Rare Bird Books has set a September 5 release date for “Loco: Chaos, Calamity, And Coal Chamber”, the first volume of autobiography from Dez Fafara. The California-born and raised everyman is now the singer and leader of the band DEVILDRIVER, artist manager, multiple brand owner, and motivational guru. In the period of time covered in “Loco”, though, Dez was just Bradley Fafara, a Hollywood club kid who escaped a lifetime wasted (in both senses) on the beach to become one of the 1990s most vivid rock stars.

With his band COAL CHAMBER, Dez pioneered a whole new sound and visual, touring the world, battling innumerable obstacles and ultimately breaking free to go solo with DEVILDRIVER, the focus of Volume Two of Fafara‘s two-book autobiography plan. Titled after COAL CHAMBER‘s 1997 hit, “Loco” describes the arc of a man who was ripped off, let down, and beaten up, but who never quit — and who ultimately achieved his own form of redemption. It includes more than 50 black-and-white and full-color images.

In a recent interview with the “Everblack” podcast, Fafara stated about “Loco”: “That’s gonna be a real tell-all. I think people are gonna get a chance to see where I come from as a kid. ‘Cause I left home early, slept under bridges, stole food, went to jail. And I think people are gonna really get a view of, like, ‘It’s a hard-knock life.'”

“Loco: Chaos, Calamity, And Coal Chamber” was written with Joel McIver, the bestselling author of “Justice for All: The Truth About Metallica”, which has been translated into nine languages, and several other books. He has written for Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Metal Hammer, Classic Rock, and he is the occasional guest on BBC. Classic Rock magazine has called him “by some distance Britain’s most prolific hard rock/metal author.” He wrote the official biography of the world’s biggest death metal band CANNIBAL CORPSE, and co-wrote MEGADETH‘s bio from former bass player David Ellefson.

In a 2018 interview with The Ties That Bind Us, Fafara stated about his his decision to get sober in October 2016: “I think I was just a casual drinker, like everybody in America — ‘Hey, let’s party on the weekends!,’ at least at first. But then I realized, I was doing it for 25 years, and I’d started having three cocktails a day, and I was looking at 280 days on the road. I was watching the bottles of vodka coming in and off the bus, coming in empty and leaving full. And when I hit 50, I said to myself, ‘How far do you want to go?’

“I wasn’t waking up in the gutter; I wasn’t beating my wife,” he clarified. “I just had a feeling that I had to show people who follow me the proper way to do life. I was already vegan, and I had gotten into that for the health aspects as well, and alcohol will kill you faster than anything. It’s pushed in our society, it’s on every commercial; we’re constantly being told you can’t have a Saturday without a drink, you can’t watch the Super Bowl without a drink. And I decided I didn’t want that anymore.”

DEVILDRIVER will release its tenth full-length album, “Dealing With Demons Vol. II”, on May 12.