Since its inception, hard rock has maintained a core audience that sustains it through times when the mainstream is occupied elsewhere. The period at the tail end of the ’70s, where our story begins, was one of these troughs in popularity for the genre. While initiates continued to fill venues when bands like Kiss and Black Sabbath rolled through town, the vast majority of the music-buying public was more interested in new wave groups like the Knack, the Go-Go’s, the Cars, the Police, and Elvis Costello and the Attractions—bands who embraced synthesizers, eschewed guitar heroics, and whose angular riffs and short, spiky hair owed much more to punk and mod fashion than to the bell-bottomed likes of Led Zeppelin or Thin Lizzy. “The industry was looking at the local new wave and punk scenes,” recalls Rudy Sarzo, the bassist in a struggling L.A. “dinosaur” act called Quiet Riot.
Both inspiring and confounding to players like Sarzo was the ascendancy of Van Halen, a four-piece hard rock band from Pasadena whose electrifying live performances, striking blond-maned front man, and resident guitar wunderkind were such an undeniable force that they transcended the record industry’s genre bias and landed a deal with Warner Bros. Rec-ords. The group’s success, however, did not trickle down to other acts occupying the same stylistic lane. “No one seemed to be interested in the other bands,” recalls Dokken drummer “Wild” Mick Brown, at the time bashing the skins in a Sunset Strip outfit called the Boyz. “Which I thought was weird, because it was like, ‘Don’t you think the record companies would want, like, nine more Van Halens?’”
They didn’t.
Refusing to be stymied by the indifference of the major labels, many young groups like Mötley Crüe and Ratt (then Mickey Ratt), adopted a do-or-die DIY approach, self-financing recordings and pouring their resources into over-the-top concert productions that were as flashy as they were foolhardy. Whether it was Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx slathering his leathers with pyro gel and lighting himself on fire or the young men of W.A.S.P. hurling handfuls of raw meat at their audiences and sending flames rippling across the ceiling of the tiny Troubadour club, the bands employed whatever means they could marshal to make their mark and give the fans a night they still haven’t forgotten. “For the early guys it was all about the music and the shows,” says Metal Blade Records founder Brian Slagel.
“The record companies wanted Duran Duran. They wanted new wave,” recalls Alan Niven, then toiling for an L.A.-based independent music importer and distributor named Greenworld Distribution. “So if you wanted to get further you had to have some imagination. You had to have a little bit of wheel-and-deal. Because that was the only way that you were going to start building your following.”