BRET MICHAELS There were flyer wars, let me say this. It was crazy. I’m talking parking-lot-knock-down-drag-out-fistfight material. Over flyers. Because that was your advertising. You either put your flyer up or no one knew you existed.
RIKKI ROCKETT It would get nasty sometimes. It really would.
CHRIS WEBER Back then, if you had a band in L.A. you spent your Friday and Saturday nights flyering for your next show. You would go to any of these copy places—and there were lots of copy places—and you would make two thousand copies of your flyer and you would go out with a staple gun and staple them on top of telephone poles all night long. Or you would go and stand out in front of whatever show was happening and you would pass them out to every single person walking out of the show. A lot of our time was all about promotion.
BRET HARTMAN Friday and Saturday nights on Sunset Boulevard there were, like, hundreds of hair metal bands handing out flyers. And hundreds of girls would come in from all over L.A. in high heels with their hair ratted out. It was just a crazy, magical time.
GINA ZAMPARELLI The flyer wars and the advertising, everybody had to be bigger than the next band. It was promotion that they learned how to do on their own. Nobody taught those guys. So there was a lot to be said about these bands’ individual creativity.
MICK CRIPPS Well, you gotta remember this is an era before the home computer or cell phones. Cable TV was still in its infancy. So it was still like the 1970s, really. You had to do it all on your own, putting up pieces of paper on walls, putting ads in newspapers and things. It was very mechanical, put it that way. It was like horse-and-buggy!
GINA ZAMPARELLI The one thing I saw about Mötley Crüe was they understood overkill. They were, like, guerrilla marketers. I don’t even know how many they made … ten thousand posters, thousands of flyers. Stickers everywhere.
NIKKI SIXX You know, as sad as it sounds, the concept of marketing has always intrigued me. Back in those days I would look at a telephone pole and think, That pole is covered with flyers on Friday, but on Saturday they’re gone. So I would say to the other guys, “We have to get our flyers higher than everyone else’s, because some guy who’s making minimum wage to clean off that pole isn’t going to climb a ladder just to get our shit down. So that will give us multiple impressions.” And the band would look at me and go, “What?” We’d stand on each other’s shoulders and get our flyers way up there. And they’d stay there for weeks.
LIZZIE GREY One time I was putting up these flyers and this guy in a black Mercedes pulls over and goes, “Hey man, you gotta put the flyer up higher. No one’s gonna see it there.” And it was David Lee Roth! He said, “You gotta make it so people can see that thing!”
DAVID LEE ROTH We had a list of fourteen high schools and junior high schools within driving distance, an hour in any direction. We would go out and wait for bad weather so we could have free run of the schools. In every outside locker we’d put a flyer in. We’d flyer the place. If you saw Aerosmith was playing the football stadium, great, that’s perfect, we’ll flyer them. You could get, I believe, four thousand flyers for forty bucks at the instant press and we would break into teams. Ultimately, we had little walkie-talkies because the police would stop one team from flyering cars, and you would know that that was happening so you’d go into overdrive on the other side of the stadium so you could flyer every car. This built up a tremendous following for Van Halen on a very, very grassroots level. On the flyers we’d write, “The People’s Choice.” I got it from Muhammad Ali fight posters.
RIKKI ROCKETT The reason we won that war most of the time is because C.C.’s parents owned a print shop—Barbara’s Place. We had massive amounts of flyers and the ability to make more and more. We’d go out and party or whatever and hang out, hand out flyers and things like that, but then at two in the morning we’d come home and change into crappy clothes and go with a glue mat and start hitting everything that we could.
HOWIE HUBBERMAN Where bands would print up a thousand flyers, Poison would print up ten thousand flyers. And it was very cheap—for ten thousand flyers it might have cost me maybe two hundred bucks. Maybe. And the guys went out and worked the streets every night and got rid of all of them. On the Sunset Strip you would see wall-to-wall Poison flyers.
DUFF MCKAGAN Poison wasn’t my cup of tea. But they knew how to market themselves.
BOBBY DALL Not a day, not a moment went past that we weren’t promoting, or stapling flyers or gluing flyers or knocking on doors or doing the hustle.
RIKKI ROCKETT Sometimes it was a conversation starter with chicks. You’re like, “Oh, for sure they’re going to come…”
SHARE ROSS Walking down the Strip you got flyered every two seconds. “Come see my band, come see my band, come see my band.” Then you were trying to decide if the person you were talking to was definitely a guy as well. Like, I think that was a dude?
CHRIS WEBER You find some girls that you like or that like you and you sort of make them feel like, “Hey, I really want you to come to the show…” And then they get their girlfriends. You would try and make everybody feel a little bit special. That’s how Poison and bands like that did it. They were nice to hang out with and friendly so they’d get a lot of girls coming to their shows, and those girls would get more girls. And then guys would come because the girls were going to the Poison show. And before you know it you have a thousand people at a gig.
JOEY ALLEN If you’ve got a thousand seats to sell, you put out four thousand flyers. And you’ve maybe already got a fan base with five hundred people so hopefully with those flyers you put out, four or five hundred more people come.
BRET HARTMAN Warrant had their flyers everywhere. And they also had that whole sex thing going on. It was kind of tongue-in-cheek and funny, though.
MAX ASHER I remember Poison had slogans, Guns always had slogans. The slogan thing was definitely big. I would say that Warrant got a lot deeper into that after my time in the band.
JOEY ALLEN There’s so many childish things we came up with. “The Horniest Band This Side of Pluto.” “$10 All You Can Eat.”
BRET HARTMAN “If It’s Not Love Use a Glove.” “Sex Police.” You know, like “Dream Police.”
JOEY ALLEN Somebody in the band at one point or another would come up with an idea, we’d all laugh, and it’d go on a poster.
JERRY DIXON If we could make people want to slap us in the face, we knew we had a good flyer.
JOEY ALLEN I mean, a lot of people could look at it nowadays and go, “God, that’s highly misogynistic.” But I grew up with two older sisters and a mother. I’ve got a daughter. I love women to death. I’m a proponent of women’s rights. It has nothing to do with that. It was just to get attention. You wish you could get it with just your music only, but at that time in life that wasn’t the key to the kingdom, you know what I mean?
JOSH LEWIS L.A. is very grid-like, so we would map out the city and say, “Okay, we’re gonna start at Vine, and we’re gonna go from Hollywood down to Melrose.” And we’d hit every single pole. Whenever we’d be like, “Should we hit that pole?” We’d go, “Well, do you want to sell out the show?” We did Vine, Highland, Crescent Heights—I mean all the way to the beach practically—which was miles and miles, but we would just do it. It was craziness.
MICKEY FINN Jetboy prided ourselves on being the flyer kings. When we hit it we hit it harder, bigger than anybody. Somebody posted half a wall? We would do two walls. We would just go crazy. We’d go out with wheat paste at two in the morning, three in the morning, we’d hit billboards and we’d hit street corners. That stems from our punk rock roots.
BILLY ROWE One time Izzy and I borrowed [songwriter and musician] West Arkeen’s car and went out flyering. It was, like, an old El Camino with a cap on the top. And I can remember we got to a stop sign and fucking Axl’s head pops up from the back. And he goes, “What’s goin’ on?” We had no idea he was even in the car. He was under a blanket sleeping.
MICKEY FINN Then we started doing ones where you’d print up, you know, a hundred flyers and then you put it together and it makes one giant ad. Like, next level, man.
DUFF MCKAGAN People would try to fuck up your gear, poster a flyer over your flyers. I was like, “All right…” We all kind of had to put the fucking Vaseline underneath the eyes and get ready for the fight.
MAX ASHER I wish I still had a little phone message that I got from Duff McKagan on the Warrant Hotline number, which was just our personal phone number. We had gone over some Guns N’ Roses posters because their show was already over and Duff called me and was like, “Hey, you little Warrant fuckers, this is Duff from Guns N’ Roses and we’re going to kick your asses if you go over any more of our shit!”
DUFF MCKAGAN That sounds right. Warrant, they’d flyered over our stuff. And we’d just flyered the night before. It’s not fucking cool, you know? And I think it happened one too many times.
JACK RUSSELL I remember driving down Sunset Boulevard and putting posters up—and just trying to get a nail into one of those telephone poles on Sunset Boulevard was an art, because it’s almost solid metal. So we’re pounding them in and I look behind us a couple blocks and there’s Nikki Sixx on the back of a pickup truck, ripping our posters down and putting his up. So what do we do? We turn around, we go back behind him where he couldn’t see us. We tore their posters down and put ours back up.
MICK CRIPPS In L.A. Guns we would talk about doing flyering, put it that way. Because we’d see these other—most of them not that good—bands putting flyers everywhere. And we’d talk about it, like, “Yeah, we should be out putting up flyers!” But we were all too fucking lazy to do that.
KRISTY “KRASH” MAJORS (guitarist, Pretty Boy Floyd) We used to do, I think, ten thousand flyers a show. If there was a big concert at the Forum or something, we would bring a couple people with us and we would hit every single car. And then you have the walls and telephone poles on the Strip, and just like with every other band, your flyers would get covered up two days later and then you’d go back out and cover up theirs.
STEVIE RACHELLE (singer, Tuff) We would pick up ten thousand flyers from a printer and at some point we would probably go through those and get another shipment. So we would do twenty thousand handbills and post them everywhere. Then we would go to Home Depot and buy these five-gallon pails of glue and paintbrushes, and then at, like, two in the morning we would put on old jeans and flannel shirts and work gloves and we would go out in a truck. And what we would do is we would literally go up to a telephone pole, take the paintbrush, dip it in the glue, and just coat the telephone pole with this super-sticky clear glue. And then one of the other guys would put up ten flyers, as high as you could go. If you’re six foot tall you could reach up seven or eight feet. If there was a park bench, we’d pull it over, we’d paste them as high as we could. We’d coat the entire pole with the flyer. And if anybody else’s flyer was on there, whether it was a pop band or a rock band or a rap band or another band from the Strip, we would just go right over it.
KRISTY “KRASH” MAJORS Every night was promoting night. Monday was at the Whisky for the No Bozo Jam. Tuesday was the Cathouse. Wednesday was Bordello. Thursday was someplace else. Friday and Saturday was the Strip and the Country Club. Sunday … I don’t know where Sunday was. But we would just stand there and hand out flyers.
BRET HARTMAN Pretty Boy Floyd would be up and down on the Strip all night handing out flyers. And they took out huge ads in the magazines constantly. That was one of their tricks. It made them look bigger than they were by taking out these full-page ads in every issue of Rock City News. Because the magazines were really big, too. There was Rock City News and there was a few other fanzines, like BAM. People were just instantly becoming like rock stars in these magazines. And you could buy a full-page ad in Rock City News for, like, $200 or something. There was no internet so it was all flyers and word of mouth and fanzines and KNAC.
GINA ZAMPARELLI I think how promotion grew during the ’80s, that’s a story in itself. There were other papers, like the Los Angeles Times, but they were always too expensive. And a lot of these guys did not have money. They didn’t have food. A lot of them were living in warehouses, in girls’ apartments. But BAM was a magazine that was affordable. And then there was flyers and there was posters.
STEVIE RACHELLE Everybody’s handing out flyers—pink and blue and orange and green and big and small and with tickets and buttons and stickers and everything else. And throughout the night a lot of it just ended up on the ground. So what would happen is every morning around four a.m. the city would have to hire some kind of crew to come and clean up the Strip. It looked like the end of a fair—there was just paper and cans and stickers and flyers everywhere. So much so that you couldn’t see the sidewalk.
RIKKI ROCKETT For the most part we’d just nail everything that we could. I mean, we’d flyer dumpsters.
STEVIE RACHELLE I guess we were basically destroying property. Covering everything with our stupid flyers.