December 11, 2009 – The last thing Ian McDougall remembers is riding his bike home around 3 a.m., enjoying a warm mid-October night in Austin, Texas. The Riverboat Gamblers guitarist had been hanging out with his friends in Valient Thorr, who had played a show earlier that night. "I wake up in the ambulance and they are cutting all my clothes off," McDougall recalls. "I'm staring up at all these people who are moving my body around and putting things in me. I had no idea what happened." A pickup truck going 45 mph had hit McDougall, who smacked the vehicle's windshield with his head, then flew 100 feet through the air before landing hard on the ground, breaking an ankle, wrist, and hip socket, as well as fracturing his skull and face.

November 11, 2009 – A winding dirt road weaves through thickets of oak trees covered in Spanish moss, past a rhubarb patch, a chicken coop, and several wire pens housing dogs and one semi domesticated wild boar, before ending at a cluster of rustic wooden cabins. Disused auto parts lie scattered, a beat-up sign reading "Goin' to Getta Gator" hangs on the back wall of a tall lean-to, and just a few yards into the woods is a large pile of alligator carcasses that gets consistently picked over by turkey vultures. The property, which lies a few miles inland from Savannah, Georgia, belongs to a licensed alligator trapper, but on this July evening it's hosting a low-key barbecue for a couple dozen metalheads who happen to be friendly with his daughter.

October 15, 2009 – During the spring of 1994, while the Flaming Lips were barnstorming across America, convincing radio programmers and their own label that a brain-fryingly weird pop tune, "She Don't Use Jelly," from their album Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, could be a hit, I was engaged in a middle-class rite of passage, backpacking across Europe. Drawn by equally healthy doses of American Jewish guilt and morbid curiosity, I spent a chilly afternoon touring Terezín, a former Nazi concentration camp 40 minutes outside Prague where more than 30,000 Jews died. This was all obviously upsetting, but the one detail I recall most clearly is the sign that adorned the entrance: Arbeit macht frei. Translated literally, it means "Work makes free." It was, of course, just insidious propaganda -- hard work wasn't going to save anyone there -- but the phrase, disturbingly, stuck with me.

July 9, 2009 – It's hard to imagine a more "colorful" bandmate than Courtney Love. And for 10 years, guitarist Eric Erlandson maintained his shaggy-haired stance alongside rock'n'roll's most unpredictable frontwoman in the group Hole. Since Hole disbanded in 1999, Erlandson retreated from the spotlight (aside from a stint touring with Vincent Gallo's band Rriiccee in 2007). While he says Hole's "worst record contract in the history of Geffen [Records]" hasn't kept dollars rolling in, he was able to buy a house in 2000 and sell it at peak market value in 2005. That real estate deal afforded him time to go backpacking across Asia, practice Buddhism (which he picked up from Courtney), and become a vegan.

June 20, 2009 – At 8:00 on a cool, sunny April morning, Stephen Glover walks barefoot across aleafy side street in Pasadena, California, toward a white Chevy pickup. The blue oxford shirt he borrowed from his roommate is unbuttoned and hanging open. In one hand, he's carrying well-worn black shoes, in the other, a letter from his drug treatment counselor attesting to the fact that he's been sober and drug-free for just over a year. The truck belongs to Glover's bail bondsman, Dan Nesser, who is driving the Jackass daredevil to the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Building. Glover, 35, is on probation after pleading guilty last June to felony cocaine possession; six days after his arrest, eight friends, including Jackass ringleader Johnny Knoxville, had him committed to the psych ward at Cedars-Sinai. Glover's hearing this morning is to check his progress in the probation-mandated recovery program.

May 22, 2009 – Steel Panther stride onstage around 1 A.M. at La Zona Rosa on the second night of Austin, Texas' annual South by Southwest music festival. The mock-metal band's joke isn't subtle: four guys with poodle hair and spandex pants performing foul-mouthed odes to fat girls, Asian hookers, and the primacy of heavy metal. Justin Hawkins first encountered Steel Panther last year when he was in Los Angeles mastering Red Light Fever, the debut album by his new band, Hot Leg. That Steel Panther would appeal to him is both obvious and a little surprising. His previous group, the Darkness, also toyed with rock clichés, though never so blatantly. The Darkness' 2003 debut, Permission to Land, matched big riffs with Hawkins' outlandish falsetto on songs about genital warts and ping-pong. Live, Hawkins dressed in flashy catsuits and played guitar while riding a stuffed white tiger.

April 22, 2009 – "Has anyone seen Brent?" It's 1:30 on a cold, rainy Friday afternoon in late February. The members of Mastodon had planned on meeting a half-hour ago at El Myr, a colorful, run-down Mexican cantina that serves as unofficial HQ for the band here in their hometown of Atlanta. Drummer Brann Dailor is less on the hunt for his missing bandmate than he is bemusedly giving voice to Mastodon's semipermanent state of being. Guitarist Bill Kelliher, who worked at El Myr in Mastodon's early days, is at the bar with his wife and young son. Dailor and bassist-vocalist Troy Sanders are chatting with friends about tomorrow night's show, a daylong outdoor metal festival the band will headline. Guitarist-vocalist Brent Hinds is nowhere to be found. Dailor, who arrived promptly at 1:00, seems less than surprised. "He'll be here eventually, going, 'What?

April 21, 2009 – Tucked into a booth behind a plate of snow crab legs and a cold beer at a cavernous fish house across from Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery, Manchester Orchestra frontman Andy Hull is talking about one of his favorite subjects: God. "There's a difference between people who use God as a way to sleep at night and people who are so convicted by their beliefs that they can't," says Hull, 22. "I'm in category two." Hull's father and grandfather were pastors, and in Manchester Orchestra, he's teamed with four guys who also grew up in Christian homes. "But we're not a Christian band. I try to write through a lens rather than on top of a soapbox." After nearly being suspended from his Christian high school for playing at a local club that featured a themed room called Hell, Hull home­schooled himself for his senior year and focused on his band.

April 20, 2009 – In the dim light of a cold, rainy December afternoon, the Washington, D.C. Central Detention Facility stands as a dull colossus at the edge of the city's grimy southeast corridor. Situated on a campus of similarly weathered municipal structures, the hulking flesh-tone edifice's exterior has been worn dark gray in splotches under its boxy windows, a visual testament to a troubled history that has included rampant overcrowding, health department citations for roach and rat infestation, and an occasional lack of running water since it opened in 1976.

January 19, 2009 – James Allan didn't grow up dreaming of being a rock star. The Glasvegas frontman had a more modest goal: becoming a professional soccer player. "At school, anybody who played guitar was just weird," he says. "In the east end of Glasgow, nobody played music. It was all gambling, going to the pub, going to football matches." Unlike most of his schoolmates, Allan, 29, nearly made it as an athlete, knocking around the lower rungs of several pro clubs' systems before it became clear he needed a plan B. After several years of unemployment, that became Glasvegas. "Me and my cousin [Glasvegas guitarist Rab Allan] saw Oasis play on TV, and I thought, 'I'm gonna do that,' " he says.