S&D: Glam Metal/Hair Metal

srsly? George Lynch comes to mind for a start

I would say Warren Dimartini and George Lynch were the true shredders in the LA scene (Rhoads excepted as being more than just that scene)

Paul Gilbert got a little mainstream with Mr. Big

Ah, OK, I was thinking about e.g. Motley Crue and Poison. I actually only know a couple of songs by Dokken and Ratt. (Didn't recall "Round & Round" being that much of a lead guitar showcase.) Was thinking of Rhoads as a different scene, yeah, but maybe he should count.

now being reminded of the "Blues" Saraceno era of Poison, meh

(which, btw, Blues isn't a stage name)

I have much to learn about glam metal shredding, clearly.

who were the WORST glam guitar players

Mick Mars and C.C. DeVille, and whoever was in Trixter.

Guitar magazine, which was mostly written by rockist snobs, once said glam metal eventually turned into "Coke jingles with a guitar solo thrown in for street credibility" by the late 80s, and i hafta say, twas a good zing.

CC deVille for sure

I didn't think Mars and deVille were more virtuosic than Slash?

Glam metal (and glam-metal adjacent) earworms from lesser lights that I enjoy muchly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaXh96lsTlQ

Later-LA group Killingbird take on The Cure and turn a romantic song into something sleazy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt7pfTnaPR4

Not glam, really, more AC/DC-inspired (from Australia, even!), but a killer riff while the singer abuses alcohol but not the wait staff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK2iq-jClLw

Fun fact: I interviewed Ron Keel for a local Columbus weekly when he was living there doing Iron Horse, a biker-country kinda thing. He has since gone full country. He was also on the Yngwie Steeler album that is kinda classic. The video is hilarious!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BnJRwe8CGM

Beautiful Creatures is a post-Bang Tango project and I love the triumphant psychedelic guitars and how they mash with the down-and-out lyrical 'tude.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZuXwyZANI0

Sweet Dolls cover by the often overlooked Shotgun Messiah. Tim Skold went on to some renown in industrial metal circles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcDEk6XEwio

Columbus group put out a record on Go Kart records. This song is just perfect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0QP_5RQIYE

DreamWorks signee from Washington state at the height of grunge but they didn't fool me, this is a very glammy track if you ask me!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da11syT3i04

"Fly Me Courageous" is their go-to glam rock moment but man, this song... I ran into Kevin Kinney after a show in Raleigh at a convenience store and I told him Smoke was my favorite album of theirs. He looked at me and wryly responded, "Yeah, they love that one in Germany."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruX1dzsM4Ek

Kerrang! heroes not really glam, but dood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyXq7Qmua7A

I picked up this CD on sale for $9.99 which was a great price for a new CD back then. Drunken blues metal done right.

Hardline got noticed as a vehicle for some Journey guys. This song is cheesy as fuck but I remember one drunken evening playing it ten times in a row and the chorus stayed in my head for the next three weeks.

Chuck Eddy's favorite band, the pride of Hagerstown, Maryland, I love this video - there's new wavers, preps, everyone's invited to the Kix party in this early video, as long as they're cool (and a kid).

This song and band got some mileage, but special shout out for the version in Decline which is decadence personified.

I can sometimes be convinced this is my favorite song by anyone. Heavy Pettin' seems like glam's version of Diamond Head in that they had everything they should have had - songs, sound, looks, even pretty good timing kicking around with Def Leppard also emerging (Lettin' Loose - they must have hated the letter G - came out the same year as Pyromania) but they never did anything. Pity.

Oops...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCosZhWikhA

Hardline got noticed as a vehicle for some Journey guys. This song is cheesy as fuck but I remember one drunken evening playing it ten times in a row and the chorus stayed in my head for the next three weeks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQMwY66HdLk

Chuck Eddy's favorite band, the pride of Hagerstown, Maryland, I love this video - there's new wavers, preps, everyone's invited to the Kix party in this early video, as long as they're cool (and a kid).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFWSoBF8Ks

This song and band got some mileage, but special shout out for the version in Decline which is decadence personified.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P71FibOAUPk

I can sometimes be convinced this is my favorite song by anyone. Heavy Pettin' seems like glam's version of Diamond Head in that they had everything they should have had - songs, sound, looks, even pretty good timing kicking around with Def Leppard also emerging (Lettin' Loose - they must have hated the letter G - came out the same year as Pyromania) but they never did anything. Pity.

i think they were answering my question about "worst glam shredders" when they said Mars and DeVille.

btw this old thread is hilarious: https://www.harmonycentral.com/forums/topic/961269-why-the-cc-deville-hate/page/2/

evh1984
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Posted August 6, 2010
Deville was well on his way to becoming the white Hendrix before they derailed him.

i mean i love poison for being stupid fun but he really was fkn terrible

what i *do* love about Poison is all the stories about how hard they worked to make it. like they may not have had enough brains collectively to power a toy car BUT they were hungry af and took it seriously. i like that.

Oh that makes way more sense. Yeah, those were the guys I was thinking about originally.

lol this feels like the tuneless guitar solo Nigel plays at one point in Spinal Tap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejStUVgMaS4

oh toooootally forgot about this lmao

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5sb93HSh18

I still get a kick out of the fact Brian Baker (Minor Threat, Dag Nasty, Bad Religion) did a stint in fuckin' Junkyard.

i mean i love poison for being stupid fun but he really was fkn terrible

what i *do* love about Poison is all the stories about how hard they worked to make it. like they may not have had enough brains collectively to power a toy car BUT they were hungry af and took it seriously. i like that.

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, May 13, 2021 12:04 AM

By all accounts, Bret Michaels is an insanely nice dude. Dunno about the other guys.

Rikki Rockett always seemed more like someone’s midwestern aunt, he is so dorkily sincere

mr veg used to work for Bill Graham Presents in SF & once refused Bobby Dall backstage access to his own concert bc he wasnt wearing his pass & mr veg didnt know who the fuck he was lmao

Haha!

By all accounts, Bret Michaels is an insanely nice dude. Dunno about the other guys.

I interviewed him once, shortly after I was diagnosed with diabetes (Michaels is a famous diabetic for those who don't know), so I was in a somewhat raw headspace and it became a much deeper conversation than your average plug-the-new-album interview. He is, in fact, very nice, at least in my experience.

WASP continued making great records long past their first three! but maybe they were no longer hair metal at that point

random names my brain is spitting out from ads in old Circus and Hit Paraders:

Brighton Rock
Guiffria
Lexx Diamond
Leatherwolf
Laaz Rockit
Salty Dog
Pretty Maids
Blue Murder

Lillian Axe, don't forget!

And speaking of axes, Lizzy Borden.

haha both good ones

Rock City Angels

Yo, I bought that Rock City Angels on vinyl just within the last year. It's not quite as good as I remembered, but I'm not mad at it.

btw LEGS Diamond not Lexx

saw Rock City Angels open for Jimmy Page, second show I saw as a kid

Hair metal is one of those things I loathed when it was current but I'm sometimes nostalgic for now. I can't imagine I'd want to hear whole albums by anyone but there are tons of great that I kind of love. I also strongly separate GnR from hair metal and remember me and another guy my age once arguing with a bunch of guys how they weren't in the same camp as Poison and Warrant but they refused to believe us.

One of my colleagues was in the LA hair band scene during this era, and has crazy stories about being in a love triangle with a woman and the singer of one of the bands everyone here knows, etc. His band had some benefactor who funded them (so they didn't need day jobs) and they were getting groomed for success and a major label deal, but then, as he put it, "Nevermind came out, and it was all over". Like they tried to wear flannels and shit for a while but it didn't work so he gave it up and went back to school.

Heh, I remember Brighton Rock from CBC's Video Hits. "Hangin' High and Dry" still gets in my head once in a while.

The weird thing about GNR is that they totally *were* in the same camp, traveled in the same musical circles, etc, just never were into the hair and costumes and poppy stuff. A lot of that could have simply boiled down to personality. Axl and Izzy were like stray dogs, Slash was an LA insider, Duff a northwest outsider. Adler was probably the most in line with the Sunset Strip scene, and as referenced above the band quickly put an end to his big drum set excess. Clearly the group was on a different level than a lot of their peers, though, which is why Appetite both sold a bajillion and stands up better than most of the other LA hard rock records of the era. Ironically, perhaps, they got a lot more ridiculous and OTT later, after the glam/hair metal stuff had all died down.

Poison in the book come off more or less pretty well in every regard aside from their music. They work hard, they're nice, etc. They and Faster Pussycat are always being referenced as bands that just didn't know how to play. And yeah, Mick Mars (who is almost a decade older than his bandmates) acknowledges toward the end of the book that he never studied scales or really moved much beyond being a rhythm guitarist.

There's a quote in the book from Phil Collen about the danger of less-than-flashy guitar solos in this athletic shredder era. Something like, "you've got shitty songs and shitty lyrics and shitty production and shitty outfits, and now you want to show everyone you're a shitty guitarist, too?" But the post Van Halen shredders were, like, guy from Ratt, George Lynch, guy from White Lion, Paul Gilbert, Nuno, Vinnie Vincent, Jake E. Lee, Rhoads, etc. (This is overlooking the sci-fi weirdoes like Steve Vai or Yngwie or whomever.) I think the book makes a good observation of the trend as a reaction against British guitar hero standards, which were still bluesy and about "feeling," which EVH handily discarded in favor of sheer elation. Regardless, like I was saying earlier about I think Winger (whose guitarist Reb Beach was also something of a shredder with a session dude CV), none of your skill matters if you're willing to sell it out to make boring by the books hair metal boilerplate. The trappings and trends just stifled creativity, which is why something like that White Lion "Wait" solo really sticks out.

Reb Beach had a Berklee degree iirc? Winger's solos stand out too imo! I only know the singles but I kind of felt like they got a bit of a bad rap.

I never really thought of Extreme or the predominantly instrumental guitar mag shredders as glam metal, nor Ozzy.

Extreme drew some from hair metal but also like, Van Halen, methinks. and by their third album, they were a completely different thing.

Pornograffiti is a lot of fun and I also like III Sides to Every Story.

Maybe these mental barriers should be taken down, though.xp

I think glam/hair metal is ultimately a red herring, because it's as much of a fashion choice as musical choice. So no, Extreme and Ozzy were not really in that mode, but the guitar players definitely intersected with that scene, and of course all their roads (no pun intended) lead back to EVH. Like, the first line of Nuno's wiki bio is basically "Unable to make a dent in the music world with his Boston-based hair metal act Sinful ..." And Ozzy of course preceded the hair metal scene, but he definitely drew band members from it. Jake E. Lee was in one of those early versions of Ratt, etc.

Iirc Beach in the book says he dropped out of Berklee because they frowned upon that sort of flashy playing.

the true shredder stuff was the whole Guitar Institute/Berklee/Shrapnel Records axis, Tony MacApline, Paul Gilbert, Vinnie Moore, David T Chastain, Marty Friedman, Jason Becker etc

still find it hilarious that Rivers Cuomo started out being like a hair metal shredda

I bet a lot of (mostly) dudes were.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0mQlJqOFxY

xpost he said he took guitar lessons from Jim Matheos of Fates Warning (v much not a hair metal dude)

xxxxxpost Around the time of The Ultimate Sin (and forward) Ozzy was going for a glam look at least

omfg at Fogerty video. lol at solo with whammy dive bombs and tapping solo before "Keep on Chooglin'"

there was also "Close My Eyes Forever", so despite his protestations about glam/hair metal, he definitely dipped his toes in the water a *little* bit.

I bet a lot of (mostly) dudes were.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, May 13, 2021 8:39 AM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

when i was an intern at the magazine i worked for, one of the editors had grown up in buffalo with pat wilson from weezer. there was a small group of buffalo ex-pats there, so when weezer was on their green album comeback tour they had a bbq at their place and we got invited. ended up talking to pat about ronnie james dio for a long time, he loved dio...also said he was in weezer for the money at that point