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DAVID LEE ROTH We had a list of fourteen high schools and junior high schools within driving distance, an hour in any direction.
In every outside locker we’d put a flyer in. We’d flyer the place. If you saw Aerosmith was playing the football stadium, great, that’s perfect, we’ll flyer them.
SHARE ROSS Walking down the Strip you got flyered every two seconds. “Come see my band, come see my band, come see my band.” Then you were trying to decide if the person you were talking to was definitely a guy as well. Like, I think that was a dude?
as Guns N’ Roses got bigger, they always took the Cathouse with them. They were always playing the club, they were always mentioning us in interviews, they were always wearing the T-shirts. I mean, Axl helped me get my job at MTV.
“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.
I never realized Kip was as creative as he was. He was a black belt in karate. He could score a movie. He could score a symphony. He took ballet.
WES HEIN Enigma had a deal with Capitol Records where some of our artists were going to be distributed through Capitol’s distribution system. There were two types of artists that would go through Capitol: one hundred percent pure Enigma artists, or, as was the case with Poison, joint-venture artists. And that meant Capitol would work it along with us.
RIKKI ROCKETT We worked really hard and got the Ratt tour. It was because of Ratt that we got to release “Talk Dirty to Me.” Robbin Crosby was a big cheerleader for us.
He turns around and he goes, “Man, every time your video comes on, I sit down because you’re having such a good time. I don’t want to miss a second of it.” So if some dude says, “Oh, you guys suck,” it’s like, “Who fucking cares? Michael Jackson saw the value in Poison.” How cool is that?
LITA FORD (guitarist, the Runaways; solo artist) Poison would have their roadies pick them out of the audience and bring them backstage, so when they got offstage they would go into a room full of girls or women or whatever.
I would suggest that they imagine a fireman, a policeman, and a paramedic standing side by side. They all look like they’re in uniform when they’re in official capacity, but they don’t all look like a squad of police officers.
for me the challenge sometimes was, “Okay, how are we gonna get you to look your very best and also be the most marketable, so I’m making the label and management happy but it’s also gonna be authentic to you, the artist?”
So Michael Jackson copied Warrant’s look for Bad. Go look at the cover—the black cotton jacket with a bunch of belt buckles on it.
FLEUR THIEMEYER We started making spandex for David Lee Roth because he did so many karate moves and high kicks and everything. And if something was to split or break, he would just lose it.
CLIFF BURNSTEIN They were musicians, those guys. Lynch was an exceptional musician. But they were so part of that L.A. scene and it was so de rigueur to look like that and dress up like that. You know, it’s hard to go against the grain.
NEIL ZLOZOWER The prettier they looked at these photo shoots, the more chicks they had at the shows.
NEIL ZLOZOWER I mean, honestly, you have a year and a half, two years between when the first Poison record came out and then Guns really sort of took off. All of a sudden the hairspray started coming down and all that shit.
RON KEEL Fashion killed us all. Because by ’87 you had one guy, Ray Brown—great guy, fantastic talent. But he’s making clothes for Mötley Crüe, Judas Priest, Keel … every band in the business was dressing up in Ray Brown costumes.
GUNNAR NELSON So here’s what I learned about John Kalodner. First off, you’d make friends with the secretaries.
JOHN KALODNER (executive, Geffen Records) In working with them as an A&R person, artists learn to hate you, because you are the only person in their life that criticizes them.
“I’ve been waiting for you guys to do something like that. For you to not listen to anybody. Because when you guys release this, everybody in the world is gonna want to tear you down. And I felt if you didn’t have the balls to come in here and stand up to me, you certainly weren’t gonna have the balls to go stand up to anybody else.”
MICHAEL WAGENER The women loved ballads and those were the people who bought the albums back then. They spent the money on it.
NIKKI SIXX “Home Sweet Home” for us was our “Dream On” or our “Stairway to Heaven.” All of the bands that we loved always had that one song on their record and we liked that.
In every case, I made all my money on ballads. But the guys weren’t that focused on the ballads. They wanted to rock! The ballad was sometimes a necessary evil. “Okay, we’ve got nine songs … and the ballad.”
ROB AFFUSO Every time, with the bottle incident, with the T-shirt, our record sales would spike. It’s ridiculous how that works. So on the one hand you hate it, but on the other hand you’re selling, you know, twice the albums for that week. I wish it could have been different, but that’s the way it was.
STEVE WEST Everybody just wrote songs, put bands together, and got rec-ord deals on the East Coast. That’s how it worked. There were no bands on the East Coast that were playing clubs, doing originals, and getting a huge record deal because they were the biggest draw in town like Mötley Crüe or Poison or Warrant had done in L.A.
PAUL TAYLOR And they both had success, but by then we were into, what, 1990? So we were starting to all notice, like, wow, where’s everybody at the shows? And where’s our chart numbers?
HEIDI MARGOT RICHMAN What’s that bromide where you have your whole career to make your first record, and then suddenly you’re in the system and it ain’t that way anymore?
everything I read in these magazines was about the Whisky a Go Go, the Sunset Strip, Hollywood, the Troubadour, the Roxy Theatre. It all started painting this picture.
by ’87 the only way to describe the Strip would be … it was like the Rose Parade or New Year’s Eve. Every night was just a complete spectacle. Every club was packed. And there’d be five hundred or a thousand people walking the streets, passing out flyers, promoting their bands.
BRET HARTMAN Pretty much all the clubs back then—the Whisky, Roxy, Gazzarri’s, the Troubadour, the Country Club—they were all doing pay-to-play. ’Cause a lot of these bands were moving here from all over the country and they were doing anything they could to get exposure.
STEVIE RACHELLE Some of these girls, maybe they came from good families and their parents gave them some spending money. Some of them were strippers making five hundred dollars, seven hundred dollars a night. And they saw the bands struggling, five guys all living in one rehearsal space or a one-bedroom apartment, and they’re like, “Hey, we’ll take you to Carl’s Jr.! We’ll buy you groceries! We’ll get you a new pair of cowboy boots for the show!”
Even amongst all the players, people like Reb Beach or Vito Bratta or Nuno Bettencourt, who might have actually had a better technical command of the instrument, they all acknowledged that it was really Eddie’s world, and everything revolved around that.
BRAD TOLINSKI The interesting or sad or weird thing about shred guitar is that for years and years, rock ’n’ roll was primarily rooted in this idea of deep personal emotional self-expression and the trauma of the black experience.
But I don’t think American kids could relate to that for even a second. And there’s no reason why they should have. So what did the guitar become? It became this sort of extension of what high school kids were into—it became sports.
CARLOS CAVAZO There was competition. Who could have the biggest hair. Who could have the loudest guitars. Who could bring the hottest chicks down. It was definitely a competition, but a friendly competition.
GEORGE LYNCH It wasn’t like most of us had incredible farsighted vision. It was pretty myopic reasoning, watching what every other band was doing and the way they were dressing and the songs they were writing and the sounds they were getting and the way they were shredding.
RACHEL BOLAN And our demographic changed drastically. We went probably from 65 percent women at the shows to, like, 35 percent.
As many of the style’s artists and industry players attest to in these very pages, the writing was already on the (bathroom) wall well before Kurt Cobain popped up on MTV in a tattered puke-green-and-brown tee and declared, “Here we are now.”
At the same time, the industry was gorging itself on hard rock to the point of bursting. “By the end of the decade every label had five to twenty hair metal bands,” says A&R man Bret Hartman.
What’s more, some of those existing bands were now hobbled by a degree of internal dysfunction that proved fatal to their careers—and in a few instances, to band members themselves.
“We were the best band to pick on,” acknowledges Winger guitarist Reb Beach. “I mean, if I were to choose I would’ve picked on us, too. Because we were professing to be excellent musicians, and yet we were up there as froofy as could be.”
the death of the scene was less the result of a coordinated attack from the Northwest than a matter of recognizing that, as the Crüe themselves once sang, it was “time for change.”
JIM MERLIS No one in the Geffen camp ever, ever imagined that Nirvana was going to get so big. Because it wasn’t music that was designed to be particularly commercial. When something like that happens, it throws everything into chaos and you lose control of things.
DANNY GOLDBERG I don’t think Nirvana ever wanted to kill anyone’s career. There was just … there was a yearning from a new generation for new stars.
KIP WINGER The thing that makes me different is that I was personally attacked. You know, it wasn’t like I was Slaughter and I was one of the many bands that just went away due to the era. It’s that I was personally attacked by Metallica and by Beavis and Butt-Head.
RICK KRIM He became the poster child for the people who didn’t like this, who thought these bands were bullshit.
HOWARD BENSON At the time did it seem like such a massive change? Well, you know, it’s a very interesting thing. I have an alternate theory that I sometimes throw around.
And I remember the chart that came out at the end of 1991, the chart the week before had had hair bands at the top. The next week, it was this guy at the top of the chart named Garth Brooks. And nobody knew who he was, you know? But he was actually selling. And we weren’t. And all this stuff was being made up by the record companies.
SoundScan leveled the playing field. All of a sudden you were like, “Whoa, we’re not selling any hair bands!” I don’t know if that had anything to do with it or not. But I sometimes wonder, if that hadn’t happened …
