SCOTTI HILL There was a time in the ’90s where it felt like as soon as you walked out of the house, people were going to throw rocks at you. You were just hated.
TRACII GUNS I didn’t do anything for a year. I shaved my head, wore a pair of shorts, walked around in the sand in Venice, and smoked weed. I mean, I could afford to do that, but I had no income.
BRIAN “DAMAGE” FORSYTHE I moved to L.A. Everything sort of went downhill as far as drugs and alcohol, and so I kind of did a nosedive. But I look back at the ’90s and I was constantly playing in different bands—I even went out at one point and auditioned for the Wallflowers and almost got the gig. But it was a blessing in disguise that I didn’t get the gig because there’s no way I could’ve held it together at that point.
MATTHEW NELSON We really couldn’t work for a couple of years. Around ’96, ’97, Gunnar and I went out with a couple of acoustic guitars and opened for America. Then we went out with Air Supply … I’ve never seen a more ravenous fan base than Air Supply’s, by the way. Like full-on fainting girls.
LONN FRIEND The ’90s were taken over by Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails and the music that came out of industrial and grunge and alternative … the more “serious” kind of existential rock. They owned radio and they became the big touring bands, and the bands that built the movement of the ’80s, of the Sunset Strip scene, they felt completely disenfranchised.
SHARE ROSS From ’93 to the end of the decade I definitely did not lead with the fact that I had been the bass player in Vixen.
BRIAN “DAMAGE” FORSYTHE People would ask me who I played for, and I’d just say whoever I was playing for at the moment. Like, if it was the Purple Gang, the blues band that I was in, I would just say, “Yeah, I play in a blues band called the Purple Gang.” I would never bring up Kix.
EDDIE TRUNK It was brutal. A lot of bands didn’t even attempt to try to go out to play, because they just knew they weren’t going to get taken seriously. They weren’t going to be able to sell tickets, and economically it didn’t make any sense. There were some bands that tried to stick it out and tried to get heavier, tried to get tougher, change their look, change their sound, but there were also a lot of bands that just folded their tent and said, “We’re going to ride this out and we’ll come back up for air when there’s an opportunity.”
TOM KEIFER It was amazing to see how an era where there was actually a lot of great music—and there was some that wasn’t, admittedly, but I think that’s any era—the whole thing was just dismissed. Not by the fans but by the tastemakers, I guess.
EDDIE TRUNK I think everybody took the same level of hit, meaning, say, just for the sake of argument, seventy-five percent of the fan base went away. If you’re Bon Jovi and your average draw is twenty thousand and you take a seventy-five percent hit, you’re still playing to a respectable amount of people. But if you’re Warrant and your average draw was one thousand people as a headliner—and I’m just throwing out numbers—you take a seventy-five percent hit, you’re playing to two hundred and fifty people.
LONN FRIEND What kept a lot of the bands alive during the ’90s was to simply get out there and play. Play smaller venues, play different cities that they may have missed the first time or their second or third time around. Go overseas, where the fans have longer memories.
EDDIE TRUNK There were bands that went and realized, “Hey, we actually might be getting killed in America right now, but I can go to Australia or Europe or South America and actually still be a rock star and do really well.” Scorpions is certainly one of the bands that could do that.
RUDOLF SCHENKER When these grunge and alternative people came in, we didn’t fight with them and try to make it—we went to Asia and Russia and played in big stadiums. We went to Malaysia and Jakarta and Indonesia. We went twenty times platinum in Thailand and ten times in Korea. And there we didn’t have to fight. We had our other playground, and then later on we came back without any kind of harm.
KATHERINE TURMAN The Bon Jovis and the Guns N’ Roses were still out there in arenas and stadiums. But the other bands, the Ratts, the Faster Pussycats, even though they weren’t front and center on MTV or in the magazines, they still carried on, just in a slightly smaller world.
ALEX GROSSI (booking agent, Vince Neil, Slaughter, Vixen, Kix, Faster Pussycat, Nelson; guitarist, Quiet Riot) I think the secret of ’80s metal is that it never went away; the media just stopped covering it for a decade. A lot of the bands still stayed together even though they were playing small clubs, because what else are you gonna do when you’re wired to do a certain thing for a living? You’re like, “Well, I don’t want to work at Walmart, so yeah, let’s go on tour.”
DANA STRUM Anyone that was willing to give it a go, keep trying, had any integrity, and was reasonably good at what they did would’ve found a way. I mean, by ’94-ish, when the managers were quitting, the agents were quitting, at that point I was so hands-on from the beginning of Slaughter anyway, I thought, What have these people done other than run the minute the shit hit the fan? Their loyalty was to the commission they were earning. And my loyalty was to the music we made.
SCOTTI HILL When Skid Row started up again in 1999, we were back in small clubs and we were getting really low guarantees and we were in a van and we were sucking it up, man, because that’s what we wanted to do. When people think of us, and they think of the videos and all that, they don’t realize the fucking gutter we dragged ourselves through after all that. It’s one thing to be out there in a van driving around, but when you’re doing that after you’ve had multiple buses and three-truck tours and being very popular and making good money? Now you’re in a sleeping bag in the back of a van for a couple of years … which seemed like forever. But eventually it started to get a little more popular and a little more popular.
RACHEL BOLAN People just want memories. And it’s the type of rock that, I don’t wanna say it’s lighthearted, but it’s just, like, fun. And people wanna go out and have a good time. I see that rising to the surface again, which is a really cool thing.
EDDIE TRUNK Poison, when they’re active, they would certainly be one of the bigger ones.
RIKKI ROCKETT When Poison came back in 2000 and started touring again, I felt like the girls were even more … they knew what they wanted more because they were a little bit older now. Do you know what I’m saying? Back in the day, there were a lot of girls that were nineteen and twenty. They didn’t know what the hell they were doing. Most of us don’t even know who we are until we’re thirty.
BRIAN “DAMAGE” FORSYTHE In 2003, Kix booked a couple of reunion holiday shows in Baltimore. We didn’t know what was going to happen, and it was huge. They sold out immediately. So we thought, Wow, that was cool. Let’s do it again.
EDDIE TRUNK I think a really big moment was in 2007, when there was a rock festival launched outside of Tulsa called Rocklahoma, which still exists to this day. Now it’s just a festival with a variety of rock bands, but when it was launched the idea for it was for it to be the Woodstock for ’80s rock. So the very first Rocklahoma was headlined by Poison and had every ’80s band on it you could imagine, from Warrant to Winger to Kix to Slaughter. It was a three-day event. The idea was “Hey, there’s a lot of people out there that love this stuff. They’ve been marginalized. They’ve been told it’s not cool, whatever. We’re going to change that and we want to have a big event to celebrate and say, ‘It’s cool, it’s okay,’ and let’s have fun.” That first year drew somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand people a day, which given that it was in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma, is very good.
BRIAN “DAMAGE” FORSYTHE Kix did the holiday shows for a couple of years and then I started thinking, Maybe we could go with this … And that’s when I started looking around at booking agents and I started noticing bands like Warrant and Great White. They were still doing it, but they were doing like the fly-date thing.
JOEY ALLEN In the rock ’n’ roll world, back in the old days, you’d have seven days a week, right? And Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Sunday are always kind of tough sells because everybody needs to get up and go to work and do what they do. So nowadays what happens is those Fridays and Saturdays are what we do. And we do them at state fairs, casinos, clubs, all the events. We get on a plane and we go do a gig, and then Sunday I’m flying home, I get in the pool with my kid and have some fun. Then Friday morning, five a.m., I’m up, I’m ready to go, and I’m working again.
SCOTTI HILL It’s two lives. It’s really crazy, man. You’re out there doing a rock ’n’ roll thing on the weekend and playing for lots of people and big crowds. And then, you know, Monday morning, boom! I’m in daddy mode, walking my son to school.
SHARE ROSS I don’t even travel with a bass. I’m, “Have strap, will rock.”
MARK SLAUGHTER I come from Las Vegas, and I met Tony Orlando once and he told me, “Listen, you’re gonna be in casinos.” I was like, “What?” And guess what? The man was exactly right. If you look at my schedule, I do fly dates into casinos, do some shows, fly home. No different than Tony Orlando.
MADELYN SCARPULLA Constant touring, that’s a grueling thing to do for a guy who’s in between fifty and sixty years old. The weekend gigs are comfortable. This is for grown-ups. And you know who’s a grown-up? The bands are grown-ups and the fans are grown-ups.
JACK RUSSELL When you’re in your fifties, you got a wife at home that you love, you don’t want to be on the road on a tour bus smelling people’s socks, people’s farts in the middle of the night. It’s like, “Ah, dude … really?”
KATHERINE TURMAN When Twisted Sister came back, there was still a lot of call for those big hits. They had really authentic songs—and humor, of course. And also, you know, visually, Dee Snider was in even better shape than he was in the early days. They aged really well.
EDDIE “FINGERS” OJEDA When people see some of our old videos, especially young kids, they say, “Wow, I wish I was there for that!” That’s why the whole retro thing became so big for us. When we got back together, we were bigger than we ever were. Most of the festivals when we played in Europe, these huge festivals for forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty thousand people, we weren’t the fifth or sixth band—we were headlining. And back in the ’80s in those big festivals, we were never the headliners.
JAY JAY FRENCH We didn’t succumb to the stupidity of making a new rec-ord, which nobody would have bought to begin with. We kept ourselves out of the marketplace, we drove the price up astronomically. We just played ten to fifteen shows per year—cherry-picked them, biggest festivals and greatest exposure—then went home. I can’t think of a better scenario for us. I don’t know how it works for everybody else, but for Twisted, it was perfectly done.
EDDIE “FINGERS” OJEDA It’s almost like we went back to the ’80s, but better.
ALEX GROSSI All the bands from the ’80s are out touring now because the people who grew up on this music now have jobs and make real money and in some cases are the CEOs of big companies. They can afford to have Vince Neil play at their company’s Christmas party for two hundred grand, or they can afford to drop fifteen hundred dollars to go on a Monsters of Rock cruise and do the VIP meet-and-greet.
MADELYN SCARPULLA It’s what we refer to as the Gold Card crowd. They buy tickets in the front row and VIP experiences. They buy beer and merch. And they come back the next year.
LONN FRIEND It’s not cheap going on the Monsters of Rock cruise. That’s a four-figure investment! But you get the lifestyle experience. This is what’s really important—you’re not just getting on a boat to see bands. You get to drink like it’s 1989. You get to hang out with your kin, and it’s a sisterhood and a brotherhood. You get to share stories. And it sells out every year.
It’s the same with the M3 Rock Festival in Maryland. It’s in its tenth or eleventh year, they’ve got thirty thousand people coming. And you’re gonna be there with thousands of the like-minded who don’t give a shit about hits or popularity or visibility or whether something’s bleak or blazing. They just want to be in the room with the music that made them happy, that gave them purpose. They still have memories of, you know, that was the first time they got laid. That was the first time they got drunk at a show. That was the first time they fell in love with a guitar. These groups mean so much as far as the historical memory to fans.
GUNNAR NELSON I’m actually bringing more money home to my family now, not being on MTV, not being in a number one band, not being on Geffen. I’m not touring with forty-five people and twelve trucks. But I own my own stuff. And by rolling into a gig with four duffle bags and a three-piece band, I’m bringing home a lot more money. Back in the day, every night I was out there playing I was in the red fifteen grand a night. It’s weird because you sit there and you’re playing for twenty thousand people and you’re going “How in the world can this be going in the red fifteen thousand dollars a day?”
TRACII GUNS Money’s a weird thing to talk about, but yeah, I’m doing good. I’m doing fine. Live, L.A. Guns makes about three times the amount of money we ever made in the past. Ever. That coupled with, you know, really nice merchandise sales and a combination of everything that comes in the mailbox from all the records and things I’ve made over the years, plus we get recording advances from our label, Frontiers. It just seems like there’s more income streams.
KIP WINGER We’re getting fees as much as we ever got. Winger played Japan last year with Alice Cooper. We got paid the same amount we got paid in our heyday. I think it all just came back because when new generations started rediscovering the music they’re like, “Wow, this is good music.” The grunge era didn’t last very long and the people that really loved it weren’t as fanatical as the ’80s fans. So the ’80s fans played all our music for their kids and now all their kids love it. And there was a bigness to it and the personalities were bigger than life. There was an anonymity to grunge music that kind of inoculated it from being a personality-based thing. Okay, Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell, that’s it. Those are the only two people from that era anybody remembers. They’re both dead. But from our era you’ve got fuckin’ Poison, Winger, Warrant … Well, Jani’s dead but, you know, fuck, the list is endless.
VINCE NEIL All those grunge bands have been gone for a long time, there’s maybe like two bands that stuck around. All it was, was the exact same thing that happened in the early ’80s: a bunch of one-hit wonders came out and then in the ’90s the same thing happened—just a couple good bands and the rest are one-hit wonders and it just goes on from there. That’s when bands break up; they’re not around for thirty years like Mötley Crüe.
LONN FRIEND Mötley Crüe is such an interesting story because they peaked with Dr. Feelgood, which is like thirty years ago. They peaked on record. But touring … that’s a different story. Especially that “final tour” [in 2014 and 2015], where they were really delivering great shows. They took the performance, the visuals, the interaction with the audience, the animation of Tommy and Nikki onstage, they took that really to the pinnacle, to the highest level.
NIKKI SIXX The band always prided itself—even when we were a club band—on pushing it as far as we could push it. If you look back to 1981 at shows at the Whisky, we played them like they were stadium shows, but they were only to 250 people. It’s just what we do.
KATHERINE TURMAN That “final” tour was, I don’t know, two years, maybe more. And I think it was more successful than they ever imagined. And that success was not assured. But with the excitement and the theatrics, with Nikki’s flamethrower bass and Tommy’s drums on a rollercoaster, you know, it really made them a shit-ton of money. And it was super interesting when The Dirt [the Netflix biopic based on the 2001 Mötley Crüe autobiography of the same name] movie came out how crazy everybody who loved that music went.
BRAD TOLINSKI What’s also interesting about audiences for bands like Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses, and even some of the lower-tier acts, it’s not just fifty-year-old guys reliving the past. They have new fans in their teens, in their twenties, in their thirties, who truly dig the music. I mean, Guns N’ Roses have made something like half a billion dollars on their most recent tour. You see their T-shirts on everyone.
KATHERINE TURMAN It was really a great thing for rock ’n’ roll when Guns N’ Roses came back, almost reunited—as long as it’s Slash and Duff on either side of Axl, I think the world is happy. They have a genuine group of new fans, twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings who aren’t looking back but who are going to the shows and saying, “Wow, this isn’t just a pale imitation of what they were in the ’80s. This delivers.”
SHARE ROSS Young kids today, they show up with their parents and they’re like, “I love you guys and you’re my idols and you’re the reason I want to play music.” Holy crap! It’s amazing.
SCOTTI HILL There are kids who’ve heard so much about it that they’re just like, “Man, I wish I was a teenager in 1985. I wish I could’ve experienced that.” Just like when I was a kid I was like, “I wish I was a teenager during Woodstock.” You’ve got a lot of these kids trying to live it, and they look like we did. When I first started noticing them in the early 2000s I was like, “Wow, that almost looks funny. It looks like they’re wearing costumes.”
TRACII GUNS There’s also a lot of guys my age, that come out all dressed up, reliving the day, which is interesting. But I mean, as long as people come, I don’t care who they are. And the older fans are slightly larger now, so it makes the room look even fuller.
LONN FRIEND This “rock ’n’ roll is coming back” bullshit that I’ve been hearing forever … rock ’n’ roll will never come back ’cause it’s never gone away. Rock ’n’ roll goes through peaks and valleys of genre, affectation, and popularity …
EDDIE TRUNK It just keeps turning over. And I think, circling all the way back to the beginning, that’s one of the biggest reasons why this stuff is able to get a fighting chance again, because you’ve seen younger people turn up because they’ve heard about these bands from their parents or whatever and they want to see them. Now, whether anyone in the current lineup of the band is in that video they watched from the ’80s is a different question …
LONN FRIEND It’s almost laughable that some of these groups are going out with their original names with one band member. You know, Faster Pussycat, essentially it’s just Taime and … players. But it’s almost irrelevant to fans.
EDDIE TRUNK I think a lot of people don’t know or care, unfortunately, who is in these bands. They see the logo, and that’s what the agents want. They sell the logo and sell the song without looking too closely, actually, as to who’s in it. But I also do think there’s something to be said, with certain bands and at certain levels, for who is and isn’t in the band. You have multiple versions of bands out there, and it bums me out that more people don’t know or care about who’s actually in the versions of the bands they’re seeing.
KATHERINE TURMAN You had that with L.A. Guns, Ratt, Great White …
STEPHEN PEARCY With Ratt it kind of hurt the brand a bit because people were confused. But, I mean, I’ll say we were never the most functional band on the planet. It’s just par for the course.
JACK RUSSELL I had such a hard time getting off drugs. Unfortunately [other members of Great White] just got sober before I did, you know? I wish ’em well. I hope they do well. I just hope I do a little better!
BRAD TOLINSKI Jack Russell’s early-2000s version of Great White was involved in that fire at the Station, which was a really horrific incident.
KATHERINE TURMAN Great White, I don’t know if ’80s metal had more than its share of tragedies than other genres, per se, but that Station fire was one of the worst that I ever heard of. [During a Great White performance at the Station nightclub in Rhode Island on February 20, 2003, the band’s tour manager ignited pyrotechnics that set fire to the acoustic foam on the walls and ceiling around the stage and engulfed the venue in flames; an estimated 100 concertgoers were killed, with another 230 injured.] It’s just so horrifying that so many people perished there. And I think it probably changed things for a lot of people. The members of Great White who survived it, how can you ever get over the guilt and the horror?
LONN FRIEND I don’t think Jack Russell ever really recovered right from that event. I can’t speak to his specific physical conditions, but he’s hobbled. He’s been walking with a cane for a long time. But he’s out there touring and I know people that think he’s never sounded better.
ALEX GROSSI There’s no shortage of gigs and there’s no shortage of bands willing to play ’em. Warrant and Dokken and Skid Row have kind of become the new classic rock, whereas when I was growing up, it was Queen and Led Zeppelin and the Who.
LONN FRIEND The first time I heard “Sweet Child o’ Mine” on a classic rock station, it just hit me. Classic rock? Guns N’ Roses? Yeah, I guess …
KATHERINE TURMAN Miley Cyrus has invited Bret Michaels onstage to do “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.” It shows that it’s not just lip service, that it is a good song and that it can sound great done by a singer of a different gender and in a different musical genre, too.
STEPHEN PEARCY People try to separate and label this music, and the worst thing is this hair metal thing. It’s like, “What is that? Please explain.” To me it’s all just music. Sixties, ’70s, ’80s, whatever. I think hair is irrelevant … It’s nice to have it, though.
KATHERINE TURMAN There’s still a lot of lovers of this music and a lot of places they can go to hear it. Even though MTV is no longer around, there’s YouTube and you can find anything you want from, you know, Bang Tango to Tuff. There’s Hair Nation on SiriusXM, there’s podcasts. Dee Snider did a radio show called House of Hair. On Nights with Alice Cooper, which I work on, we’ll stick in deep cuts from ’80s bands. And there’s Rock of Ages … I mean, you’ve got these sexed-up, drunked-up hair guys on Broadway and it’s a huge hit. That really says something.
JOEY ALLEN It just goes to show you, that whole thing that we were all a part of back in those Sunset Strip days, people like it. Even if, you know, I can’t explain it.
MICHAEL SWEET Stryper went over and did the Loud Park Festival in Japan, and I’ll never forget it. They had stages at either end of the arena, and one band would play at one end as the band at the other end was setting up. So here we have Limp Bizkit playing, and they have a massive crowd. And we’re setting up onstage at the other end, we’re on in fifteen, twenty minutes. And I go out there in my pants and my black shirt and I’m setting up my gear. I’m looking at the crowd, they’re watching Limp Bizkit. I turn around and I’m plugging in my gear for, like, five minutes. And then I say to our manager, “Hey man, give me my jacket.” And he hands me my yellow-and-black jacket and I put it on. And I hear the crowd just go, “Ahhhhh!”
I just kind of assumed it was for Limp Bizkit or whatever, but I turned around and, like, half the crowd was facing me and cheering for me putting on my yellow-and-black coat. It gave me chills.
ALEX GROSSI I think what’s important is the brand. And as time passes you’re going to see that the brand and the songs are what really live on.
BRAD TOLINSKI Then you have bands like Steel Panther, who are taking everything outrageous about the ’80s and just blowing it up into something completely ridiculous and over-the-top.
KATHERINE TURMAN I remember seeing Steel Panther early on and I thought it was kind of a fun shtick. And I have to say I’m super surprised that they’re doing well, people like them. I’m not quite sure what that says. I guess it says, “Yes, there’s still a hunger for that and you can make fun of something while simultaneously loving it.” Which is nice.
TRACII GUNS Steel Panther is vital. They’re an outlet and they’re relevant to people that remember, and also to people that are really interested in that time frame now. They’re able to really push things in a comedic way that is almost reality based.
EDDIE TRUNK I’m not a fan. Nothing personal. The look, the attitude, the misogyny, the goofy lyrics, all the silliness, it just basically re-stokes that whole fire of those bands not being credible bands and these guys really, really sort of taking the piss out of them. I’ve seen them a couple times and I just don’t think it’s funny.
LONN FRIEND The debauchery, the decadence, that came from the ’60s. It’s just that the ’80s bands crystallized it. And they crystallized it with hair and volume and questionable behavior and substance abuse and alcohol. I mean, come on! These groups, they glamorized it, they glorified it, and they were shameless about it.
JOEY ALLEN This isn’t rocket science. It’s not U2. We’re not trying to save the world. We’re coming from a point of view of, it’s Friday night, forget about your day gig, go get a six-pack, let’s have some fun … and, you know, be responsible at the same time.
STEPHEN PEARCY People are having a great time, they’re coming out, and that’s what it’s all about. My god, we just left, where did we go? A festival in Brazil, Mexico, somewhere like that. And it was like eighty-fucking-thousand people out there. I mean, those events, we love that. The gigs are great.
BRIAN “DAMAGE” FORSYTHE When we first started playing again, everyone, especially our singer, Steve, didn’t think it would just keep going. But it seems to get stronger and stronger. That’s the crazy part.
SCOTTI HILL People just want to hear those songs. They want to hear “18 and Life,” they want to hear “I Remember You,” they want to hear “Monkey Business.” I mean, I’ve played “Youth Gone Wild” every fucking show we’ve ever done since it was written. Even at fifty-six, “Youth Gone Wild.” And man, we’re not youth. We’re just youth gone.
JOEY ALLEN Warrant played with Cheap Trick and I asked their bassist, Tom Petersson, who was sixty-nine years old, “You gotta give me some advice. How are you still doing this?” And he looked at me dumbfounded and he said, “What do you mean, man? This is what we do.” He looked at me, he goes, “This is what you do.”
STEPHEN PEARCY It is what it is, and Ratt can’t be exterminated anyway, so …
DANA STRUM It’s the rise and the fall of a music genre that was meant to be extinguished several different times. And funny enough, it still gets played out there to this day.
BRIAN “DAMAGE” FORSYTHE Everybody’s sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it hasn’t. Hopefully it won’t, because I just relocated to Nashville and bought a house. I need to keep working!