Why the rock snobs are wrong about ‘hair metal’
In the summer of 1993, members of the American hair metal band Winger answered a knock on the door of their tour bus from a young fan bearing a video cassette of a new cartoon series about a pair of unsupervised, delinquent young rock fans. Beavis And Butt-head, it was called. “You really need to see this,” their visitor told them.
As the group gathered in front of the TV set in their ride’s front lounge, to their horror, they discovered that the increasingly popular MTV show, then in its first full-length season, featured a wimp of a character, called Stewart, who wore a Winger shirt in every scene in which he appeared. As well as wetting the bed and contracting diarrhoea, the short and tubby little boy was consistently derided by titular leads who wore clothing bearing the names AC/DC and Metallica. There were no prizes for guessing what the writers and animators thought of Stewart’s favourite band.
The effects of this less-than-resounding endorsement were felt immediately. “People just stopped coming to our shows that week, and we cancelled the tour a few weeks later,” recalls Winger guitarist Reb Beach in the three-part documentary series Nöthin’ but a Good Time: The Uncensored Story Of ’80s Hair Metal, which premiered recently on Paramount+. “Television – they made us and they broke us.”
It delights me to report that this story is just one of Nöthin’ but a Good Time’s many lip-smacking calamities. With its emphasis on West Hollywood and, particularly, the Sunset Strip, over the course of three episodes, the viewer is afforded an unsparing view of the rapid rise and fall of a movement defined by its remarkable absurdity. Although most metal-adjacent bands of the time had long hair, the term “hair metal” refers to the ones whose faces were plastered with slap and whose barnets were tousled with hairspray. So much hairspray, in fact, that the series is only ever a stray cigarette away from becoming a musical production of The Towering Inferno.
Depending on your position on either side of the cultural divide, this 21st century account is either a trio of horror films or else a much-needed corrective on behalf of a subgenre that has yet to receive its critical due. Certainly, it tends to be forgotten that in the 1980s the donnybrook between “real” and “false” metal was nothing less than a sonic and aesthetic civil war. The enmity between people enamoured of noisy groups who looked as if they’d emerged from a plane crash and those who preferred catchy fare made by musicians who resembled pantomime dames was viscerally real.
Me, I’m just about old enough to have despised this stuff the first time around. What’s more, today, my noisy teenage insistence that the invading army of spandex-clad dudes amounted to a feeble foe feels vindicated now that I know that one of the movement’s more popular groups – in the US, Winger somehow scored two platinum albums – was sunk by a cartoon. See, it’s rubbish. Certainly, there is no way the creators of Beavis And Butt-head would have dressed Stewart in a Slayer shirt.
And yet, from the moment Paramount announced Nöthin’ but a Good Time’s place on the schedule, about this time last month, I’ve been counting down the minutes until the series aired. After spending yesterday making notes in front of the telly, upon her return from work, I asked my wife if she fancied watching it, too. “Um, when?” she wanted to know. I dunno. I was thinking, like, tonight, with me? I’m more than happy to watch it again. Bizarrely, this offer was given rather short shrift.
Rather than face the terrifying prospect that indifference, not hate, is the opposite of love, I prefer to attribute my enthusiasm for this Day-Glo nightmare to a fondness for rock and roll war stories. Never mind my familiarity with the name of every band mentioned in the series, no matter how obscure – Bang Tango, anyone? – it was the scent of insanity that piqued my interest. God knows, there’s more than enough to go around. The pursuit of hedonistic happiness, it seems, drove everyone in the scene crazy.
While a full itemisation of unvarnished stories from the hair-metal heyday would require Nöthin’ but a Good Time to remain on the air for longer than The Simpsons, the show does its best to appraise the wreckage. Roll up, roll up to hear about the time when Great White singer Jack Russell was discovered hiding a stash of hard drugs beneath his wig; the night when Brett Michaels and CC Deville, from Poison, had a fist-fight in front of Cindy Crawford and Arsenio Hall backstage at the MTV Awards; and the North American tour by Ozzy Osbourne and Motley Crue during which people defecated in shoes awaiting valeting in the corridors of upscale hotels.
To be fair, recalling their crazy days and nights at fleshpots such as the Rainbow Bar & Grill, on Sunset Boulevard, talking heads Warren DeMartini, from Ratt, and LA Guns guitarist (and Guns N’ Roses co-founder) Tracii Guns seem like smart people. Other contributors seem like bright sparks, too – or at least, they do now. It’s only as part of a wider cohort in search of success, substances and sex on the streets of Los Angeles, in the 1980s, that the whole lot of them were as dumb as dirt.
Even today, I struggle to believe just how popular some of this stuff became. In the United States, Ratt and Poison went multi-platinum five times between them. LA Guns and Tuff, whose career seemed to last about three weeks, went gold. Quiet Riot’s Metal Health was the first hard rock LP to top the American chart. Appetite For Destruction, meanwhile, by Guns N’ Roses, has to date sold more than 30 million copies. (In my respectful opinion, GNR, who promptly decoupled from the scene, anyway, were the only good band of this number.)
With their appetite for drugs and sex, naturally, it was early-day pioneers Mötley Crüe who set the tone. “This is what’s going to kill [new wave acts such as] A Flock Of Seagulls,” enthused A&R man Tom Zutaut to the Managing Director of Elektra Records. Shortly after signing to the record label, singer Vince Neil repaid the endorsement by sleeping with Zutaut’s girlfriend. I use the verb in only a figurative sense. The liaison actually took place in a backstage porta cabin following a performance in front of a quarter of a million people at the US Festival, in San Bernardino, in 1983.
Very quickly, licentiousness became a defining characteristic. “The amount of sex that was going on in my life was insane,” reports Tracii Guns, on camera. “I could be at the Whisky [A Go Go club], walk upstairs, and there’d be a girl or two [to whom] I could say, ‘Are you going to the bathroom?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Can I go with you?’ ‘Yeah.’ That was normal… and that leads to such a skewed point of view.”
It sure does. I’ve long found it rather ironic that in a community comprised of men who were adept at applying lipstick and mascara, the contributions of genuine female rockers were so comprehensively marginalised. Yeah, okay, groups such as Vixen and Femme Fatale were entirely terrible, but no more so than, say, Trixter or Jet Boy. For some reason, though, the hair dye had been cast. The role of women was to provide eye-candy in music videos, or else to sleep (often with rapacious enthusiasm) with the boys in the bands. Sometimes, they would feed them, too, and even pay their rent.
“It was such a sexist environment,” opines the film director Penelope Spheeris in the documentary. “The guys really did look down on the women. And the freaky thing about it is that the girls went along with it.”
She should know. In 1988, Spheeris directed The Decline Of Western Civilization: The Metal Years, a film rightly celebrated for its ability to capture gormlessness on almost every frame. Filmed in LA the previous summer, “highlights” included the mother of W.A.S.P. guitarist Chris Holmes watching her already paralytic son slugging vodka from the bottle in a swimming pool, and the singer of hair metal basket cases Odin saying that, if his band didn’t make it big, he would kill himself. (Despite not making it big, he continues to walk among us).
For all it’s worth, I regard Penelope Spheeris’s film as an honest representation of a certain kind of loud music. Only problem is, it’s the worst kind. In fact, if one is looking for the exact point at which the rot set in on the hair metal racket, this might well be it.
Nöthin’ but a Good Time, though, sees things differently. According to its telling, it was Nirvana alone who obliterated the Sunset Strip like an atom bomb from the Pacific Northwest. It’s true, of course, that Nevermind, the Seattle trio’s second LP, unleashed an extinction-level event upon the scene, but in the years before 1991, other groups, too, put in plenty of hard yards challenging an orthodoxy that had long since become embarrassing. The filmmakers would have done well to at least mention in passing the contributions of Metallica, Jane’s Addiction, Faith No More, Soundgarden, Fishbone, Slayer, Living Colour, and more.
In truth, though, the hair metal crowd were ripe for the picking. As the 1980s began to run out of puff, newer acts contented themselves ripping off groups who had found success as recently as the previous year. As major labels fell over themselves to sign unknown and untested names, the marketing strategies used to launch these bands became as uniform as the music itself. After issuing a rockier song as an album’s leadoff track, the second release would be a monster ballad with lovelorn lyrics and an epic guitar solo. Upon hearing Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nevermind’s seismic first single, any practitioners smart enough to know they were producing rubbish would have realised immediately that they’d cynically wasted their shot.
When it came, the end was dizzyingly fast. Equipped with a new singer, Mötley Crüe went from playing multiple nights at the 17,500 capacity Forum, in Los Angeles, to appearing at Cowboy’s, a mechanical-bull riding bar in Oklahoma City. Mike Tramp, the frontman with White Lion, knew that something was up when executives from nearby Atlantic Records stayed away from his band’s show at The Ritz, in New York City. Others weren’t even as lucky as this. Kix, for example, learned of their own reduction in fortunes when their label, East West, axed the budget for the – you guessed it – power ballad Tear Down The Walls while they were filming it.
I shouldn’t laugh, really, should I? At my age, I should be more charitable than this. But as Penelope Spheeris says, “It’s not [as if the scene] was going to be going on for centuries. It’s just not that meaningful.” It’s worth noting, too, the bald truth that anyone seeking nothing but a good time can often end up having a very bad time indeed. In a documentary heavy on the drug use, the contribution of Steven Adler, the erstwhile drummer with Guns N’ Roses, is one of the few moments that failed to raise even a self-conscious chuckle. So terrible are the long-term effects of his addiction that his words are accompanied by subtitles.
That many of the bands featured onscreen today earn a living on the fairly lucrative nostalgia circuit is – and, for once, I mean no insult – roughly what they deserve. At state fairs and medium-sized festivals, this most dangerous time is ably replicated in a safe environment by musicians whose lifestyles no longer resemble those of their younger selves. As Doc McGhee, the former manager of Motley Crue, puts it, “The drugs now are blood thinners and heart-pressure medication”.
Nothin’ But A Good Time: The Uncensored Story Of ‘80s Hair Metal is available now on Paramount +
