INTRODUCTION
This book, which at times seemed more like an unruly beast about to turn on its masters and engulf them in flames than a mere collection of inert words on a page, is complete. Our sincerest hope is that with its publication, an enormous debt will be repaid.
Although we’ve both spent our careers writing about artists who inhabit any number of musical genres, it is the hard rock music of the ’80s—call it “glam metal” if you must, and “hair metal” if you’re itching for a fight in the tweet-o-sphere—that first captured our ears and teenage imaginations. It gave us the bug, as they say, and we still have it. This music, inspired by ’70s bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Kiss, Cheap Trick, and, most unambiguously, Van Halen, sounded larger than life and incorporated unforgettable sing-along choruses, chest-beating riffs, cocky swagger, Technicolor glitz, detonated drums, and, in the fleet fingers of the many guitar gods who emerged from the era, a pure athleticism that was nothing short of jaw-dropping.
There was something else fundamental to this genre, a common thread that emerged as we were reporting back to each other on a just-completed interview or on the progress of a given chapter. Almost every person we spoke to for this book exhibited a single-mindedness, work ethic, confidence, and, yes, courage, that was nothing short of indomitable. That determination, more than the outrageous dress, massive hair, pointy guitars, and not-infrequently sexist videos, is the shared DNA that connects the characters in this story. No one stumbled into this (okay, maybe Brian Baker of Junkyard did), and you won’t find a single character who confesses, “I never planned to make this a career. I was in art school and sort of just joined a band for fun.” The price of admission to this rarefied world was to check your backup plan at the door and dedicate yourself to endless practice, relentless self-promotion, nonstop hustling, and, often, the gobbling of enough drugs and alcohol to kill a large dog or maybe a small horse—take your pick. This was total-immersion rock ’n’ roll.
The experience of being in the audience during this era was equally all-consuming; performances were not only spectacles but also celebrations. If fans didn’t leave a show grinning from ear to ear and feeling like they had just attended the biggest, loudest party in the world then they simply hadn’t gotten their money’s worth—regardless of how many crew members and trucks were employed in the transportation and maintenance of all the towering amplifier stacks, massive drum kits, risers, ramps, walkways, flash pots, hydraulics, lights, confetti, lasers, and, of course, sound systems that were essential attractions of this spectacular rock ’n’ roll circus.
For kids living far from the bright lights of the Strip or unable to sneak out to the shows, some consolation could be found in the fact that MTV served up a steady regimen of the aforementioned music videos—clips whose production aesthetic did its best to replicate the explosive spectacle of the glam-metal concert experience while also brazenly advancing the argument that no girl or woman could resist the sexual allure of the featured players. Videos like Mötley Crüe’s woman-hunting “Looks That Kill” or Warrant’s firehose-flaunting “Cherry Pie” may have offended some female staffers at MTV, but to most American teens of the era they were one thing and one thing only: awesome.
Speaking of sex, this seems as good a time as any to address the fact that this work chronicles a bygone era where notions of sexism and gender politics and the disease of addiction were still relatively crude. Like the culture around them, most of the artists in this book have evolved and have also become fathers, mothers, and—yikes!—grandparents. That said, if you’re hoping for an outpouring of regret or a litany of mea culpas, you’ve come to the wrong place. Our primary goal was to uncover what really happened from the people who lived it, not to make them apologize for it.
If anything, glam metal’s greatest sin was arguably that by the end of the ’80s it had begun to suffer from a total lack of imagination and was functioning largely by rote mimesis. New bands looked and sounded alike and were marketed so similarly that it would have been virtually impossible for them not to blur together in the eyes and ears of the fans. Something had to change, and it did, seemingly overnight. It’s probably not a spoiler to note that virtually every musician you will meet in this book saw his or her career disintegrate soon after September 24, 1991, when, as the story goes, a meteor known as Nirvana’s Nevermind impacted the musical landscape and raised a massive dust cloud that forever altered the entire climate of the business. The decade of decadence, as Mötley Crüe dubbed it, had come to a close, and acts that had sold millions of albums, packed arenas, and dominated MTV’s rotation didn’t just slowly fade out of fashion; they slammed headfirst into an immovable wall of antipathy. Overnight, not only had glam metal become superannuated but it was deemed unmentionable and untouchable—and anyone tainted by the genre became equally undesirable. The ecosystem suffered a total collapse.
This musical apocalypse is where we initially planned to end our story. But as we assembled the chapters that chronicle the rapid demise of the genre, we realized that it was just too much of a … what’s the literary term for it? Oh right, a total bummer to finish on such a sad note. The truth of the matter is that there actually is a happy conclusion; it just took a couple of decades to reveal itself.
Our epilogue explores how in the twenty-first century, a significant subset of fans can’t seem to get enough of this music. What once was dismissed as anachronistic schlock is the new classic rock. A reunited Poison still routinely tour arenas and outdoor sheds, compelling tens of thousands of cross-generational concertgoers to raise their lighters (or cellphones) high in the air on a nightly basis. Mötley Crüe, armed with flamethrowers, flying drum kits, and enough pyro and explosions to light up a small nation-state, played to upwards of a million fans over the course of their 2014–15 “final tour” and were the subject of a recent Netflix biopic. Guns N’ Roses, with perennial adversaries Axl and Slash back in cahoots, have to date grossed an estimated half-billion dollars on their current worldwide jaunt, selling out stadiums from L.A. to Lisbon to Lima.
And while they aren’t out packing “enormodomes,” many of the other bands chronicled in this book are back on the road, playing festivals, corporate events, casinos, and themed cruises to a growing audience. The hard rock and hair metal fan base never went away—it just got older, became gainfully employed, and spawned children that wanna rock right along with them. That’s a much more uplifting way to wrap things up, right?
Now cut those houselights and cue the fucking pyro!
—Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock
PART I
EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!
Since its inception, hard rock has maintained a core audience that sustains it through times when the mainstream is occupied elsewhere. The period at the tail end of the ’70s, where our story begins, was one of these troughs in popularity for the genre. While initiates continued to fill venues when bands like Kiss and Black Sabbath rolled through town, the vast majority of the music-buying public was more interested in new wave groups like the Knack, the Go-Go’s, the Cars, the Police, and Elvis Costello and the Attractions—bands who embraced synthesizers, eschewed guitar heroics, and whose angular riffs and short, spiky hair owed much more to punk and mod fashion than to the bell-bottomed likes of Led Zeppelin or Thin Lizzy. “The industry was looking at the local new wave and punk scenes,” recalls Rudy Sarzo, the bassist in a struggling L.A. “dinosaur” act called Quiet Riot.
Both inspiring and confounding to players like Sarzo was the ascendancy of Van Halen, a four-piece hard rock band from Pasadena whose electrifying live performances, striking blond-maned front man, and resident guitar wunderkind were such an undeniable force that they transcended the record industry’s genre bias and landed a deal with Warner Bros. Rec-ords. The group’s success, however, did not trickle down to other acts occupying the same stylistic lane. “No one seemed to be interested in the other bands,” recalls Dokken drummer “Wild” Mick Brown, at the time bashing the skins in a Sunset Strip outfit called the Boyz. “Which I thought was weird, because it was like, ‘Don’t you think the record companies would want, like, nine more Van Halens?’”
They didn’t.
Refusing to be stymied by the indifference of the major labels, many young groups like Mötley Crüe and Ratt (then Mickey Ratt), adopted a do-or-die DIY approach, self-financing recordings and pouring their resources into over-the-top concert productions that were as flashy as they were foolhardy. Whether it was Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx slathering his leathers with pyro gel and lighting himself on fire or the young men of W.A.S.P. hurling handfuls of raw meat at their audiences and sending flames rippling across the ceiling of the tiny Troubadour club, the bands employed whatever means they could marshal to make their mark and give the fans a night they still haven’t forgotten. “For the early guys it was all about the music and the shows,” says Metal Blade Records founder Brian Slagel.
“The record companies wanted Duran Duran. They wanted new wave,” recalls Alan Niven, then toiling for an L.A.-based independent music importer and distributor named Greenworld Distribution. “So if you wanted to get further you had to have some imagination. You had to have a little bit of wheel-and-deal. Because that was the only way that you were going to start building your following.”
1
“THE PUSSY-PLUCKING-POSSE POCKET OF HOLLYWOOD”
DANA STRUM (bassist, bad axe, vinnie vincent invasion, slaughter) In the late ’70s I was playing with a band called Bad Axe. We were a Hollywood circuit band playing the same clubs as London, which was Nikki Sixx, and Suite 19, with Greg Leon and Tommy Lee. We were headlining the Starwood, headlining the Whisky, the normal thing.
STEPHEN QUADROS (drummer, Snow) The Whisky was the house that Hendrix played, Cream played, Zeppelin … the list goes on and on, the people that played that place. That’s the club you wanted to play, just because of the history. But the Starwood was the Wild West. It had no age limit. The behind-the-scenes stories, the dressing room, the wild partying, the drugs, the alcohol, it was a completely different vibe.
GREG LEON (guitarist, Suite 19, Dubrow, Dokken) There was the Hot 100 Club upstairs, which was the VIP area, and that led to the backstage area, which had these secret rooms. So if you met girls or you wanted to party or whatever, you could go back there and get away from everybody else. The policy was basically ask for it and you got it. Cocaine was rampant. Quaaludes were everywhere. The place was basically a front for drugs, as everybody knows.
MICHAEL ANTHONY (bassist, Van Halen) The upstairs area was more of like a local hangout scene. There’d probably be people up there doing some blow or something. It was more of just where the cool people would go.
NEIL ZLOZOWER (photographer) I went to see Van Halen at the Starwood, probably in 1977. But right around those years, those were the years of the Rorer/Lemmon 714’s. In other words, Quaaludes. And I used to love Quaaludes. I remember going to the Starwood, probably I was upstairs in the VIP section, probably took a Quaalude before the band came on, and all I remember is waking up at the end of the show going, “That wasn’t so fucking good…” I think I passed out during their whole set.
DANA STRUM Had it not been for the Starwood I wouldn’t have seen Randy.
KELLY GARNI (bassist, Quiet Riot) I met Randy Rhoads at John Muir Middle School in Burbank in seventh grade. He was an oddball kid like me and we gravitated toward each other. We started playing together, and as far as we were concerned, you had to somehow be involved in Hollywood to make it happen. That’s where all the cool clubs were. That’s where all the cool people were. That’s where all the rock stars hung out.
KELLE RHOADS (musician; Randy Rhoads’ brother) Randy and I played together in a band called Violet Fox when we were kids. But by late ’72 that had already broken up. Once Kelly and Randy met, it was always Randy and Kelly. They had like six or seven different bands before it turned into Quiet Riot.
KELLY GARNI Quiet Riot was formed in 1974, largely because of our meeting with Kevin [DuBrow, vocalist]. He really wasn’t what we were looking for. We were so into Alice Cooper and David Bowie and that really glam, shock rock kind of thing. Whereas Kevin was more of a Rod Stewart/Steve Marriott kind of a guy. We didn’t think his look went with us, either. But he was extremely persistent and knew how to create a band and drive it forward, and we really kind of lacked that. He recognized that Randy overshadowed everyone with his talent, and he said, “I need to be with this guy.” He saw the same thing I saw, to be honest with you.
KELLE RHOADS When Kevin met Kelly and Randy, they were playing backyard parties and just doing local, jamming, garage-type stuff. Kevin was the one who brought them into Hollywood. He told them, “No, we can play in the clubs, we can make money, there can be a career strategy here.” And Randy liked that. Randy listened to Kevin and took his advice.
BOB NALBANDIAN (journalist) Locally, everyone knew who Randy was. He was supposed to be the next Eddie Van Halen. That’s what everyone would say.
KIM FOWLEY (impresario, Producer, L.A. Scenester) There wasn’t any vibe around L.A. when Van Halen first started playing. They were these guys who played Gazzarri’s and now and then would sell out in Pasadena. They were a big deal at the Golden West Ballroom in Norwalk—the guitarist was hot and the singer was a James Brown version of Cal Worthington [a famous car dealer who advertised on television] and that was about it. A few nymphomaniacs, these four blondes with big tits, used to talk about the group quite a bit.
ALEX VAN HALEN (drummer, Van Halen) Gazzarri’s, we auditioned twice. The Starwood we auditioned a couple of times. Walter Mitty’s, The Rock Corporation, Barnacle Bill’s, you name it. You name any club that was around at that time and we were there.
BOBBY BLOTZER (drummer, Airborn, Dokken, Ratt) Edward was just fucking unbelievable. And David Lee Roth was, you know, front-man king.
STEPHEN PEARCY (singer, Mickey Ratt, Ratt) I met Roth in the late ’70s. And I eventually told my guys, “Hey, you gotta go and see this band. You’re gonna shit when you hear the guitar player. He’s nothing like you’ve ever seen or heard.” They’d go, “Yeah, sure, sure.” And when they did they went, “Holy fuck!”
MICK MARS (guitarist, White Horse, Vendetta, Mötley Crüe) They kicked ass. I had a band called White Horse who played with Van Halen a few times. At Gazzarri’s. Ed was always great … My mouth would fall open.
KELLY GARNI Randy did go and see Van Halen at Gazzarri’s, and he met Eddie Van Halen and Eddie kind of blew him off a little bit. But that was okay with Randy, because Eddie wasn’t anybody to him. He wasn’t in competition with him. He never saw one guitar player in his life as competition.
ROSS HALFIN (photographer) Randy Rhoads was more tasteful than Edward, who was just jerking off.
KELLY GARNI Van Halen were sort of an oddity in our world. We were familiar with them, but the best way to put it is, that we sort of ran in different circles. We were pretty much the house band at the Starwood, something we had worked our way up to from the first time we played there and got paid with a case of beer. And Van Halen was down the street at Gazzarri’s, which in the ’80s became a very popular heavy metal club but back in the ’70s was more of a college-kid hangout. It was a different type of person that came to see us at the Starwood.
Copyright © 2021 by Thomas Beaujour and Richard Bienstock
