S&D: Glam Metal/Hair Metal

Blackie's lyrics to Rebel in the F.D.G. are a nice hedonistic fantasy, exactly the type of song I'd love to play while driving 80 miles an hour on an empty highway and dream of the unattainable "glamorous" form of debauchery where there are no hangovers, any jail sentences are cushy, you don't wind up accidentally killing anybody, and then when your body is partied out, it just dies peacefully. also killer guitar riff.

https://genius.com/Wasp-rebel-in-the-fdg-lyrics

xpost - I think everyone was in London for a minute, that band was like the glam metal farm team

right!? “if you wanna be in this scene you need your girlfriend’s makeup, a teasing comb & to be a former member of London”

I’m still amused that there was both a UK band, London SS, in the original punk scene and the US glam metal London where both bands were starting points for a whole bunch of players. (As separate from the other UK punk band simply called London.)

Didn't London put in a brief appearance in The Decline of Western Civilization Pt. II, or am I thinking of Odin?

they featured quite a bit in Decline 2, on-camera interview clips & some stage stuff i think

they even said themselves in the doc that they were like a gateway band or something

'Bankok Shocks Siagon Shakes Hanoi Rocks' is one of my all time favorites. It's a good and sleazy but has quite a bit of power pop. Their other albums have really good tracks and worth hearing too. I had heard of the band as a teenager but never got any of their music until Geffen put them out on CD in '89.

Axl probably the best lyricist by far?

no.

Man, Hanoi Rock is pretty good. All I knew was what they looked like and their connection to Motley Crue so I never bothered giving them a shot.

Here's a question for armchair historians of the era. The first Van Halen album came out in 1978. So what or when was the first album to feature a finger-tappy guitarist clearly trying to imitate EVH?

Nursery Cryme, 1971

there were a couple Quiet Riot albums with Randy Rhoads that only came out overseas but I've never heard them

It doesn't answer your question but I'm actually curious if Steve Hackett was the first guy to do it on electric guitar in a pop context.

I'm not including Steve Hackett (who def. tapped) or that other guy people cite, I'm talking about the wheedle-wheedle folks clearly influenced by EVH.

Those Quiet Riot albums with Rhoads came out right after VH, right? Or more or less the same time? I wonder how much of a flashy Rhoads showcase they are. Anyway, I'm mostly wondering how long it took for guitar players to essentially figure out what EVH was up to. Because for sure by the early '80s there were a ton of imitators. But for example, Steve Vai didn't release any of that kind of stuff (afaik) until around 1983. Or Satriani, his first album didn't come out until 1986. Clearly he knew about tapping before that, but I have no idea what he had been up to before that. Just teaching?

Here's something I just dug up:

In a new interview with the "Behind The Vinyl" podcast, Joe Satriani was asked if he started using the technique of tapping notes on his guitar when he first heard Eddie Van Halen in 1978. He responded: "I'd been tapping before that. I think, just like Eddie, 'cause we were the same age and started playing pretty much at the same time, we saw other people on television doing it. So I saw the guitar players in WISHBONE ASH. There was a show in America called 'Don Kirshner's (Rock Concert)', and I think WISHBONE ASH was on one night. And I think my dad was watching it. And I just walked into the room for a second, and I looked and I see the guy playing with his fingers. And I'm, like, 'Oh my god!' I just went right up to my room, picked up my guitar and went, 'That's a great idea. I'm gonna do that all over the place.'

"My group of friends, everyone was tapping, but the great brilliance of Eddie was what he did with it," Joe continued. "And that's what you can say about everything. We knew the same chords — there's a million guitar players that know exactly the same 12 notes, the same chords, we buy the same strings, we're using the same guitars, pretty much. So what makes Eddie so special? Why did that genius just say, 'Well, I'll take that and just do this with it.' But he did, and all of us responded like it was godsent.

"The first time I heard Eddie was when 'Eruption' came to the radio, and I was sitting there with my guitar just jamming along with the radio, and, yeah, my jaw dropped. And I put my hands down and I went, 'Oh my god. I'm in the presence of greatness. That guy knows how to use things that I know.' It's, like, I've got all the tools laid out on my table just like him, but wow, look what he's doing with them.' And it just made me smile. I was so happy.

"The other part that made me so happy was because he played so aggressively and so melodically — the whole song, like it was a whole Eddie Van Halen world that he would show you," Satriani added. "But it was fun. It was rock and roll. It wasn't perfect. It wasn't pretentious. It was still, like, 'Let's just have fun.' And I thought, 'I need to get everybody that I know in this town to like this, because this is gonna be good for all of us guitar players that really wanna play.' Cause it was that attitude at the time — I was feeling like people were telling us, 'Slow down. Don't play so many notes. No feedback. Try to make your guitar sound like clean guitars from the '60s or something like that.' We were waiting for somebody like Eddie to come along and just like reinvent it. And he did. And it was truly great."

Eddie has said in the past that he was inspired to start doing the finger-tapping trick after watching LED ZEPPELIN at the Los Angeles Forum in the early 1970s. Jimmy Page played the solo from "Heartbreaker", using both hands to tap out notes on the neck of the guitar, which inspired Eddie to take the technique and refine it, enabling him to play a seemingly impossible flurry of notes and pinched harmonics.

"It's like having a sixth finger on your left hand," he explained in 1978, according to BBC. "Instead of picking, you're hitting a note on the fretboard."

DEEP PURPLE's Ritchie Blackmore reportedly claimed that he had seen CANNED HEAT guitarist Harvey Mandel using tapping onstage as early as 1968. DOKKEN guitarist George Lynch corroborated this, mentioning that both he and Van Halen saw Mandel employ "a neo-classic tapping thing" at the Starwood in West Hollywood during the 1970s. Mandel used extensive two-handed tapping techniques on his 1973 album "Shangrenade".

No mention of Hackett, sad face.

the secret tapping dude is Harvey Mandell

Would love to tap Mandel

Cristo Redentor rules

Hell yeah!!!!!

the snake, baby

I've read from George Lynch that many of the other LA guitarists saw Eddie in the clubs and started picking up stuff even before they got big.

I'd say the two guys that Eddie probably picked up some of that style was Richie Blackmore and then Michael Schenker as they both did all those triad hammer-ons based off a pick. They did not go out and tap the first note, but some of the technique is pretty similar. Allan Holdsworth was the guy that Van Halen was even kind of blown away by that type of playing as he takes that hammer-on technique really to a virtuoso level.

in the book Van Halen Rising, there's a part where Eddie and Lynch go see Mandel together to check out the tapping. Also I guess Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top would do like single note two hand taps on certain riffs and Eddie loved ZZ Top (he's only human after all)

Also they open for UFO and he like super woodshedded for weeks before to totally blow Michael Schenker out of the water because people were saying he was hot shit, real Michael Jordan stuff haha

Maybe Ronnie Montrose was doing something similar too, Montrose were a pretty big influence on VH/glam metal I guess.

he also loved the shit out of Cactus who I'm not sure I ever heard

guys

i thought you were talking about Howie Mandell and i was SO confused

lmao

https://uproxx.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/gettyimages-140625530.jpg

well shit check this guy out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y1WK040cAI

Is there recorded footage of Page tapping during the solo of "Heartbreaker" (pre-78)? I don't think I've seen that in any versions I've seen.

Fans of the Nothing But a Good Time book might enjoy the discussion with its authors on "The Best Show" podcast (w/Tom Scharpling). It goes on for over an hour. At the end the authors field questions such as "What would you consider the Citizen Kane of hair metal?"

I’m curious what the answers were.

My 7 year old has been going to a school of rock intro class which got him really into Van Halen. Later I showed him a Poison video and he described them as “basically four David Lee Roths”

The Citizen Kane of hair metal = first Montrose album, or maybe first VH. Definitely not Shout at the Devil.

*spoiler alert*

One of the authors said Dr. Feelgood by Motley Crue was the Citizen Kane of hair metal. The other author suggested Poison's first album, but then kind of conceded that it's more like the Fast Times at Ridgemont High of hair metal.

dr feelgood is way too late in the era its gotta be the first ratt album or something

Citizen Kane of hair metal I'd suggest is the first Van Halen record (which Montrose for sure laid the groundwork for). "Dr. Feelgood," that's more of a symbolic last gasp, where the band peaked in popularity, got re-signed to a bazillion dollar contract and yet, never released anything of note ever again. And neither did any of their peers, afaict.

oh actually its bangkok shocks by hanoi rocks.

It's down to how you interpret "Citizen Kane," whether it means the blueprint for everything else that follows (in which case, yeah, Montrose or Van Halen) or whether it means the ultimate expression of the genre. The one author of the book thought Dr. Feelgood was the latter, iow the quintessential highpoint of the genre.

Hanoi Rocks and Montrose feel like ur-texts; I'm not sure how much hair metal resembles those acts (musically). I feel Van Halen really established the sleazy party vibe, and their adherents did their best to absorb the influence despite their general lack of inspiration or talent.

Seems like Hysteria>>>>Dr. Feelgood using that Citizen Kane metric.

One interesting thing in the book that the guys kept talkin about is that a ton of the early shit was coming out of later-day Christian Death style deathrock. Rozz Williams was huge in LA. Nikki Sixx was in London and there were a hundred other bands doing the same shit. It was a twisted post goth thing as much as it was David Lee Roth for at least a year.

You mean London the band, to be clear

yes ty

I think the problem with diagnosing a Citizen Kane without nominating something like Hysteria is that, for most of that core 84-90 period, most of the albums aren’t as well renowned as the big singles, the image or the live show.

Def Leppard an obvious exception (but again, how much or how far did DL transcend the hair metal scene with such gargantuan albums?), Crue probably by Dr Feelgood, maybe Poison to an extent

DL are too British hair metal is USA baby

Well part of the thing about Hysteria is that, in the book in question, the authors decided to focus on the US-based bands with some connection to the Sunset Strip scene, therefore Def Leppard wasn't a part of the conversation. Which I thought was kind of unfair and I expressed that opinion upthread. But the authors say in the podcast, if they had included foreign bands in their scope the whole project would've been exponentially more vast and daunting. Which makes sense. But I still think Pyromania and Hysteria were crucial inputs to that scene.

I sorta mutter about hair metal in my old piece on Hysteria:

https://thequietus.com/articles/09833-def-leppard-hysteria

But basically those two American smash hit albums of theirs were...like, TOO good. Or too hyperpolished and pristine, which is not a complaint, but a description. The hair metal types were essentially sloppy/dramatic trashiness, DL and Lange were going "What if glam rock was industrial pop shot through with lasers?"

But how many of those LA bands would have killed to have Mutt Lange produce their music and make them sound less sloppy & trashy

One does wonder!

Slippery When Wet: the Citizen Kane of Hair Metal
New Jersey: the Chimes at Midnight of New Jerseys

As ultimate expression of the genre Dr Feelgood tracks in a way

For me personally I’d say Cinderella “Long Cold Winter” but mostly just bc they’re a better band? Idk. I love Motley but I don’t wanna give them that much credit lol

Whoever said RATT can meet me in the parking lot

IMO Hysteria is the hair metal album Elephant in the Room, compounded by the fact they’re not American, never mind from LA, so as said they’ve always been thought of as a band not strictly ‘of’ hair-metal

It helps to have good timing - if you release your biggest album in 1987 - the peak of hair metal IMO - you’re laughing.
As already mentioned, as big as it was Dr Feelgood seems “late”