Everyone doesn’t need to know everything. Faust learned that the hard way. The kids today have an expression: stay in your lane, and Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux does so. He knows the Dead, all the fauna in a hundred-mile radius around his home, the rules of icing, and that’s it. History of the Japanese code of bushido and its allegories to the Western code of chivalry? David cannot speak with authority on this matter, although he has viewed movies featuring both samurai and knights. Chemical makeup of a supermassive black hole?
“Well, there’s just a whole bunch of nothin’ in there, eh?”
That is not the right answer, but I do not blame our northern friend. That what one doesn’t know will vastly outweigh the sum of one’s knowledge is a common tragedy. I don’t know what’s in a black hole, either. Perhaps nougat. Maybe black holes are delicious. Again: I don’t know, so I cannot help David.
HOWEVER, DL recently copped to complete ignorance of Hair Metal and that means it’s TotD’s time to shine. So, sit back, David (and the rest of you who give a shit) and journey back to a mythical time called the Eighties and a legendary street known as the Sunset Strip.
A Quick and Dirty Guide to Hair Metal
We begin by defining our terms, and useful in this task is approaching it from the negative side. Hair Metal is NOT:
- Actual metal. (You know that TotD despises gatekeeping and the whole “this is real XXX and this isn’t,” there is absolutely a delineation to be made between real metal bands and poofy-topped sissy-boys covering Brownsville Station. Real metal bands, for example, wore jeans. Hair Metal bands wore leather or spandex trousers; if dungarees were worn, they were generally topped with chaps.)
- Glam rock. (Are you a citizen or a subject? Because glam rockers were British. Hair Metal can be read as the cracked-mirror American version of glam, but it ain’t glam rock because glam rock requires camp, which was in short-ish supply in, say, Ratt’s rehearsal space.)
So what is Hair Metal? Well, some folks say it started in Max’s Kansas City when the New York Dolls first put on makeup, and others say you can blame Marc Bolan, but the problem started in backyards in 1970’s Pasadena. Nightclubs in Los Angeles–most of the country–had live music most nights, but they demanded cover tunes. Drinkers wanted to listen and dance to the big radio hits of the day, and all those golden oldies, and they wanted four or five sets a night. Two Dutch immigrants, a loudmouthed Jew, and a Polish bass player didn’t cotton to the regulations: they wanted to play their original music (and a lot of Kinks covers) for one show and then get blowjobs. At first, their name was Mammoth but the lead singer convinced the two brothers that their last name had a bitchin’ ring to it, and the band was rechristened Van Halen.
Now, Van Halen was not a Hair Metal band, but they spawned multitudes; it’s like how Christ wasn’t a Christian. After the mighty Van Halen signed a record deal and moved to their new Fat City addresses, groups popped up like mushrooms that were wearing too much eye makeup, all imitating VH’s already-stolen shtick. (The birth of the Golden God/Guitar Hero dyad is credited by some to Led Zeppelin, but a strong case could be made for The Who. Also: David Lee Roth directly copped his whole routine from a guy named Jim Dandy in a band called Black Oak Arkansas.) Some bands had five members; these aped Aerosmith.
Let’s move outwards and upwards and put events into context: at this point in the early 80’s, the Steakheads were not being catered to. The ones that would have bought a Zeppelin record had it been available. The KISS Army. That sea of blue jeans from Englishtown. Dumb teen boys, basically. The smart kids had their books and their Elvis Costello albums, and the stoner kids had the Dead, and the girls had Madonna, but there were vast fields teeming with acne-laden morons who wanted loud guitars, plentiful drums, and to be told two things:
- They were winners.
- Due to their winning, pussy would be made available.
The Clash was certainly not going to tell the Steakheads that, nor were any of these so-called “New Wave” bands from England, most of which–let’s be honest–were queer as hell. The record labels had all given up on anyone ever caring about punk music, and so were rooting around for the next big thing. Coincidentally, the performance spaces on the Sunset Strip–the Starwood and the Whiskey and Gazzara’s–had also given up on punk music. Unlike their New York or DC counterparts, LA punks always included a performative aspect to their shows, such as “setting the stage on fire” or “hurling lightbulbs at audience members’ faces,” and club owners had had enough of the bullshit. So: just as the bands needed places to play, and the record companies needed places to see the bands, venues opened up.
A scene emerged quickly, along with a uniform. In one of Hair Metal’s many interior contradiction, the look was as unisex as the culture was not. Everybody looked like this:
The women looked like that, too, but with bigger tits. Women could also wear skirts, but men were confined to kilts (but only when paired with a catcher’s chest pad).
For all the androgynous looks, though, the Hair Metal scene was ruthlessly misogynistic. There were no bands of mixed gender–chicks could sing backup, but they had to be hot–and only one mainstream lady group, Vixen, but they were treated as even more of a novelty than Stryper, who were a Christian Hair Metal band and sang songs like To Hell With The Devil and dressed up like perverted bumblebees. I’m not making that up.
Did you think I was making it up? They also used to chuck Bibles at the audience. These men were laughingstocks.
These men, on the other hand…
…were the princes of the scene. Mötley Crüe were the biggest Hair Metal band of all: they wore the leatheriest leather, and their lead singer looked like Marianne Faithful, and they may or may not have worshipped the devil but sure did talk about him a lot, and the bass player would set himself on fire to distract from the fact he couldn’t play all that well, and their drummer had Big Dick Energy, and their guitarist was present, and Mötley did ALL the drugs; they did so many drugs that someone in a completely different band died. That is some high-level Rock Starring right there.
You may be wondering at this point why I haven’t been playing you any of the music. It’s because it’s bad. Even the good stuff is dreck. Mötley Crüe? They were maybe the best of the Hair Metal bands and they had–in total–a half-dozen listenable tunes. Quality dropped precipitously after them: there was Poison, and aprez-poisson, le deluge du merde. You had tedious, bewigged Dokken, and L.A. Guns hanging around like a ditched prom date, and ugly, chubby W.A.S.P. , and born followers Warrant, and self-destructive Quiet Riot, and career men Bon Jovi. Those were the stars! I haven’t even gotten to the also-rans!
Great White, and Whitesnake, and White Lion, and Black & Blue, and Blue Murder; Danger Danger, Bang Tango, Tora Tora, and Enuff Z’nuff; London, Saigon Kick, Europe, There were bands led by guitarists thrown out of other bands, like the Vinnie Vincent Invasion or Jake E. Lee’s Badlands, and there was a band made up of musicians thrown out of the Vinnie Vincent Invasion, Slaughter.
And Britny Fox. Wanna understand Hair Metal? Here you go:
It’s got everything; this video is Hair Metal broken into its essential amino acids. There’s:
- Steven Tyler’s non-union Mexican equivalent.
- A gray world of drudgery being brought to life by the power of Rock and Roll. (This was an omnipresent trope in HM music videos. Bands were always bursting into classrooms and teenage bedrooms to liberate them.)
- Cowboy boots worn on the outside of leather trousers.
- A cartoonish authority figure being petard-hoisted.
- The drummer does drumstick tricks.
- Guitar solo featuring that Eddie Van Halen tippity-tap bullshit.
- Coiffures.
- Bouffants.
- These boys done got their hair did.
- Look at this bullshit:
- Hair’s not supposed to do that, no matter what ethnicity you are.
- Chewbacca has less volume than that.
- And this isn’t “long hair.”
- “Long hair” is when you stop going to the barber and let the chips fall as they may.
- This hair got did.
- There were strategic decisions about bangs and layering.
- They meant for it to look like that.
- Can’t be Hair Metal without hair, now can it?
1983 to 1992, that was it for Hair Metal and the Sunset Strip and all those boys in their spandex and mascara. Quiet Riot’s first album went to #1 in 1983, and in 1992?
And it turns out if you’re dressed like this…
…you look like a complete asshole standing next to the guy in the cardigan. The thing about wearing a costume is that everyone else needs to be, too, or you just look silly, and silly is the worst thing a manly man can be. Hair Metal disappeared overnight. The music-buying public had moved on from junkies in spandex to junkies in flannel. The bands in Seattle were authentic, or at least inarticulate in a way that read as authentic, and so Rolling Stone and the record companies bought rain jackets and flew up north to sign everyone and his brother just the same way they had on the Strip.
And we left it there in the past, everyone but Chuck Klosterman, a slightly shameful Rock and Roll detour. Prog Rock was embarrassing, sure, but at least the guys could play. Same with Fusion. All that synth shit still sounds dated, but there were melodies: Don’t You Want Me by the Human League is catchier than any number of HM band’s entire catalogs put together. But Hair Metal? No cloaked figure leaves a bottle of brandy on its grave each year; it’s remembered more for the satire it produced–Spinal Tap, among others–than the actual music. Not even fit to be used ironically.
But maybe it was music for dreamers, dreamers with hearts of gold. Kids who had to run away high, so they wouldn’t come home low. Could be it was for folks with hearts like open books for the whole world to read. Little something to keep ’em together at the seams.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WAZ60xA9wo
And maybe one day it will return home.
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