Nothin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion

by Tom Beaujour

The decade of decadence, as Mötley Crüe dubbed it, had come to a close, and acts that had sold millions of albums, packed arenas, and dominated MTV’s rotation didn’t just slowly fade out of fashion; they slammed headfirst into an immovable wall of antipathy. Overnight, not only had glam metal become superannuated but it was deemed unmentionable and untouchable—and anyone tainted by the genre became equally undesirable. The ecosystem suffered a total collapse.

ROSS HALFIN (photographer) Randy Rhoads was more tasteful than Edward, who was just jerking off.

know what? Gazzarri’s was the pussy-plucking-posse pocket of Hollywood. Every goddamn rich girl who had a mom or dad that hated her and was gonna be a stripper later got started at Gazzarri’s, man!

You gotta understand, we’ve got this guy, he’s like six-two, he kinda looks like Robert Plant, and he has platform shoes on and he’d have one leg up on the monitor with these stretchy see-through pants with no underwear, standing in front of the audience, playing flute, and trying to blow fire out of his flute.

The guy ate worms! Out of a live bait box!

Yeah, a box of night crawlers. Extra large. It was fun to watch.

just remember standing there in the Starwood being absolutely shocked. I was still, I think, in high school. And I was just like, “What is going on? Who is this guy?”

This is before they decided that being a religious band was going to be their focus. Because they weren’t religious. They were in the parking lot, you know, with chicks just like everybody else. There was no indication of any Christianity in them.

But when you’ve got nothin’, you know, you’ve got nothin’ to lose.

To sell through sex is powerful, but to sell through fear is much more powerful.

There’d be a line of fat girls across the front of the stage. And then, like, the gay boys showed up. You know, there was a Sex in the City episode about, like, the fat girls and the gay boys? That was absolutely about Poison. Then the cool girls came, and then the guys came.

You prioritize your shit when you’re young. Put the pussy and booze first.

Quiet Riot really, truly saved rock ’n’ roll. A lot of people don’t give them credit for that. Because at that time people were still stuck … They just wouldn’t let go of the new wave stuff. But the hard rock, heavy metal, rock ’n’ roll surge, Quiet Riot started that.

Ozzy and Mötley together was just insanity.

was a band of lunatics on the road. Because they were just breaking through to a new audience. It was after the show that the mayhem started.

It was a fuck fest. It was insane—Ozzy pissing on fucking cop cars and not realizing it’s a cop car, ...

I was like, “One of you guys is going to die and it ain’t going to be my husband.”

remember Ozzy just had his daughter Aimee and I remember seeing her as a tiny, tiny little baby. Sharon had just had that kid when we were doing that tour. But Ozzy was still fuckin’ up everywhere. He’d come up to our bus singin’ “Iron Man” but he was singin’, “I … am … krelly man.” And he’d have about half an ounce of cocaine in a baggie and he’d come on the bus and cut out a bunch of cocaine lines and stuff. We called ’em Texas power rails. And the next thing that I know is, I was going to my room, the other guys went to the pool, Nikki pissed, and Ozzy started snorting ants.

Then Nikki said, “Well, let’s change the rules.” And Nikki was out there with a girl that he had met the night before. She was lounging in the sun and Nikki pulls his dick out and starts pissing. She didn’t like it, she ran off. It was getting

Then Ozzy was sitting on the concrete and we were looking at him to see what he was going to do. And he had this funny look on his face, and that’s when I could see that he was pissing in his trunks while he was sitting down. There’s this pool of piss forming around him, and because he was quote-unquote in physical training, he must have been taking a lot of vitamins because I remember his piss was almost fluorescent. So Nikki’s kind of looking at him, like, “I dunno if that beats me…” And then Ozzy got on his hands and knees and started licking his piss up. That’s when I gathered my things and I said, “Okay, I’m out.” And as I was walking away I saw him snorting something on the ground, which I assume was the line of ants. If they did anything after that, I don’t know and I kinda don’t want to. SHARON

he did with Dokken was that he secretly recorded my conversations … my speech in the control room, and then edited it into a different meaning. You know? He used hours and hours of it—he was very good, a very good engineer—and made it sound like I was gay and wanted to fuck the band.

Everybody was drinking, doing lines of coke in the bathroom, flirting with girls in a way where if you did it now, you’d be behind bars, you know? If they had cameras back then, that whole scene would be in jail.

Crazy stories? The one that always stands out in my mind is Axl Rose chasing David Bowie down the street saying he was gonna kill him.

“Well, I guess you have it written down in a black book?” He grinned at me, and I put out a press release that Poison had a sex computer, that in it the girls were all categorized by name, city, and type of sex acts they had done. And the line from Bret was “The only safe sex I practice is not falling out of bed.”

remember when he sang “Little Fighter” the first time, I said, “Mike, what’s that about?” He goes, “A Greenpeace boat that the French government destroyed.” I’m like, “You wrote a song about a boat?” I mean, we’re coming off a multiplatinum record and our first single’s about a boat?

C.C. DeVille once said, “You come out with your rock songs, and then you put out your ballad, and then you buy a house.” He was right.

People always ask me the stupid question, “Was ‘More Than Words’ a blessing or a curse?” It can’t be a curse. Anything that you write and that you create that becomes a hit is a blessing. Period.

Sebastian was just so hyper, you know? I was excited as well but he couldn’t contain it. A couple hours before landing, Ozzy … it’s pitch-black in the plane and he says to Sebastian, “Do you ever shut the fuck up?”

“Hold on—is it a gun problem or a bat problem?”

TRACII GUNS There’s also a lot of guys my age, that come out all dressed up, reliving the day, which is interesting. But I mean, as long as people come, I don’t care who they are. And the older fans are slightly larger now, so it makes the room look even fuller.