ANDY SECHER And within a year hair metal had been wiped off the face of the earth by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains. Did not see it coming. Should have. One of my few regrets. But, yeah, I was putting Warrant and people like that on the cover of Hit Parader when I should have had Nirvana on the cover.
JAY JAY FRENCH I think a lot of hair metal bands would like to think there was a conspiracy against them. The labels must be sitting in a room and going, “We don’t want this kind of music anymore.” I say, since when is capitalism and fucking people over to make money a conspiracy?
GREG STEELE We went to New York and met with Elektra when they were setting up everything for the Faster Pussycat Whipped! record. All the people that worked there were like, “We’re gonna push the shit out of this, it’s gonna be great, we’ve got so many plans for this…” We did a video for a song called “The Body Thief” on a Friday and Saturday. And by Monday they dropped us.
TAIME DOWNE Kiss was the last tour we did on that record. We’d be in cities and there’d be no Elektra reps at the gigs when we’re playing an arena tour. There wasn’t anybody. So we knew something was going down. For us it was like, it was just a matter of time. We weren’t surprised by anything.
JANET GARDNER All of a sudden, we were the school nerds. I mean, no shit. It was pretty ugly. Luckily, I am blessed with a super-supportive family, really good friends. I did not have any inkling of like, oh, maybe I’ll drink myself to death, or anything like that. It was always like, well, there are other things in life, and so I did other things in life.
LITA FORD I left the music industry. The people turned into bank tellers. They weren’t rock stars anymore. It was, dude, you should be pumping gas or something. You just don’t look right. You don’t sound right. There’s nothing special about anything you’re doing. This was just my thought. I loved Alice in Chains. I loved the whole Pearl Jam thing. That whole change didn’t last long, but that whole changeover, it was awesome. Then it went into the deep end of it and that’s when I left. I got married and got pregnant, moved to a deserted island.
KIP WINGER The thing that makes me different is that I was personally attacked. You know, it wasn’t like I was Slaughter and I was one of the many bands that just went away due to the era. It’s that I was personally attacked by Metallica and by Beavis and Butt-Head.
RICK KRIM The problem? Kip was a good-looking guy, and he pranced around with his bass, and he let his chest hair show, which worked to his advantage. But next thing you know, Metallica’s throwing darts at him, and Beavis and Butt-Head have their nerdy kid, Stewart, wearing a Winger shirt.
REB BEACH We were on tour for Pull, selling a thousand tickets a night in theaters. It was going really well. And this guy came on the bus and he said, “I gotta show you guys something.” We were driving down the road and he put in a Beavis and Butt-Head video. And when they hung that kid by his underwear on the tree in his Winger T-shirt, we all just looked at each other. I remember going, “Oh no, this could be all over. Jeez, I hope it’s not all over.” Well, it was all over. Boom! The day after it aired nobody bought Winger tickets anymore. We had to cancel the tour.
RICK KRIM I’m sure it bummed Kip out. I’m sure that other stuff bummed him out, bands poking fun at him.
KIP WINGER Metallica, they had my poster in their video for “Nothing Else Matters,” throwing darts at it. Now, they’re a very powerful act. And they were basically telling their fans that I suck. It was an attack on me. Personally. So they can live with that.
REB BEACH It was Kip that was getting picked on. I didn’t get that kind of ridicule as much as he did. You know, Kip got laughed at walking into a McDonald’s. I felt bad for him.
RICK KRIM He became the poster child for the people who didn’t like this, who thought these bands were bullshit. But musicianship-wise, I’d put Winger up against any other band that was out at the time.
KIP WINGER I mean, c’mon. Lars [Ulrich] … everybody knows Lars is not an amazing drummer. He’s no Rod Morgenstein. It’s a fuckin’ joke. So, whatever. I’m not a bullying, slag-off-other-musicians-to-try-to-prop-yourself-up person. That’s what they are. Or maybe they were. But it’s all spilt milk. The way I came back from that was to get a Grammy nomination for Best Classical Composition. So fuck them, you know?
JOEY ALLEN We were at a Sony Grammy party in L.A. right after Dog Eat Dog came out. Donnie Ienner is there, Mariah Carey is there, Tommy Mottola is there, everyone is there. It’s like ’92 and Seattle is starting to come out and Pearl Jam’s record, Ten, is just killer. So I had a few drinks in me and I bumped into Rick Krim and I pulled every credit card in my wallet out and all the cash I had and put it in my hand and said, “Please play my video!” He looked at me and said, “I wish I could, but it’s not up to me.” Up until then, it was a good relationship between MTV and Warrant.
KATHERINE TURMAN Even Mötley couldn’t survive. They split with Vince and put out a strong album with John Corabi, a superior singer and charismatic front man, but no one cared. Even using the same team—Bob Rock, who produced their massive hit, Dr. Feelgood, five years previously, they weren’t able to make the record fly. I’m sure Mötley thought it would be like Sammy Hagar joining Van Halen: a new lease on their career and a bunch of multiplatinum albums and radio hits. But nope.
NIKKI SIXX When the album came out, I remember Rolling Stone saying, “This should be the album of the year—unfortunately it’s by Mötley Crüe.” That was our experience of the ’90s. There was some good music in the ’90s, but I didn’t think the bands were very sexy. Soundgarden had some really cool riffs, and obviously Nirvana had a really iconic figurehead with Kurt Cobain. But nothing had that “let’s go in the bathroom and have a quickie” feel to it.
KIM THAYIL You know, I love the song “Dr. Feelgood.”
HOWARD BENSON At the time did it seem like such a massive change? Well, you know, it’s a very interesting thing. I have an alternate theory that I sometimes throw around. There’s another thing that happened in 1991, 1992, that people don’t remember and that was the advent of SoundScan. So we didn’t really know what was selling up until that moment. And I remember the chart that came out at the end of 1991, the chart the week before had had hair bands at the top. The next week, it was this guy at the top of the chart named Garth Brooks. And nobody knew who he was, you know? But he was actually selling. And we weren’t. And all this stuff was being made up by the record companies. The numbers were being juiced up and there was no way to keep track of anything. It was all promotion. So we didn’t know how much this stuff was selling. We just thought it was selling. SoundScan leveled the playing field. All of a sudden you were like, “Whoa, we’re not selling any hair bands!” I don’t know if that had anything to do with it or not. But I sometimes wonder, if that hadn’t happened …
TOM WERMAN I remember thinking during the mid-’80s that I could, if I wanted to, keep doing this for the rest of my life. And I was wrong.
BEAU HILL I had no idea that my name, Beau Hill, would be synonymous with nuclear waste at that point. The shift was unpredictable and very unpleasant, because anything that touched any hair band in any way—production, songwriting, whatever—all of a sudden you were radioactive and nobody is going to answer your phone call and nobody is going to do anything.
BRET HARTMAN There was probably a hundred hair metal bands that got let go between 1991 and 1992 just because they’d gotten one album or two and, you know, it costs $150,000 to make the album, $100,000 to make the video, the label gave them money to tour … Most of these bands were in debt for like, four or five hundred thousand dollars. And so the labels didn’t want to spend any more on them.
“DIZZY” DEAN DAVIDSON Britny Fox’s A&R guy, like all the guys on the floor, was let go. People were packing their boxes up when I was there at Mercury, like their office supplies, and I’m like, “What’s going on?” And a person let me know. They said, “Well, every single label in California and New York, where all the hubs are, are cleaning up their label because of this new music that’s coming in.” Which was Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, the list goes on, Blind Melon, like, all of them. And they were getting people in the offices that were younger and knew that music … You could see it.
EDDIE “FINGERS” OJEDA I mean, with Nirvana and bands like that, I liked them. I get it. But it’s like having the table set for Thanksgiving, and then you sit down to eat and everybody takes the food away.
“DIZZY” DEAN DAVIDSON I see a guy in the record label dressed with leggings with combat boots and oily hair and I go, “We’re doomed.”
EDDIE “FINGERS” OJEDA It’s kind of funny because it was just this costuming in a different way, but instead of dressing up, they would dress down. You want to look homeless or just wear the weirdest shit that you could find.
JAY JAY FRENCH When “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came out, the whole thing changed. I sat back and said, “Okay, these things happen in the cyclical nature of the music industry. The Beatles came, wiped out everything before.” Punk comes, I said, “Okay, fine, this is another thing.” Now grunge is in. The problem with it was that when I was going to see bands, just because friends of mine would say, “Come and see this band,” all of a sudden everyone cut their hair and is wearing plaid shirts. I’m saying to myself, “Boy, the scene never changes. These are the wannabes.”
TOM KEIFER Every decade, every generation of music has a look. The one that took over from the ’80s became ultimately a bigger pose than the ’80s. If you didn’t have your flannel shirt and Doc Martens … It was just a different pose. But somehow that was a credible one.
FRED COURY Grunge didn’t kill our music. We all did. Winger put out Pull, which was a different thing for them. Warrant put out a hard rock record with “Machine Gun” on it, great song. Everybody did great work. Warrant was on their way to being a Journey, with the ballad and Jani’s voice. They were on their way to be pop superstars. The issue is, and this is just my opinion, of course, but the issue is, everybody alienated their fans at the same time. Warrant puts out a hard rock record, no big ballads like normally. Skid Row put out a heavy metal record practically. Ratt put out whatever the heck that was, their worst record. Everybody did something completely different than what their fans were used to.
TAIME DOWNE I went to Chicago and I did Pigface. Kept busy learning different shit. Took the time to learn how to work with computers and gear. Learned how to track. Learned what the fucking knobs meant on a fucking console. Before I didn’t know what the fuck—I just wanted a couch to fuck pussy.
RON KEEL We lost our European deal. And you think, That’s all right, I’ll get another deal. Then we lost our Japanese deal. Then you lose your U.S. deal. Then you go through the personnel changes. I went on with a band called Fair Game for a couple years until finally I had nothing left except a guitar and a story to tell. And I went to the desert and I made a campfire and I sat there with that guitar and started pouring my heart out. And it came out as country music.
TAIME DOWNE You gotta fucking move with the fucking punches. Do something different. Shit always changes.
GUNNAR NELSON Our record label, DGC, was ground zero for grunge. So we came home and all the employees had shifted over to flannel-wearing nineteen-year-olds who fucking hated us.
MATTHEW NELSON We went from being the heroes to being the zeros overnight, and we were heavily leveraged by the time we were done. But honestly, if somebody asked me right now, “Okay, you’re going to sacrifice your life, like completely, and you’ll get like three years. You’re going to be a huge superstar, you’re going to have amazing experiences, girls will be throwing themselves at you, it’ll be amazing, amazing, amazing. But at the end of it you’re going to be worse off financially, by a long shot. You’ll be paying it off for years. Are you going to do it?”
The answer for me? “Yeah. Absolutely.”