As the ’80s wore on, the top tier of first- and second-wave hard rockers—Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Poison, and Guns N’ Roses—were firmly established platinum sellers, as venerated by red-blooded American teens as Michael Jackson, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, or any pop star of the day. Others, like Quiet Riot and Twisted Sister, who had once been an inescapable presence on both radio and MTV, were unable to sustain their crossover success and were quickly fading into obscurity.
Big mainstream success begat, as it were, big everything else—the ever-glitzier clothes and higher hair, the bombastic stage productions, the overblown sonics and sentimentality of that eternal ’80s rock touchstone, the power ballad. Crowds swelled and embraced a seemingly unending parade of new bands with open arms, and many of them—from Winger and Warrant to Skid Row and Nelson—landed almost immediately on arena stages and were presented with gold and platinum album plaques shortly thereafter. And while many MTV staffers were uneasy with the often crass male-adolescent fantasies depicted in so many hard rock and metal videos, the music and its associated imagery ultimately proved unflaggingly popular at the channel. “The Top 10 of Dial MTV, from what I recall, was almost always hair band videos,” says then MTV vice president of music programming Rick Krim.
If it all started to look and sound a little bit the same to the casual MTV viewer, to the rock fans in the trenches there was an endless world of nuance between, say, Mötley Crüe and Dokken and Bon Jovi—even if they were, in fact, all being costumed by the very same designer.
So just how big were hard rock and metal? Big enough that, at the close of the decade, supermanager Doc McGhee could round up five of the genre’s heaviest hitters—Ozzy, Scorpions, Mötley Crüe, Cinderella, and Skid Row—load ’em onto a booze-filled Boeing 757 headed straight to the heart of the Soviet Union, and have them usher in some glam metal glasnost in the form of the Moscow Music Peace Festival. The two back-to-back concerts at Central Lenin Stadium (capacity one hundred thousand) marked the first time Western hard rock and metal acts were permitted to play in the Soviet capital, and the event was beamed into households in dozens of countries and packaged for broadcast on MTV in America. Better yet, the Scorpions got a chart-topping power ballad out of the experience.
There was only one direction left for this music to go, and it wasn’t up.