Chuck Eddy

Life and career

Chuck Eddy was born in Detroit, Michigan. After starting his journalism career with The Village Voice and Creem, where he published one of the first national interviews with the Beastie Boys in the mid-1980s, Eddy then wrote for Rolling Stone, Spin, Entertainment Weekly and other national and local publications. He also authored two books: Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe, and The Accidental Evolution of Rock and Roll.

In 1999 he was hired as the music editor at The Village Voice, where he served for seven years. After being terminated on grounds of "taste" upon Village Voice Media's merger with New Times in 2006, he briefly wrote a thrice-weekly heavy metal blog for MTV's URGE and a monthly page of capsule CD reviews in Harp magazine called "The Last Roundup". From 2006 to 2007, he worked as a senior editor for Billboard magazine.

Eddy currently freelances from Austin, Texas. He contributes a regular "Essentials" column to Spin; blog entries and several reviews every week, and occasional video interviews, to Rhapsody.com; and frequent pieces to The Village Voice, eMusic, and other outlets. He has also programmed several artist-specific web radio stations for Clear Channel.

He has published book chapters in several anthologies, including: The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll (Random House, 1992); Spin Alternative Record Guide (Vintage, 1995); Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: Music And Myth (NYU Press, 1999); Bubblegum Music Is the Naked Truth (Feral House, 2001); Creem: America’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll Magazine (Collins, 2007); and 1000 Songs To Change Your Life (Time Out, 2008.)

A best-of collection, Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism, was published by Duke University Press in 2011.