This book, which at times seemed more like an unruly beast about to turn on its masters and engulf them in flames than a mere collection of inert words on a page, is complete. Our sincerest hope is that with its publication, an enormous debt will be repaid.
Although we’ve both spent our careers writing about artists who inhabit any number of musical genres, it is the hard rock music of the ’80s—call it “glam metal” if you must, and “hair metal” if you’re itching for a fight in the tweet-o-sphere—that first captured our ears and teenage imaginations. It gave us the bug, as they say, and we still have it. This music, inspired by ’70s bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Kiss, Cheap Trick, and, most unambiguously, Van Halen, sounded larger than life and incorporated unforgettable sing-along choruses, chest-beating riffs, cocky swagger, Technicolor glitz, detonated drums, and, in the fleet fingers of the many guitar gods who emerged from the era, a pure athleticism that was nothing short of jaw-dropping.
There was something else fundamental to this genre, a common thread that emerged as we were reporting back to each other on a just-completed interview or on the progress of a given chapter. Almost every person we spoke to for this book exhibited a single-mindedness, work ethic, confidence, and, yes, courage, that was nothing short of indomitable. That determination, more than the outrageous dress, massive hair, pointy guitars, and not-infrequently sexist videos, is the shared DNA that connects the characters in this story. No one stumbled into this (okay, maybe Brian Baker of Junkyard did), and you won’t find a single character who confesses, “I never planned to make this a career. I was in art school and sort of just joined a band for fun.” The price of admission to this rarefied world was to check your backup plan at the door and dedicate yourself to endless practice, relentless self-promotion, nonstop hustling, and, often, the gobbling of enough drugs and alcohol to kill a large dog or maybe a small horse—take your pick. This was total-immersion rock ’n’ roll.
The experience of being in the audience during this era was equally all-consuming; performances were not only spectacles but also celebrations. If fans didn’t leave a show grinning from ear to ear and feeling like they had just attended the biggest, loudest party in the world then they simply hadn’t gotten their money’s worth—regardless of how many crew members and trucks were employed in the transportation and maintenance of all the towering amplifier stacks, massive drum kits, risers, ramps, walkways, flash pots, hydraulics, lights, confetti, lasers, and, of course, sound systems that were essential attractions of this spectacular rock ’n’ roll circus.
For kids living far from the bright lights of the Strip or unable to sneak out to the shows, some consolation could be found in the fact that MTV served up a steady regimen of the aforementioned music videos—clips whose production aesthetic did its best to replicate the explosive spectacle of the glam-metal concert experience while also brazenly advancing the argument that no girl or woman could resist the sexual allure of the featured players. Videos like Mötley Crüe’s woman-hunting “Looks That Kill” or Warrant’s firehose-flaunting “Cherry Pie” may have offended some female staffers at MTV, but to most American teens of the era they were one thing and one thing only: awesome.
Speaking of sex, this seems as good a time as any to address the fact that this work chronicles a bygone era where notions of sexism and gender politics and the disease of addiction were still relatively crude. Like the culture around them, most of the artists in this book have evolved and have also become fathers, mothers, and—yikes!—grandparents. That said, if you’re hoping for an outpouring of regret or a litany of mea culpas, you’ve come to the wrong place. Our primary goal was to uncover what really happened from the people who lived it, not to make them apologize for it.
If anything, glam metal’s greatest sin was arguably that by the end of the ’80s it had begun to suffer from a total lack of imagination and was functioning largely by rote mimesis. New bands looked and sounded alike and were marketed so similarly that it would have been virtually impossible for them not to blur together in the eyes and ears of the fans. Something had to change, and it did, seemingly overnight. It’s probably not a spoiler to note that virtually every musician you will meet in this book saw his or her career disintegrate soon after September 24, 1991, when, as the story goes, a meteor known as Nirvana’s Nevermind impacted the musical landscape and raised a massive dust cloud that forever altered the entire climate of the business. The decade of decadence, as Mötley Crüe dubbed it, had come to a close, and acts that had sold millions of albums, packed arenas, and dominated MTV’s rotation didn’t just slowly fade out of fashion; they slammed headfirst into an immovable wall of antipathy. Overnight, not only had glam metal become superannuated but it was deemed unmentionable and untouchable—and anyone tainted by the genre became equally undesirable. The ecosystem suffered a total collapse.
This musical apocalypse is where we initially planned to end our story. But as we assembled the chapters that chronicle the rapid demise of the genre, we realized that it was just too much of a … what’s the literary term for it? Oh right, a total bummer to finish on such a sad note. The truth of the matter is that there actually is a happy conclusion; it just took a couple of decades to reveal itself.
Our epilogue explores how in the twenty-first century, a significant subset of fans can’t seem to get enough of this music. What once was dismissed as anachronistic schlock is the new classic rock. A reunited Poison still routinely tour arenas and outdoor sheds, compelling tens of thousands of cross-generational concertgoers to raise their lighters (or cellphones) high in the air on a nightly basis. Mötley Crüe, armed with flamethrowers, flying drum kits, and enough pyro and explosions to light up a small nation-state, played to upwards of a million fans over the course of their 2014–15 “final tour” and were the subject of a recent Netflix biopic. Guns N’ Roses, with perennial adversaries Axl and Slash back in cahoots, have to date grossed an estimated half-billion dollars on their current worldwide jaunt, selling out stadiums from L.A. to Lisbon to Lima.
And while they aren’t out packing “enormodomes,” many of the other bands chronicled in this book are back on the road, playing festivals, corporate events, casinos, and themed cruises to a growing audience. The hard rock and hair metal fan base never went away—it just got older, became gainfully employed, and spawned children that wanna rock right along with them. That’s a much more uplifting way to wrap things up, right?
Now cut those houselights and cue the fucking pyro!
—Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock