S&D: Glam Metal/Hair Metal

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

That gives me the warmest feelings I've ever had for a Weezer member maybe ever.

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.

I mean it didn't help them in any way being wiped out with all the rest of em once the combo of Pantera/Biohazard + Nirvana/Pearl Jam swept their middle school fanbase away, but in retrospect it does seem to have given them more cred.

I think my (v possibly mistaken) 11-12yo pov was that Extreme was more like the poppy end of arty funk-metal like FNM or Living Colour. I do think they were going for something pretty different by III Sides to Every Story at the least, although it has been years since I listened.

there should be a Cock Rock Cruise

ugly kid joe always felt like they dressed the grunge part but were really of that before time

I just listened to Winger's "Headed for a Heartbreak" btw and the extended solo still sounds pretty epic.

xxxpost I mean I did think about Living Colour when I made my original post as Nuno's riff style has some similiarities to Vernon Reid, Pornograffiti has elements of sleaze, but there's a pretty well-regulated limit to how far it goes (unlike most hair metal), and the choruses are more Van Halen-esque with smooth, layered vocal harmonies, rather than the sleek,gang-style vocal harmonies of hair metal.

and yeah, III Sides pretty much leaves any connection with hair metal behind. it's not as arty per say, but Cherone leans a lot more into his Everly Brothers influences on vocals, songs are a little more stylistically varied, with orchestrations used on a few tracks.

haven't heard the debut or Waiting for the Punchline.

Suzy wants her all day sucker suzy wants her all day WHAT

i love the interview in the book w Steve Brown of Trixster. it’s so the opposite of the stories of the early scene bands, like just completely blowing mad piles of cash when the whole scene is literally over

they spent $600k on their second album that came out in ~1992~

and ***$250k*** on the video for the single “Road of a Thousand Dreams” … that MTV didn’t air

sad trombone lol

"Headed for a Heartbreak" actually does some pretty tricky things with tonality! The verses are mostly over Bb and C chords with a lot of extensions, while the melody is largely centred around C. It might lead you to expect an F major resolution in the chorus but the chorus mostly seems like G minor. Then the bridge is built over a Db pedal with Db-Eb movement in the chords and a melody that seems centred more around Bb. Then the last 3 minutes of the song are a long guitar solo.

Like, Poison wasn't doing things like that.

That makes sense, Neanderthal.

imo Winger are the Queensryche of this genre, they maybe more proficient & do better things musically but it will never ever (for me) save them from their lead singer being an unrepentant douchecanoe imo

interesting how quiet this thread was all day in the uk time zone.
also, this thread revival made me dig out a cd i picked up cheap a couple of years back, and had never listened to it.
the debut by l.a. guns.
damn, it was a lot of fun, i listened to it all the way through which i never expected to.

I went to a college with a guy who, well into the latter half of the '90s, would argue strenuously that Kip Winger was a criminally underrated musical genius.

wanted to post two minnesota hair metal era curios....and two of the more ridiculous (or ridiculously awesome) bands of that era

1) SLAVE RAIDER

Staples of the Minnesota club and ballroom scene, led by Chainsaw Caine (who now owns the traveling hair metal tribute band Hairball), they used to do kinda Alice Cooper theatrics, fire stuff and the chainsaw itself. He was really bitter about Jackyl's success; he claims they saw Slave Raider and stole the bit. Anyway, absolutely knucklehead silly shit, but catchy. Always got the sense Chainsaw was in on the joke. This video is so hilarious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuGTrTPut1w

2) MORTICIA

Ex-punks who started as a goth/deathrock type band, had more synths like Sister of Mercy or something...eventually ended up an odd mix of goth and sleaze metal...one of them I believe went on to to be a touring member of the Cult.

i think they are still around kinda, went back to the goth roots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUyrpwG9eCU