In the mid-'60s, Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi lost the tips of his right middle and
ring fingers in a sheet metal factory accident, forcing him to down tune his strings to
play with less pain, and thus invented heavy metal. Legend has it that JD Monroe
traveled through time to find those fingertips, sauteed them with garlic and butter, and
ate them, thereby making his drumming heavier than the water at the bottom of the
Mariana Trench. 
Monroe started drumming at the age of five and has been steadily refining his
thunderous approach for more than forty-five years. Playing a deluge of styles — rock to
reggae, punk to funk, jazz to metal, free improv to Afrobeat — with bands such as
Citizens of the Universe, Stone Ape, Stockhausen Syndrome, Sugar Push and Xenat-
Ra, he's also attained percussive insights as a professional DJ and MPC assassin.
Monroe is a man of multitudinous musical moods who's equally at home in a band or as
a hired studio gun, and he's recorded at least 30 albums over the course of his genre-
jumping career. Plus, he only occasionally spontaneously combusts onstage.