Read It Like a Man: 80s Hair Metal Books

Cover for "Mom, Have You Seen My Leather Pants? by Craig A. Williams

Patrick Sauer is funny. This is his third “Read It Like a Man” weekly column for Blisstree. Click to read his original intro, and first and second installments.

Chapter 3: 80s Hair Metal

I have this pet theory that the essence of what these here United States are all about can be summed by Van Halen. (Hear me out – you’ll kill at the next happy hour.) We talk a big game about freedom, liberty, and democracy, but the most honest quote about our country came from one of its worst presidents, Mr. Calvin Coolidge, when he noted that “the business of America is business.” It took us almost a century to go to war over the idea that black people maybe weren’t property, and that was long after we played the game of “No, it’s a sweet deal, Chief Indian guy, you get free land and firewater.” Let golden boy Bob McDonnell and his Caucasian lawn jockeys “debate” the issue of states’ rights, but let’s be clear that the only right was whether or not it was kosher for slave owners to manifest their destinies in the daughters of the fellas harvesting the cotton for compensation not even approaching what we now call minimum wage.

Which brings us to Van Halen. They are the epitome of the American archetype summed up in leather chaps, karate kicks, and guitar tapping. The band includes the immigrant story: Two talented hardworking brothers who came to these shores to ply their trade, working up from the streets of Pasadena to the mansions of Beverly Hills. They also featured the showman who shook off his Jewish heritage to get rich living and breathing the P.T. Barnum idea that suckers – and sex partners – are born every minute. Throw in the fact that David Lee Roth stole his act from James Brown, and you have American capitalism in a codpiece. I have a longer dissertation that includes the blue-collar workaday union man role of Sammy Hagar and the “New Coke” Gary Cherone experiment, but for that you’ll have to subscribe to my newsletter.

Why am I dropping my Van Halen thesis on you? Because their massive shadow covers an entire musical movement known as hair metal (a.k.a. cock rock, butt rock, glam rock, that crap we all listened to to in 1986), which added little to the global musical canon, but spawned Big Ben-esque-not-entirely-tall tales of deviant behavior. It was short-lived, but it was glorious, and now we have books to prove it. Van Halen was the skinny Elvis and the fat Elvis rolled into one, which begat a one-armed drummer getting stadium crowds on their feet to pour some sugar on him, whatever sticky situation that inspires.

And the cradle will rock.

The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Mötley Crüe with Neil Strauss

The Riff: The genital-warts-and-all musician bio hit the big time with Stephen Davis’s Hammer of the Gods, the unauthorized Led Zeppelin story. Released in 1985, it was a seminal (in every sense of the word) work detailing the unfathomable depths that rock stars can plummet, with the infamous and alleged mud shark incident setting a Caligulian capper of depravity that astonished fans assumed would never be topped. Not so fast, golden gods. While rock groupies were arguing over the veracity of Led Zeppelin’s hedonism, four sprite young lads from L.A. were shouting at the devil to such excess that old Beelzebub himself was all like, “You kids really need to slow down.”

The Cherry Pie: Mötley Crüe literally needed to slow down. Frontman Vince Neil, while out on a beer run during an epic bender, was doing 65 in a 25 mph zone when he crashed, killing his buddy from Hanoi Rocks, drummer Razzle Dingley. (Yes, justice was served. Neil served more than two weeks in jail for his vehicular homicide.) Even while acknowledging that half the recollections in The Dirt are fuzzy at best, “train wreck” doesn’t even begin to describe the Crue’s decadence. There was Tommy Lee’s assault on Pamela Anderson while she was holding their infant son; Nikki Sixx’s dead-for-two-minutes heroin overdose that required a paramedic/headbanger fan to jam two adrenaline shots into his ticker (genesis of the stripper anthem “Kickstart My Heart,” so win-win); and a disgraceful act involving two groupies, a ill-placed phone receiver , and the most unspeakably wrong call ever placed to someone’s poor mother.

Why Women Should Read: The enduring phrase “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll” is perfect for Mötley Crüe, because the music always came last. They had a few killer tunes – I’m partial to “Too Young to Fall in Love” – but The Dirt makes it clear that the Crue was never about the art. Sixx goes so far as to admit that two of their biggest albums, Girls Girls Girls and Theatre of Pain, more or less sucked. The frankness and openness from the boys makes Mötley Crüe more endearing than guys like Hendrix or Cobain, sad cases who squandered their talent. Mötley Crüe caused, and endured, their share of pain, but collectively, their greatest gift was to the cause of debauchery, which is why The Dirt fascinates. We’ve all dreamed of the Dr. Feelgood lifestyle. Bumping rails out of porn star ass-crack is what goes through our minds while playing air guitar, not the actual power chords. It’s all part of our rock-and-roll fantasy. No mortal man would want to have lived the Crue life, but the devil is in the details. So dig up The Dirt and shout it out; we all want to take a ride on the wild side – 25 years after the fact – in book form.

Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota by Chuck Klosterman

The Riff: The Crue held such sway over the 80s hair metal decade that Chuck Klosterman opens Fargo Rock City with the thrills he got buying a “Shout at the Devil” cassette tape (kids, ask your parents) as a fifth-grader in Wyndmere, North Dakota. It’s like that great scene in Almost Famous when Anita leaves William all her records and tells him to “listen to Tommy with a candle burning and you will see your entire future.” Only in Klosterman’s version, he can’t quite tell if the guys are actually girls or if the backward messages were officially Satanic; but it doesn’t matter because, as he says: “I was possessed, just as Tipper Gore always feared.” (Attention Gore family, neither Judas Priest’s “Eat Me Alive” nor Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop” caused the world to end, thus throwing global warming into serious question.)

The Cherry Pie: Klosterman has become one of America’s premiere pop culture gadflys, the kind of guy who gets paid handsomely to ponder Kelly Kapowski’s existential nature, so it’s kind of jarring to be reminded that he made his name somewhat seriously defending a club that accepted people like W.A.S.P., Warrant, and Whitesnake as its members. Klosterman can’t really defend 80s hair metal on its musicianship (or lyrics, style, authenticity, or originality), but where he proudly stands up for his spandexian idols is the fact that the music mattered to him, and most of the people around him – so it matters. It’s an engaging argument that can been applied all over the popular yet subpar landscape (read: 1970s disco or 2010s pop country.) If it has wide-appeal to somebody out there, doesn’t that count for something?

Why Women Should Read: Even through Klosterman’s admittance that the likes of Ratt and Skid Row aren’t the Beatles or the Stones, Fargo Rock City raises interesting cultural questions about how music shapes our adolescent years, and ears. To his credit, Klosterman isn’t overly arch or phony about answering the question. He knows he can only sort-of make the case for hair metal, but he never puts air quotes around the idea of hardcore fandom. It takes a big man to admit that the big hair bands weren’t an ironic “guilty pleasure,” but rather groups of marginally-talented coked-up overgrown teenage poonhounds that we enjoyed the hell out of. Am I biased because I saw Poison on my 18th birthday at the Billings Metra? Perhaps. But damn if Brett and C.C. didn’t know what we needed that monumental night. Nothin’ but a good time – and a healthy dose of Aqua Net.

Sad But True: Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City thesis takes on tragic dimensions in his book Killing Yourself to Live. He visits the Rhode Island club where those 100 Great White fans burned to death. He does some coke with a guy who lost a close family member, and later ruminates on why people felt it was okay to make jokes and send tasteless emails about the uncool, yet fully-invested fans of a crappy band. They died horrible deaths while seeing a band they loved, not to be seen seeing a band some damn hipsters on Pitchfork deemed acceptable. What could be more authentic?

Mom, Have You Seen My Leather Pants?: The Tale of a Teen Rock Wannabe Who Almost Was by Craig A. Williams

The Riff: This is the story of a simpler time in America, when a young boy could pick up an instrument, come up with a band name with vaguely pornographic overtones, pen the immortal “Another Tear,” play a show on the Sunset Strip, and sign boobs, all by the tender age of 16. In this engrossing memoir, Williams is the scamp out getting into some monkeyshines with his band Onyxxx, the adolescent doppelganger of, say, Winger. Like all great 80s hair metal band, Onyxxx lived fast and died young, metaphorically at least, as the whole saga took place before they were seniors in high school.

The Cherry Pie: In Leather Pants, Williams tells the story of the rise-and-fall of Onyxxx with a wink and a nod to the utter ridiculousness of the band’s “career,” but what comes through as loud as the Scorpions is that they lived a decent version of the rock star life, and he knows it’s one hell of a story. While Onyxxx wasn’t quite the Crue, they did their teenage drinking, drugging, in-fighting, backbiting, girl-swapping, groupie-banging, HIV-test-getting, geometry-class-skipping best. Leather Pants is an oddly accurate microcosm of the entire Rainbow Room scene, a Behind the Music morality tale where a hardworking band gets a shot, reaches the top, and then blows it all in a epic meltdown. Although, Onyxxx is unique in that the end days were somewhat related to the fact that too many members of the band were doing it with Barbi, their 38-year-old manager/Loni Anderson impersonator. (And no, that is not made up.)

Why Women Should Read: Beyond the sheer lunacy that Onyxxx ever happened, Leather Pants is an interesting look at the Reagan years, when those of us who dug hair metal had our boom boxes pointed toward the California Dream. For some it was the end of nuclear annihilation and lower marginal tax rates, for others, it was a quickie in the Whiskey-a-Go-Go bathroom with Lita Ford. Here was Williams, straddling both, going from a typical suburbanite smoking his first cigarette while listening to “Shout at the Devil” (not hard to picture Klosterman doing the same) to a guitar-soloing rock star partying with older statutory-rape-category Great White groupies (something Klosterman probably couldn’t have fathomed at that time.) Onyxxx could only have existed in the era of the 80s hair metal band, meaning that in a specific time and place, Mötley Crüe helped make a young boy’s dream come true: John Hancocking a set of juggs.

Rock on.

Patrick Sauer is a writer, blogger, and performer. Originally from Billings, Montana, he now lives in Brooklyn. For more, check out: patrickjsauer.com.