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'Hair metal' rises again
Plug in the hair dryer and break out the hair spray. The hard-rockin' pop of the '80s is back. But did it ever really go away?
By JEFF VRABEL, The Times-Union
Poor Kip Winger.
Bands break up all the time, genres come and go, musical fads are only temporary. But Kip and his brethren in Winger have said they could have survived the grunge onslaught that demolished their band's popularity were it not for the repeated beatings they endured from ... Beavis and Butthead.
Yes, if you need a metaphor for the death of pop-metal, look past Kurt Cobain's primal howls, past Eddie Vedder's moody baritone, past the rainy streets of what was to become the music's capital in the early '90s. Beavis put a doofus named Stuart in a Winger T-shirt, and the coffin was sealed.
Sort of.
"I'll be the water when you get thirsty, baby/When you get drunk, I'll be the wine."
Bon Jovi, I'll Be There For You, 1988
No genre has endured a speedier or less celebrated mainstream extermination than what is often referred to as "hair metal."
But somewhere on its plummet down from the wild '80s glitter years of Bon Jovi, Poison, Motley Crue and all those bands that started with W, hair metal forgot to die.
Oh, it got close. It had to be comatose for years, after the ingredients that made it so big -- the self-glorifying cheeseballery, the sex puns, the flying scissor-kicks and, of course, the magnificent hair -- started seeming unbearably lame next to the earnest pain of the massing Seattle flannel people.
But, fads are only temporary and, as nostalgia-rock has proved, so are their off years.
No one ever went broke dealing in musical nostalgia, but hair metal? Spandexed, White Rain-ed hair metal? Are there not some genres that defy even ironic looks back?
The answer may be no.
Kiss
Actually, it may be more like: "Are you still ready to rawk?!"
"Lookin' like a tramp, like a video vamp/Demolition woman, can I be your man?"
Def Leppard, Pour Some Sugar on Me, 1988
For lighter-waving proof, look no further than Def Leppard's gig Friday night at the Veterans Memorial Arena.
Now in their 25th year, Def Leppard, whose Pyromania and Hysteria stand as defining documents of the time and who have sold a mind-rattling 65 million albums worldwide, are on the road all summer.
"If you stick around, things move back in front of you," Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott said from a recent tour stop in Oklahoma. "Eventually, the goalposts move back to where they should be, and you fit back in with what's going on."
Def Leppard may be here partly for a reason that's nostalgic in itself: lots of radio play. David Moore, program director for WFYV 104.5, said that in the past month, it was Rock 105's third-most played band, behind AC/DC and Van Halen. "They're what we call a core artist," he said. "Like most stations, we do music research, and we really can't find any Def Leppard songs not to play."
Rose
Many of those songs appear on the band's new two-disc hits set, Rock of Ages: The Definitive Collection, which put them in Billboard's Top 10 for the first time in a dozen years. Elliott says the band is pleased, but not necessarily surprised, about the record's success.
"We do like to think of ourselves as a Top 10 act," he said. "That's how we got to where we are, by believing in ourselves, not in an arrogant but a confident way."
The Lep is hardly alone in its persistence. Moore's station regularly spins the Crue, Cinderella, Bon Jovi, Poison, Whitesnake, Great White and, heh heh, even Winger's Seven- teen.
And these days, many pop-metal bands circle their wagons on the package-tour circuit, looking to, if not conquer the earth, at least ruin some more of its ozone. "We joke in the office, but this music is the new classic rock," said Denise Kovalevich, operations manager for Chipster PR, which has been involved for years with the Rock Never Stops Tour (this year's version, the eighth, stars Cinderella, Ratt, Quiet Riot and Firehouse). "People grew up on it and miss it. And sad to say, there aren't many bands around today that really have the following these did."
Tom Lipsky, CEO of the Sanctuary Records Group, which has released records by KISS, Queensryche, Tesla and the Scorpions (as well as others such as Robert Plant and Morrissey) said that while other genres rise and fall, rock is permanent.
"Artists of the '70s and '80s were part of that generation's culture. We grew up with artists as they grew up," he said in an e-mail interview. "Today, however, artists have become disposable to the music industry. If a new group scores quickly they stay in the game, but if they do not prove to be a return on investment immediately, more often than not they are dropped. They are not part of their fans' lives long enough to develop deep loyalty, as happens with artists whose careers span decades."
Drummer Fred Coury of Cinderella is in his 19th year of experiencing that loyalty.
"Nineteen years! I just wanted 15 minutes!" he said from the tour opener Friday in Billings, Mont. "I was out looking at the crew setting up the lights and the pyro yesterday, and I thanked God for every day of this. I hit the lottery. Which is good, because in the outside world, I'm useless!" he laughed.
Point being, people are listening to his kind of music -- right now.
"Catch a magic moment, do it right here and now!
It means everything!"
Van Hagar, Right Now, 1991
This is all assuming those aforementioned outfits all count as hair bands. Which is where this gets a little sticky.
For our purposes, and to incite angry e-mails, the rules for a hair band are something like this: Band had to, at some point, wear uncomfortably snug pants and/or sport hairdos that call to mind Marge Simpson, that guy from A Flock of Seagulls or some combination of the two. Power ballads are a must; videos involving Tawny Kitaen washing a car also help.
But from there, it gets sketchy. Does Guns N' Roses rank? Van Halen? Van Hagar? (For our purposes: no, 1984 does, and yes).
Gregg Steele, the senior director of music programming for Sirius Satellite Radio who oversees the company's rock channels, has a special place in his heart for such music, having worked at L.A.'s behemoth metal station KNAC during the '80s Sunset Strip big bang. In fact, he said, Sirius' pop-metal channel wasn't poppy enough at first.
"It went on the air in January 2004 as something similar -- Big Rock, a hodgepodge of arena rock that played Whitesnake with, say, Journey and Pat Benatar," he said. "But it wasn't as focused as we found the actual taste of the listeners to be. They wanted something more pure."
Thus was born the Hair Nation channel.
"The name seemed to sum it up," he said. "Our audience doesn't hide from it -- it tells exactly what it is. The only people who don't care for it are the musicians, sometimes. I don't think that Sebastian Bach (of Skid Row) wants to be known as a hair rocker, but he is."
Moore isn't sure the Lep even qualifies.
"I think Def Leppard got lumped into (the hair genre), fairly or unfairly," Moore said. "The bands that got critical dissing -- Styx, Boston, even Led Zeppelin to some degree -- were dissed because they were commercial. Def Leppard, more than all of them, was blatantly commercial. They set specifically out to write hard pop songs. And they did a really good job of it."
Elliott said that, image or no image, the songs were always their priority.
"It wasn't the hair, the T-shirts or the videos," he said. "We were in the video generation, but at the end of the day, the videos don't get played on the radio. When your songs are still being played between the Beatles, Stones, the Who and Led Zeppelin . . . that's exactly where we wanted to be."
"Don't need nothin' but a good time/And it don't get better than this!"
Poison, Nothin' But A Good Time, 1988
A hint of pop-metal is always detectable out there. Bands such as The Darkness revisit the genre's gleeful bombast; 3/5 of Guns N' Roses regrouped into the surprisingly successful Velvet Revolver. And Coury, Cinderella and Rock Never Stops are playing 40 cities this summer, including Savannah, Orlando and St. Pete.
"We're not singing about politics, we're not there to get our angst out," Coury said. "We're singing about chicks and having a good time. People come back to relive those high school years, the most fun years they ever had."
And even if the music never rescales its Headbangers' Ball heights, Moore believes fans will be happy to keep revisiting it from afar.
"For our target audience, these songs are right in their wheelhouses. They're as important as Beatles and Stones are to their audiences," he said.
Steele agrees.
"It's hard to determine what motivates people about music; it happens organically," he said. "And just because it was deemed not very popular at a point, doesn't mean that fans give it up.
"That's the beauty of (Hair Nation). It's supposed to harken back to a time when you didn't have a cell phone or a wireless connection, all the things that make our lives more complicated now. When it was just irresponsible sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, and the very last time for it."
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