by Ian Christe
Under their androgynous exteriors Ratt and Dokken were cold and calculating songwriters, crooning sweet nothings from anesthetized hearts—jaded seducers whose lyrics openly admitted they were in it for the money. As a consequence there was ruthlessness to the glam metal bands that sounded shocking as they took over the Top 40 singles chart. Where British heavy metal dealt mostly with tragic romance when it talked about love at all, sex was a major theme of glam metal. Frosty-haired male pinups played into little girls’ bedroom fantasies, then treated the young maidens like dirt. Winger’s cradle-robber hit “Seventeen” gladly boasted, “Daddy says she’s too young / but she’s old enough for me.” Though the music was bright and soft, the effect was icy, a product of pop in the 1980s.
If image was a crucial selling point, the ultimate sellout was the power ballad—usually a maudlin, pseudo-acoustic love song complete with weepy guitar solo and lovelorn sing-along chorus. After the phenomenal popularity of Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home” doubled the band’s audience size, power ballads warped Hollywood metal in a major way. Newer bands like Poison and Danger Danger skipped the hip-grinding, knife-flashing threat of early Mötley Crüe entirely and headed straight for the guaranteed gold of good-time radio fodder. “Those bands, in their style and approach, that’s what I call tits-and-ass metal,” comments Rob Halford of Judas Priest. “Nothing wrong with that—I wouldn’t expect anything else to come out of Hollywood.”
Back on the Strip the local culture turned rock-video values into reality, as young women worked as go-go dancers to buy groceries for their boyfriends—many of them future rock stars who dressed like strippers themselves. These hair rockers clung to traditional male sexual roles while shunning the responsibilities. “That’s how a lot of bands made it in the early days, at least in L.A.,” says Ben Liemer, editor of Circus, a primary source of glam metal pinups. “There were enough women that wanted to hang out with rock stars, knowing that they could be the next big thing. The bands were more accessible at the clubs, and it was easier to get into the dressing room there. You can’t believe it—those guys just got over. Women would buy them clothes, take them out to dinner, and buy them drinks and drugs.”
In odd but obvious ways, glam metal in the 1980s was a testing ground for changing gender roles—often cultivating the seed of the 1960s sexual revolution through the strange television landscape of the 1970s. While fertilizing metal’s choke hold on pop culture, MTV consolidated the signals into something that would sell soft drinks. In the surreal metal music videos stereotypical sitcom plots were winning out over challenging content. The narratives of concept videos by Poison and Warrant showed insecure young males gaining supernatural power over women and portrayed conflict between teens and the older generation like a 1980s version of Happy Days.
In contrast, even while playing to the generation gap, L.A. thrashers Megadeth came to MTV with “Peace Sells … But Who’s Buying?"—a snide indictment of military-industrial doublespeak such as “peacekeeping missiles.” In that video a disapproving father enters the TV room and barks to his metalhead son, “Turn this off, I want to watch the news!” The longhaired resister quickly flips the channel back to Megadeth’s vision of tanks rolling across the sand. “This is the news,” he asserts in defiance.
Both were breeds of heavy metal, but their intentions were intensely different. “You had the bands like Metallica that just would go out in a T-shirt and jeans and play loud, heavy, tight, tight, hard rock,” says Michael Sweet of Stryper about the local scene. “And then you had the glam thing going that started to take off, with the big hair and the makeup and the shiny clothes. Not to be mean, but those guys weren’t masters at their instruments. It was more of a show.”
The flecks of true grit in the glam metal reality fell from the ratty hair of Hanoi Rocks. A Kerrang! favorite that was also universally admired by Hollywood bands, Hanoi was an extremely passionate and supremely image-conscious Finnish act that released five diverse albums in its five years. While saxophone-wielding singer Matti Fagerholm, aka Michael Monroe, pushed an ultrafeminine urchin image, the band seared with a ragtag pastiche of high-energy moves nabbed from the Ramones, the Clash, Sweet, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop. As the hungry band became more confident between 1981’s poppy Hanoi Rocks, Bangkok Shocks, Saigon Shakes and 1984’s rugged Two Steps from the Move, the eclectic sound flirted with heavy metal.
Mike Monroe of Hanoi Rocks, Virrat, Finland, January 1982 (Raimo Autio)
Hanoi Rocks was a group of strange pioneers, overcoming secondhand style with genuine passion for wild music and the rock way of life. Monroe pushed the limits of androgyny to extremes at a time before it was safe. “We went to do press at our label,” he told journalist Martin Popoff, “and when I went to the men’s room, all the men had to leave because they were too intimidated [by my jewelry and makeup]. That was weird. I was going, ‘What the hell is this?’ So the label was not even prepared to deal with a band like that. We were way ahead of our time in that sense, and years later all these bands have copied us. Poison, for example. They were not a good rock band at all but they got huge, and after that, CBS was again looking for bands like Hanoi.”
Tragically, Hanoi Rocks was destroyed in 1984 during its first trip to L.A. While partying with Mötley Crüe, drummer Nicholas Dingley, aka Razzle, was killed in a car accident during a run to the liquor store with Mötley Crüe singer Vincent Neil Wharton, aka Vince Neil. Occurring in mid-December, Razzle’s passing spooked fans of Hanoi’s prophetic anthem “Dead by Christmas.” For driving the car, which also maimed two passengers in an oncoming vehicle, Neil was ordered by the court to pay a $2.6 million fine, serve thirty days in jail, and perform two hundred hours of community service. “I deserved to be punished more than that,” he later told VH1. Hanoi officially disbanded in May 1985, while the Crüe adopted Hanoi Rocks’ gypsy image on the 1985 album Theatre of Pain.
With simple needs and money rolling in, the party continued unabated. Dressed in fishnet gloves and wielding neon guitars, a third and fourth generation of Hollywood metallers appeared on the scene. Many were sleazy bar bands that lacked the heart of British metal or even the originality of Ratt. “Mötley Crüe definitely spawned it,” says Los Angeles native Katon DePena. “We knew they were Hollywood guys, so it made sense that they dressed in [drag] costume. It was just funny. After Poison came, that’s when everything started flooding. You saw so many pretty bands coming down.”
Strained of all dangerous details, the feminine-looking Poison sold 7 million records in America during the 1980s, totaling more than 11 million by 1991. These refugees from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, were third-generation heirs to Van Halen’s legacy of outrageous-ness with one-tenth the musical muscle. “Poison was just about having a good time,” says Circus editor Ben Liemer. “There wasn’t a reflective bone in their body. ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’ was about as reflective and as contemplative and as soulful as they could manage. Priest and Maiden were very proud of the fact that they were good. I don’t think Poison or Mötley Crüe worried about that too much, at least until later.”
From the Sunset Strip it was a quick cruise to the Hollywood film studios, so along with a slew of monster and horror movies marketed to heavy metal teens came a number of films that used heavy metal as source material. Of particular local interest, The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II: The Metal Years, the sequel to a punk documentary shot in 1979, examined the gilded age of glam metal in Los Angeles. Unable to contact luminaries like Ronnie James Dio, whom director Penelope Spheeris called the “godfather of it all,” the film worked within its environment, revealing the specific hopes and heartbreaks of struggling rock stars on Sunset Boulevard.
Glamorous staged interviews with superstars Kiss, Aerosmith, and Ozzy Osbourne offset a harrowing segment starring W.A.S.P. guitarist Chris Holmes, floating in a backyard swimming pool littered with empty vodka bottles while his mother watched with grief. In contrast, giggly glam supergroup Poison looked and acte
d like grateful lottery winners. Playing the role of naysayer, only Dave Mustaine of Megadeth punctured the mystique of the star machine, telling would-be MTV idols not to quit their day jobs. The Megadeth performance closing the movie raged in comparison to live performances by hair-spray
GLAM METAL
Sprouting from a crack in the sidewalk of Hollywood, California, glam metal was the product of heavy metal energy, MTV glitz, and a remnant of hard rock leer. Though Guns N’ Roses, Poison, and even David Lee Roth came from the Midwest, somehow every cross-dressing lite metal act with a pink guitar seemed to land in Los Angeles during the late 1980s, where they found girlfriends to support them until they were blessed by the inevitable light of stardom. Unfortunately for the Finnish band Hanoi Rocks—the spiritual forerunners of Poison, Guns N’ Roses, and later Mötley Crüe—its date with Hollywood turned to tragedy when drummer Razzle was killed in a drunk driving incident. Undeterred, the glam machine purred decadently onward until the end of the decade, when poser dreams were squashed between grunge and the unstoppable assault of Metallica. For better or worse, the mile-high hair, women’s lingerie, and thick rouge defined heavy metal attire in the popular memory.
Guilty Pleasures
Night Songs (1986)
Dokken, Tooth and Nail (1984)
Faster Pussycat, Faster Pussycat (1987)
Guns N’ Roses, Appetite for Destruction (1987)
Hanoi Rocks, Back to Mystery City (1984)
Mötley Crüe, Girls, Girls, Girls (1987)
Nitro, O.F.R. (1989)
Ozzy Osbourne, The Ultimate Sin (1986)
Poison, Look What the Cat Dragged In (1987)
Ratt, Dancing Undercover (1986)
Stryper, To Hell with the Devil (1986)
Warrant, Cherry Pie (1990)
W.A.S.P., W.A.S.P (1984)
hazards Faster Pussycat, Lizzy Borden, Seduce, London, and Odin. Not surprisingly, Megadeth’s career was one of the few that lasted longer than a can of Aqua Net.
As a portrait of heavy metal in 1988, the picture might have been incomplete. “I don’t doubt that it’s a good movie, but they should have picked underground bands instead of a bunch of glam bands,” grumbles Blaine Cook of the Accused. Yet the night the film premiered, a crowd of ticket holders and empty-handed loiterers grew large enough to shut down Hollywood Boulevard, drawing a small army of motorcycle cops to barricade the theater. A giant lens peering into the strange local metal phenomenon, the movie was a sensation. “As far as limiting it to what was going on in Hollywood at the time,” says Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P., “the movie was probably pretty accurate.”
Glancing at glam metal’s dominance of the Billboard charts in the late 1980s, it seemed any band with a blond singer, a hotshot guitarist, a power ballad, and a wardrobe case could score—if its video was played on MTV. The metal rush incited countless runaway teenagers to flee their Nebraska farms and seek fame and fortune in California. Luckless rockers slugging it out in bars from Queens to Miami migrated west and placed “Bassist Seeks Band” advertisements in the local music papers. Merciless club promoters charged this endless supply of would-be stars up to five hundred dollars a night to perform under infamous “pay-to-play” arrangements—and there was never a shortage of emerging talent to take the bait.
As the hair teased higher and out of control, the Hollywood dream machines created their own clueless rendition of heavy metal. Easy as it was for music studios to manufacture the Monkees or create a punk band with a package of safety pins, the culture industry applied Max Factor to white-bread-and-water rock pretenders like Winger, Vain, and Bullet Boys, then waited to see if heads would bang. Bang they did, however lightly. After Vixen was discovered performing in a garage in the low-budget beach comedy Hardbodies, EMI Records gave the all-female band of midwestern transplants a glam makeover (ironically, to look more “girlish”), sent them on tour with Scorpions, and promptly scored a gold album for the self-titled Vixen.
Glam metal was so entrenched in Hollywood that it spawned its own headbanger trade school, Musicians Institute, encompassing the Guitar Institute of Technology (GIT), and its offshoots the Bass Institute of Technology (BIT), Percussion Institute of Technology (PIT), and Vocal Institute of Technology (VIT). Instead of slaving away in solitude like Eddie Van Halen or Randy Rhoads, young hotshots copied licks from a chalkboard, studied flashy stage tricks, and for final exams played showcase gigs to label scouts in the GIT auditorium. The small campus became a magnet for fledgling players, a frizzed-out networking center for up-and-coming lords of the whammy bar.
If the problem in Los Angeles in 1981 was lack of metal, the drawback to the city’s music scene in 1987 was the overwhelming success of heavy metal of the most disposable type. Established bands like Kiss and Whitesnake permed their hair, opened powder compacts, and played power ballads to feed the diet metal market. At least Ozzy Osbourne’s frosted hair spray could be attributed to not-quite-temporary insanity—longtime fans took to calling him the “Mad Housewife,” with all due respect. Y&T had been Northern California’s hard rock hope in the late 1970s, but by 1986 they were just another group of hair salesmen. “They were a good, tight band,” says Metal Mania publisher Ron Quintana, “until MTV came along and they went glam like a lot of bands.”
“Mad Housewife”-era Ozzy Osbourne
(Deborah Laws/Metalflakes.com)
Even God got into the act. Labelmates of Slayer and Poison on the indie Enigma, the Orange County “white metal” staples Stryper drew platinum sales from power ballads with ambiguous Christian content. Stryper shrewdly appealed to skeptical parents by preaching a pro-God message but did not sacrifice metal flair. Throwing free Bibles adorned with Stryper stickers into concert audiences, they claimed that their gaudy black-and-yellow jumpsuits referred to “stripes” left on the hide of Jesus by the whip of Pontius Pilate. “I think in the very beginning it was mainly Christians that were buying Stryper records and going to Stryper shows,” says singer Michael Sweet. “But when we broke in Soldiers Under Command and especially To Hell with the Devil, when you walked into a Stryper show, you felt like you were at a typical rock and roll show. People were drunk, you could smell pot in the air—all that stuff was going on. I think after a while it would set in, what we were talking about. There’d be a shocked look on certain faces, in a good way: ‘Aw, man, these guys are Christians!’”
Jon Bon Jovi
(Deborah Lynn Laws)
A notable exception to the Hollywood rule, New Jersey singer John Bongiovi, aka Jon Bon Jovi, spoke of good times without decadence and disorder. The frosted-hair prince of power ballads banked four platinum albums in the 1980s via hits like “Bad Medicine,” “You Give Love a Bad Name,” and the road-weary “Wanted Dead or Alive.” Raised in the music business, Bon Jovi also discovered the Philadelphia bar band Cinderella, a heavily AC/DC-influenced act whose Night Songs and Long Cold Winter each sold 2 million copies. Bon Jovi later played wily mentor to another Garden State metal act, Skid Row, in exchange for a publishing interest in power anthems like “Youth Gone Wild"—a financial arrangement that burst into a public feud between the two groups.
Back at ground zero, in every way except megastardom the Hollywood glam craze reached its unreal summit with Nitro. Nitro was a pickup group formed by vocalist Jim Gillette—whose stage gimmick was shattering a crystal glass with his voice—and Michael Angelo— who upped the gonzo factor by playing an X-shaped guitar with four functional necks. Gillette and Angelo also peddled metal-technique instruction tapes in the back pages of Hit Parader, and the pair’s song-writing sounded like a juiced-up draftsman’s jumble of Ratt, Accept, and Mötley Crüe riffs, overloaded with guitar solos and drum fills.
If Mötley Crüe was the pinnacle of quick-fix rock and roll, Nitro became the further distilled epitome, an abstraction on top of a derivation, firing delusion up oversize nostrils with silver pistols. Nitro’s load-blowing O.F.R. (“Out-fucking-Rageous”) was incredibly bugged-out treble noise f
rom a bunch of prodigies with skyscraper hair and a knack for electronic wizardry. Their half-minute falsetto wails and tightly strung guitar squiggles respected hit formulas, yet the kamikaze results were too octane-laden for mainstream use. Their music did feature prominently in Suburban Commando, a comedy starring the wrestler Hulk Hogan—a match that could only have happened in the late 1980s cultural climate that spawned Max Headroom and Alf, extreme in its plastic pathology.
Nitro, the highest and the fastest
(Rampage Records)
As MTV bands partied on in crash pads cluttered with royalty statements, others paused to reflect on the meaning of their accomplishments. “I really wanted to make metal mainstream, and for all the right reasons,” wrote Dee Snider. “I loved this underdog so much that I felt that we deserved to be in the fucking elevators. We deserved to be on in the restaurants, and at halftime in football games.
What I didn’t realize is that if I had succeeded—which some bands did later on, Bon Jovi, Warrant, and Winger—once it got into the mainstream, it was over. It was always the underdog image that kept it alive.”
Even as the heavy metal bandwagon primped to the point of implosion, a surly new savior grabbed the reins. Ultimately the most successful band to come from Hollywood during the teased-hair era, Guns N’ Roses were semihomeless scavengers at the time of their breakthrough, Appetite for Destruction. They tried every trick in the metal book. Appealing to the underground, their self-released 1985 Live?!$$ @ Like a Suicide EP, which had already sold 10,000 copies, was quietly re-pressed by Geffen Records in early 1987 to cultivate credible support for the band’s official debut. Meanwhile, the members were fine actors who played MTV like virtuosos. Appetite’s first video, “Welcome to the Jungle,” portrayed singer William Bailey, aka Axl Rose, as a greenhorn stepping off a Greyhound bus from Nowheresville, immediately confronting a TV image of himself as rock and roll predator.