and history. Again, I had an Axl interview from the old days, so I used that. Jon might have had a Marduk interview, so we used that.
Jon: We used the best from everything that we were able to assemble.
Was there a most meaningful part of the book for either of you other than finishing it finally?
Katherine: I don’t know. Since it’s come out, it’s been a little sad because a couple huge people, as you know have died recently. Many people – at least a dozen that we interviewed – Jani Lane died shortly after I interviewed him. I interviewed Dickie Peterson from Blue Cheer…he passed away.
Jon: I interviewed Paul Gray before he died, I interviewed Ronnie James Dio. Even Mick Morris from Eighteen Visions who sadly passed away yesterday from a heart attack, was really very helpful with connecting me with some of the people in the metalcore chapter, and he was really excited about seeing the book.
Katherine: That makes it more poignant I guess. Those sections, you are like “wow, I’m so glad we got that person in”, and it makes it sadder that he’s gone because we had this connection and had him down in black and white.
