Enuff Z’Nuff were outliers in the glam metal era – a Chicago band who loved The Beatles and sounded closer to Cheap Trick than Mötley Crüe. But record company machinations, changing musical tastes and self-sabotage meant they never lived up to their promise. In 2018, as they prepared to release their new album, Diamond Boy, founding bassist Chip Z’Nuff and former singer Donnie Vie looked back over the band’s chaotic career.

There have been times when Chip Z’Nuff could have rolled over and given up, and nobody would have blamed him.

During the glory days of the late 1980s, his band Enuff Z’Nuff were fêted as rock’s Next Big Thing. They were power-pop princes in glam-metal clothing – The Beatles and Cheap Trick reinvented for the lip gloss-’n’-hair-spray set. Bassist Z’Nuff and singer/guitarist Donnie Vie were one of the great double acts of the era. They were blood brothers, as close a pairing as you’ll find, and together they had the drive, the ambition and the songs to become stars

Unfortunately, they also had a superhuman capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, which they proceeded to do at every step along the way. For all the great music they have made, Enuff Z’Nuff’s career has been punctuated by drug-induced self-sabotage, inglorious failure, premature death, bankruptcy, a constant churn of record labels and personnel, and ultimately the acrimonious dissolution of the brotherhood between the two men at the heart of it. As Z’Nuff, a man not prone to under-exaggeration, puts it: “It’s been ten steps forward and thirty steps back.”

But quitting has never been Chip Z’Nuff’s style. Almost 30 years after Enuff Z’Nuff’s debut album, he’s still flying the flag for the band that shares his name. Their new record, the iridescent Diamond Boy, is as good as anything they’ve released since their late-80s/early-90s heyday.

It’s also the first record Z’Nuff has made without Vie; Z’Nuff handles vocals, although the spectre of his former bandmate haunts songs like Dopesick and Down On Luck. ‘I’m living in a world of pain and mixing it with cheap cocaine,’ Z’Nuff sings on the latter, a barely disguised reference to his old friend-turned-unwilling antagonist.

“I put the band together back in the eighties and I didn’t wanna give it up,” Z’Nuff says proudly. “The choo-choo train still has some fuckin’ coal in it.”

Chip Z’Nuff is a natural-born optimist. “There’s not a lot of pessimism in my life,” admits the man born Greg Rybarski in Blue Island, Chicago around the time The Beatles got together. He talks with an accent as wide as the Lake Michigan waterfront and a rasp like a malfunctioning hair dryer. “Although the music business will bring the worst out in you.”

He’s an inveterate networker, too. During our conversation he drops in the names of various people he’s crossed paths with, from legendary music mogul Clive Davis, who signed Enuff Z’Nuff to his label, Arista, in the early 1990s, to fellow Chicagoan Kanye West; Z’Nuff worked with the rapper in 2007 on an album by West’s protégé, Malik Yusuf. “I thought it would show people that we weren’t just rock musicians, that we were six-trick ponies,” he says, and then laughs a throaty laugh. “Obviously that failed miserably.”

It’s this enthusiasm for life that has kept Enuff Z’Nuff afloat through their turbulent career, and got them off the ground in the first place. “There were a lot of obstacles back then,” he says of the band’s beginnings in Chicago in 1983. “There were a ton of groups out here who were kicking ass but just couldn’t get arrested.”

He’d put the band together with Donnie Vie, a wild kid from a broken home. Z’Nuff, five years older, took Vie under his wing. “The bond was unbreakable,” he says. “The task as hand was: ‘Let’s write some great songs.’”

They bought a drum machine, moved into a flophouse and began writing those songs. They played anywhere that would have them, passing their tapes on to anyone who would listen. “We were full of piss and vinegar,” says Z’Nuff. “We knew we had a good sound. We were very flamboyant, very colourful, we looked great.”

They were opportunists, too. They recorded a demo at a studio in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. “We’d sneak in the studio at two o’clock in the morning when everybody was done and record these songs,” says Z’Nuff. “We’d get an ounce of cocaine and a couple of bottles of Jack Daniel’s and go for it.

One of the peculiarities of talking to Z’Nuff is that he frequently uses the word ‘we’ when referring to his band’s ill-starred narcotic history, despite insisting that he never indulged in anything stronger than pot.

“I never fell into the drugs,” he says. “I knew we couldn’t do any business if we were all fucked up. But you are the company you keep. If you’re hanging out with somebody who’s all fucked up on the hard stuff, well guess what – you’re fucked up as well. I include myself, cos that’s my team.”

The hard stuff was the provision of Vie and guitarist Derek Frigo, a local hotshot who joined Enuff Z’Nuff in 1988, a year before they recorded their self-titled debut album. The pair’s chemical proclivities often came close to undoing what Z’Nuff was trying to build.

“Everyone was fairly jacked up,” says Z’Nuff. “I found myself always trying to break up fights, trying to keep the drug dealers away from the band. I tried to make the road a little bit smoother for us. It never was, it was constantly bumpy.”

Bumpy or not, the road eventually led them to Atco Records, who threw their weight behind the band. All the signs pointed to stardom. They looked like part – psychedelic glam-metal gypsies in billowing shirts and purple-tinted granny glasses. MTV embraced the Beatles-y singles New Thing and Fly High Michelle. Their sparkling self-titled debut album sold half a million copies – not Guns N’ Roses numbers, but certainly respectable. Then the label dropped a bombshell.

“They came to us with a bill for $775,000 and said: ‘That’s what you owe us,’” says Z’Nuff. “We said: ‘We sold half a million records and we still owe three quarters of a million dollars?’”

Undeterred, they recorded a follow-up, the magnificent Strength. It matched its predecessor sales-wise, and even Rolling Stone took notice, declaring Enuff Z’Nuff to be the hottest rock band of the year. But their debts were mounting.

“Here we are, making great records, touring the country,” says Z’Nuff. “It was everything we wished for, yet we’ve got no dough. On top of that, because of our problems with substance abuse we weren’t focusing on the shit that was all around us business-wise.”

Z’Nuff decided to hit the nuclear button: he filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on behalf of the band. It was a risky gamble, one that could have turned Enuff Z’Nuff from bright young things into music industry pariahs. But it paid off when Clive Davis – the man who built the careers of an impressive list of artists including Aerosmith and Whitney Houston – offered them a deal with Arista.

“Clive knew when he signed the band that we had a few issues, but he was unaware of just how bad they were,” says Z’Nuff, who claims that Vie was arrested for drug possession the night before a crucial meeting with the label. “But he went with us. He said: ‘I don’t care what it takes to get that vocal out of your brother, make it happen.’”

He wrangled the vocal from Vie, but that was pretty much all he got out of their time with the label. Enuff Z’Nuff’s third album, 1993’s Animals With Human Intelligence, was released just as the grunge wave crested. The band remained stuck in the traps. Within a year they were off Arista. “We were never fired, we were never dropped,” says Z’Nuff. “But we found ourselves in debt again.”

Chip Z’Nuff being Chip Z’Nuff, he wasn’t about to let everything he’d built fall to pieces. The bassist hustled and cajoled his way through the next few years, releasing a string of albums on assorted independent labels. He still had enough charm to persuade the likes of Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen, Styx guitarist James ‘JY’ Young and the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan to appear on the band’s 1999 album Paraphernalia.

“I met Billy at a funeral, and said: ‘Are you aware of my band, Enuff Z’Nuff?’” he says. “He goes: ‘Are you kidding? I got the Strength album in my car right now.’ I thought maybe if I get some of the musicians in Chicago to come in and cameo on the record it would help elevate Enuff Z’Nuff’s name.”

It didn’t. The bumps in the road got bigger and more frequent. Enuff Z’Nuff cycled through a steady stream of band members and managers. In 2007, drummer Ricky Parent lost his battle with cancer. Three years earlier, former guitarist Derek Frigo, who had been fired in 1993, had died of a heroin overdose; for a while it looked like Donnie Vie would follow him.

“I was there for my brother all the way,” says Z’Nuff. “However, if I said there wasn’t any stress and aggravation, that wouldn’t be true.”

The cause of that stress and aggravation was having problems of his own. Since the beginning of Enuff Z’Nuff, Donnie Vie had been getting fucked up. And the only way he knew how to deal with that was by getting even more fucked up.

For a man who has spent a large chunk of the past 30 years in a bad place, Donnie Vie hasn’t lost his sense humour. “A bad place? Ya think so?” he says drily.

Vie currently lives in California. He’s two thirds of the way through recording a new solo album, the follow-up to 2014’s The White Album released soon after he quit Enuff Z’Nuff for the second and final time.

“I should have done it a long time before that. I just wasn’t ready,” he says of his departure. “I’ve just outgrown it. It’s not that big a deal.”

Except it is. Whether he likes it or not, Vie is still inextricably linked with the group he joined as a teenager 35 years ago. But any pride he takes in being part of Enuff Z’Nuff for so long is overshadowed by a mixture of ambivalence and frustration.

“I made I don’t know how many records, and wrote all the songs and sang ’em, and nearly killed myself doing it,” he says. “It’s part of my history. But that’s what it is: history.”

He was a kid named Donald Vandevelde when he met Chip Z’Nuff back in the 80s. “Fucked up, came from a dysfunctional home, manic depression, ADHD, bi-polar, all of that shit,” he says. “Like anyone in that situation, as soon as you can you find something to drink or smoke so you don’t feel like this depressed, insecure piece of shit.”

Asked what his poison of choice was, he laughs. “It would be easier to say what it wasn’t. I didn’t like acid. I was a great lover of the stimulants, but then comes the stress and you need something to equalise it, and before you know it you’re in a vicious loop. You become this monster.”

Vie’s relationship with Chip Z’Nuff was complex even back then. He credits the bassist with helping turn him from feral street kid into a proper musician and songwriter, and doesn’t deny that Z’Nuff’s drive was the thing that got Enuff Z’Nuff where they did. But he’s dismissive about their perceived roles in the band.

“He had a problem with being upstaged,” says Vie. “To this day he goes around claiming he wrote all the songs. He really didn’t. He made a very minimal contribution. Chip was a great player and a star, but he wasn’t an artist.”

Vie was uncomfortable at being bundled into the glam-metal movement, but he was too messed up to do anything other than go along with it. “There was a lot of drinking, a lot of drugs, a lot of girls,” he says. “The music and the shows was extra-curricular to the party. It was like a carnival ride. This thing was spinning so fast. And once that carnival ride is rolling there’s no way you can get off.”

Through his narcotic haze, Vie watched his band’s initial promise dissipate. He wasn’t unaware of the problems, just numb to them.

“Oh, it’s my fault that I wasn’t in any kind of mental shape to say this is wrong, that’s wrong,” he says. “When it came to that kind of decision making, I’d just disappear.”

More than once, he says, he tried to make a solo album, only for “other people” to muscle in and co-opt it as an Enuff Z’Nuff record. “Next thing you know, you’ve got a deal, you’re playing shows, you got money and you’re back on the carnival ride. I kept fooling myself, thinking: ‘This time it will be different.’”

It wasn’t. Vie quit Enuff Z’Nuff for the first time in 2003, only to find himself pulled back in a few years later. It looked like he had as much trouble breaking his addiction to the band as he did to narcotics.

He left Enuff Z’Nuff in 2013. It would be another couple of years before he quit drugs. The tipping point came when he returned from a European tour and was pulled off the plane by the police for an outstanding drug warrant. He could have gone to prison for a long time, but instead the court offered him the option of undergoing a programme to get clean. He seized the opportunity. “It was time to stop the ride,” he says.

It worked. Vie says he’s been clean for more than two and a half years. The programme helped him deal with an array of health issues, ranging from rotten teeth to hepatitis C (a disease common among intravenous drug users).

“I have a lot more days where I’m not not happy, where I’m not all strung out,” he says. “It’s great that I know I’m not going to be in the studio for the next thirty-six hours because I’m all fucked up, afraid of the sun. There’s a lot of things I don’t miss about those days.”

One of those things, apparently, is Chip Z’Nuff. Vie hasn’t spoken to his former bandmate in four years, and shows no signs of wanting to change that any time soon.

“There’s no real reason to do that,” he says. “I could never function in that band the way he has it orchestrated without being medicated. There’s no way I could deal with that…” He searches for the word. “Buffoonery.”

And so here we are in 2018. Chip Z’Nuff and Donnie Vie have separate lives, separate careers. Despite his upbeat demeanour, Z’Nuff can’t quite keep the disappointment out of his voice when he talks about his former colleague and friend.

“The only time we talk is when it has to do with money, and it’s always through his manager, who is his brother-in-law,” says Z’Nuff. “I love the guy, but I don’t feel that love is reciprocated.”

Z’Nuff says that Derek Shulman, the man who signed them to Atco Records all those years ago, attempted to broker a rapprochement in 2016 with a view to getting the pair back together to make a new album. According to Z’Nuff, Vie wasn’t interested in the songs he’d written.

“That’s why I’m singing on the new album,” he says. “Listen, Donnie and I did a lot of stuff together. But when you don’t have your partner with you it’s swim or fuckin’ drown. And that’s what I did, I swam.”

Vie says he hasn’t heard the latest Enuff Z’Nuff record. Nor does he sound like he wants to. “I’ve moved on,” he says. “All that shit’s in the past.”

There’s no fairy-tale ending in sight for Enuff Z’Nuff, but then there wasn’t much of a fairy tale beginning either, the brotherly bond stronger in theory than in reality. But as long as Chip Z’Nuff has air in his lungs and there’s coal in the engine, that choo-choo train will keep on rolling.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 255 (October 2018)

Gary Holt says Exodus used to cut hair metal shirts to threads with knives during concerts.

In a new interview with Ultimate Guitar, the guitarist, who plays in Slayer as well, reflects on the thrash metal vs. hair metal rivalry which dominated the California scene in the 1980s. He also claims his band lifted the conflict to new, physical extremes during their time with Paul Baloff on vocals.

After saying that Exodus’ following was “the most violent and most over-the-top” of any fanbase in the Bay Area, he adds, “In the Baloff era in Exodus [1982 to ’86], if someone showed up with a Ratt shirt, we’d pull out the pocket knife and cut strips of the shirt off.”

He continues: “If you look at some of the old photos of Baloff, he’s got all these pieces of cloth, like, for three inches, tied around his wrist. Those are threads of a poser shirt!”

However, Holt admits that he and his bandmates harboured a secret appreciation for Ratt and fellow hair metal stars Dokken. “But, at the same time, us guitar players were secretly coveting every Warren DeMartini riff, like the sickest, greatest guitar player on Earth with the best tone ever, him and Robbin [Crosby]. So, we were like actively sitting there listening to him and [Dokken guitarist] George Lynch.”

Holt is far from the first thrasher to voice the subgenre’s early rivalry with hair metal. In 2013, Metallica singer/guitarist James Hetfield said thrash “probably” wouldn’t exist were it not for its musicians distaste towards Mötley Crüe, Poison and the rest.

“There was a giant hatred for that that fueled a lot of thrash,” he told MK Onderground (per Ultimate Guitar). “Metallica growing up in Los Angeles right in the heart of glam, right at the peak of glam and your Mötley Crües, your Ratts, your Poisons… all that stuff was based in L.A. and we were the hated figure, but they were hated even more. We were thrown out of clubs because they thought we were punk rock.”

Earlier this month, Holt announced his memoir – A Fabulous Disaster: From The Garage To Madison Square Garden, The Hard Way – will come out on April 1, 2025 via Hachette Books. It was co-written by Adam Tempedelen and features a foreword by Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett, who founded Exodus in 1979.

Across the spectrum of metal-themed films, you’ll find an array of serious, thought-provoking pieces of art alongside far-less-serious productions that revel in their absurdity and embrace niche audiences with open arms. Hairmetal Shotgun Zombie Massacre: The Movie proudly stands in the latter category. This over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek, heavy metal splatter comedy has overcome a slate of devastating hurdles to make its way onto the screen and into the hearts of headbangers across the globe.

At first glance, Hairmetal Shotgun… may seem little more than a crass orgy of gratuitous violence, sophomoric humour and an endless barrage of headbanging riffs. But beneath this superficial veneer lies a doggedly affectionate celebration of heavy metal culture and the positivity and solidarity that underpin its ethos. Not to mention a few very special cameos from some bona fide metal legends…

As writer/director Josh Vargas told Decibel, the concept was, “What if we put a drug-and-sex-obsessed hair metal band in an Evil Dead-type situation?” Expanding upon this tasty premise, Hairmetal Shotgun… revels in its outrageous violence, taking every opportunity to showcase shockingly excessive kills that defy both physics and common sense.

Narratively, the film tells the story of a vapid, drug-obsessed hair metal band called Witches’ Lips who, after deciding to record their debut album in a stereotypically creepy cabin located in the middle of a cemetery, accidentally open a portal that allows demons to possess the corpses that reside on the grounds. Sustaining themselves on weed, booze and heroic amounts of cocaine, the band attempt to survive the night. 

In any other context, the film’s unwavering commitment to outrageous levels of gore would quickly grow stale, but within the framework of this movie, it’s a riotous celebration of the kind of jaw-dropping, over-the-top violence that operates as both comedy and satire. Hairmetal Shotgun… doesn’t take itself seriously, and it doesn’t expect the audience to, either. The film is peppered with humour that ranges from groan-inducingly cheesy one-liners to disastrous levels of self-sabotage that would make even the grimmest metalhead crack a smile. The characters, including a grizzled hero with a seemingly endless supply of shotgun shells and an eccentric inventor who creates elaborate zombie-killing contraptions, are all scene-chewing caricatures that generate endless laughs along the way.

Intentionally calibrated for metalheads, Metal Shotgun… is packed with more inside jokes, metal references, band names and glammy stereotypes than a Steel Panther world tour. But beneath the multiple layers of chaos and comedy, Metal Shotgun… delivers an open-hearted love letter to heavy metal culture. While both Vargas and Whitney are old school hair metal fans, the film’s high-profile cameos come from far heavier realms: Slayer’s Tom Araya (hilariously playing himself in the fiery climax), Lamb Of God’s Randy Blythe and Morbid Angel’s David Vincent all make appearances in the film. Musically, Witches’ Lip’s songs were contributed by power metal mainstays Helstar: a stupidly catchy blend of King Diamond-esque shrieks and stadium-sized riffs that stand up exceedingly well on their own merits.

Low-budget movies are difficult enough to make, but Hairmetal Shotgun… faced more than its fair share of challenges. Shot in three back-breaking weeks, Vargas and co-writer Justin Whitney had little margin for error: no small feat considering all of the stunts, special effects and pyro called for in the script. In 2016, having stitched together a sufficiently-decent edit, they premiered the film to select audiences at some conventions. But, in 2017, flooding as a result of Hurricane Harvey destroyed all of the hard drives containing the film’s post-production work. They had to recreate the entire post-production process from scratch.

A limited release was re-scheduled for 2020 but then further tragedy struck. Speaking to Metal Hammer about what happened next, Vargas says, “In the middle of getting a proper surround mix and strategising a proper DVD/Blu-ray, our friend and producer [Jason Poh] suffered a very untimely death. That pretty much derailed everything.

However, the writer/director adds: “[Hairmetal Shotgun…] was a blast to make and is a fun, ridiculous, heavy metal horror movie. I turned a version loose on YouTube just so people could see it.”

And just like that, the movie is now freely available just in time for Halloween. Fans interested in supporting the cause can also scoop up a commemorative (and employment-threatening) t-shirt.

While Hairmetal Shotgun Zombie Massacre: The Movie may not be everyone’s cup of tea, it never pretends to be anything other than what it is: a gloriously chaotic, headbanging romp through a world where logic takes a backseat to mayhem. This self-awareness and willingness to embrace absurdity are what make the film so endearing: it knows it’s ridiculous and fully embraces its campy charm. In doing so, it invites the audience to suspend their disbelief and simply enjoy a wild, head-banging ride.

Watch Hairmetal Shotgun Zombie Massacre: The Movie in full here:

Back in November 1981, just less than 12 months after they got together, Vince Neil, Nikki Sixx, Mick Mars and Tommy Lee were total unknowns; young, dumb and practically overflowing with cum, inhabiting the Mötley house in Los Angeles later portrayed so graphically in their book The Dirt, and without the proverbial pot in which to urinate. 

The band’s sleazy adaptation of hard-rock themes was hardly in demand at the time. Gigs were in short supply – as was toilet paper. Six months earlier all 100 copies pressed of their aptly titled seven-inch vinyl debut single Stick To Your Guns (b/w Toast Of The Town) had been given away free at the band’s live shows. And yet the full-length album they’d been dying to make would ignite a glam metal revolution.

In the days before Doc McGee and Doug Thaler handled their affairs and Elektra Records signed the group’s royalty cheques, Mötley Crüe were managed by Allan Coffman – a former construction worker who was the brother-in-law of a friend of Mars – and his wife. The group were being paid just $20 a week. 

Indeed it was drummer Tommy Lee’s willingness to ‘take one for the team’ that enabled them to visit the studio at all. 

“We were all in relationships at the time except for Tommy, and the manager at Hit City West studio was this girl,” singer Vince Neil reminisces with a mischievous grin. “She wasn’t very attractive, but we made Tommy do her for some free recording time.” 

Self-produced by the group, recorded over just three days and mixed at Cherokee Studios (with Coffman And Coffman Productions credited as executive producers), the album was made for the miserly sum of $2,500. Just 20,000 copies were pressed on their own label, Leathür Records.

"Too Fast For Love was a demo tape, man,” Neil exclaims. But, without doubt, its audaciousness paid off. Once Elektra signed the group, Roy Thomas Baker, of Queen fame, was brought in to remix the original Leathür edition.

“A lot of people say Roy screwed up the album, and I agree,” admits Neil. “I prefer the rawness of the version that we did ourselves.” 

In fact Mötley had apparently tried to persuade Andy Scott, guitarist of The Sweet, to oversee the record, but their efforts were in vain 

“That’s absolutely true,” Neil confirms. “Mötley Crüe loved Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard album. We also asked Herman Rarebell [drummer with the Scorpions] to produce us and take a share in the band, but he passed. I still tease him about that.” 

Neil is amused to be reminded that the press release that accompanied Too Fast For Love called the group’s style “A return to the hard-driving sound of The Beatles re-energised for the 80s”. Considering that Mötley Crüe went on to become one of the most copied bands in the world, it didn’t sound like they thought of themselves as particularly original. 

“You’ve gotta remember that in the 1980s, music was still recovering from the punk rock movement,” the singer protests. “We were one of the first bands to take punk and mix it with glam and metal. We started a whole new trend.” 

So many acts never quite manage to surpass their first two or three albums. So what is it about the spark of a group’s earliest work? 

“Well, you have your whole life to write your first album, and then a year before the sophomore curse kicks in,” Neil reasons. “To me, Too Fast For Love has some great material. We still do most of those songs on stage. Some are pretty juvenile, Come On And Dance makes me want to cringe a little, but we were a young band back then, and for the time that it came out, we were so far ahead of the game."

The Roy Thomas Baker remix of Too Fast For Love is available as part of the Crücial Crüe box set, out now.  

“It was what MTV was built on, and what sold out stadiums all over the world,” says Justin Quirk, author of the forthcoming book Nothing But A Good Time - The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Glam Metal, which aims to tell cultural history of the genre. “It struck me that there had to be a story in there.”

For a while, back in the 80s, Glam Metal was everywhere. For rock fans growing up in the UK, where the sound of hard rock was invariably accompanied by the stale, sickly scent of patchouli and two litre bottles of warm cider, its emergence provided an impossibly glamorous glimpse into another world altogether.

It was a world where the party never stopped, where men embraced the feminine and made themselves more attractive to females in the process, where you could go to Hull, or Hatfield, or Huddersfield, and find a taste of Hollywood if you knew where to look.

Conventional wisdom states that a cold wind blew in from the Pacific North West and the party stopped, and everyone knows that story. But the years that preceded grunge? Now there’s a tale that deserves to be properly told.

“It struck me as odd that this kind of music has been sort of written out of history, and seems to be pretty much the only genre which is considered completely beyond the pale in terms of serious critical reassessment,” says Quirk. “The emergence of grunge obviously hit glam metal very hard, but part of the response seems to have been a kind of collective embarrassment, and a general denial that anybody was ever into this stuff. And I knew from my own memory that these bands were huge at the time - it wasn’t some niche concern that was limited to one place.”

Quirk, who has written for The Guardian, Kerrang!, Esquire, The Times, Sunday Times and The Independent, is currently running a crowd-funding campaign in order to finish the book. Contributors will get their names featured in the finished publication, while those prepared to splash out a little more money can claim rewards that include Quirk DJing at an event of their choosing.

Why does glam metal deserve a book?

It struck me as odd that this kind of music has been sort of written out of history, and seems to be pretty much the only genre which is considered completely beyond the pale in terms of serious critical reassessment.

When I started researching it, I realised that what I didn’t really want to do was an exhaustive user’s guide to glam metal - partly because it wouldn’t be that interesting, but also because those things always feel like you’re on a hiding to nothing, and will always miss out something which someone considers important.

I was more interested in stepping back a bit and looking at why it happened where and when it did - and the more I looked into it, the more it felt like a real product of its environment. This decade when America was rebuilding itself after a very fractious seventies and early eighties, and seemed to be regaining its confidence culturally. Action films, wrestling, huge stadium shows, yuppie culture, MTV, America winning the cold war, huge works of art etc - everything seemed to be getting bigger and more inflated and excessive, and it seemed like glam metal was the musical wing of all that. But over the course of the decade, it gradually soured into something a lot darker.

I think Appetite For Destruction is probably the crucial turning point in all that - on the one hand, as an album that’s got all the key elements of 80s excess (drugs, women, partying, LA etc), but they’re all portrayed in a really grim, seedy light. The comparison for me is with that strand of sixties hippy culture, where things start off as fun and liberating, but end up with Manson and Altamont. Those scenes where the wheels come off really badly are always grimly fascinating.

Who should buy it?

Not just diehard glam metal fans - I want to write something which is of a wider interest to anyone who thinks about why music turns out the way it does, and how it can’t really be separated from the culture around it. America was in a fascinating place at that time, and I think we’re still dealing with the repercussions of it to some extent. It’s a cultural history more than just a narrow musical one, although you might get more out of it if you accept that Hysteria is one of the greatest albums ever made as a starting principle.

What would you say to fans who look back with a degree of embarrassment about their glam metal past?

That’s a natural part of growing up, but you shouldn’t be too hard on yourselves. While there was something ostensibly ludicrous about walking around a suburban town in south east England in cowboy boots and a top hat, it’s no more or less ridiculous than most phases people go through. And as they say in The Wrestler - ‘Was there something wrong with just wanting to have a good time?’

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You’re a DJ. What’s the one glam metal track guaranteed to fill the floor?

It’s a hugely obvious choice, but You Give Love A Bad Name is an absolutely perfect, machine-tooled pop song which will be getting played to big groups of rowdy drunk people until the balloon goes up. That and Living On A Prayer are basically the same tune just slightly reworked, but they’re completely irresistible - the production is great, the backing vocals are just right for yelling along to, and they absolutely hit the ground running.

They actually have an enormous halo effect on the rest of Slippery When Wet which is really not as great an album as people remember - most of side two is pretty forgettable, but those singles just lift the whole thing.

Is glam metal ripe for a non-ironic return? After all, Ratt and others feature fairly prominently on the soundtrack to the latest series of Stranger Things.

I can completely see this happening. I was thinking about it last summer when Barry Gibb played at Glastonbury - he looked at first nervous, and then cautiously relieved, then finally weirdly touched that he’d been welcomed like that by the crowd and they acknowledged him as a genius. 10-15 years ago, disco was essentially treated as a novelty, only played at fancy dress nights, written off as this frothy, lightweight thing and people like Nile Rodgers were these peripheral figures. But people went back, and reassessed what they did and realised how important it was culturally and musically, and now treat them with absolute reverence.

I think you’re getting the first stirrings of that - Mariah Carey and Taylor Swift both covering Def Leppard songs, those recent WASP shows in London seemed to be the biggest shows they’d played in a long time etc – but I would genuinely be unsurprised if that slot at Glastonbury in a few years time has someone like that playing.

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Poison - From The Gutter to Glam Rock Superstars

“We thought we were the baddest creatures on God’s great earth. Nobody could do it as hard as us and as much as us, and get away with it like us. There was no competition. The more fucked up we got, the greater people thought we were.”

That was how Nikki Sixx described the ascent of Mötley Crüe, the band who would cast the mould for so-called ‘hair metal’. That band’s wilful nihilism would soon distil into a more general, frothier hedonism, but the cheap thrills the Crüe created were enough to sustain the Sunset Strip scene for a decade.

While the Crüe had their roots in glammy ‘chicks with dicks’ like the New York Dolls and the influential Finns Hanoi Rocks (whose paths they would cross, with awful consequences), they were fond of saying their attitude was punk. If it was, it was the American definition of it; the Crüe were certainly more interested in success, drugs and women than in making social comment.

Their trash aesthetic was quickly and universally adopted, although only Guns N’ Roses really pushed the boundaries of it. The overwhelming explosive impact of GN’R’s debut Appetite For Destruction shoved even Mötley Crüe to the sidelines.

While the Crüe and Guns were each arch manipulators of their image, and neither sported for very long the truly towering hairdo that christened the scene, there were hundreds picking up crumbs from their table, from the harmless bubblegum popsters Poison to the more graphic LA underbelly inhabited by L.A. Guns.

Like most overwhelming musical trends, hair metal was closely associated with one location, in this case the few miles of Sunset Boulevard that ran through West Hollywood up to the edge of Beverly Hills. The iconic clubs there – the Rainbow, the Cathouse, the Whisky A-Go Go – became nirvana for kids from Moscow to Milton Keynes. And attempts to recreate them elsewhere were rarely convincing; what sounded great on Sunset Strip came across as forced and ersatz in the mouths of Doncaster brickies.

Ultimately, the scene was about lifestyle as much as music. It was about embodying a rock-star idyll. And all of the nerdy kids who were excluded would eventually rise up and kill it. Kurt Cobain wore make-up too, but not in the way that Nikki Sixx did.

While Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses have been sturdy enough to survive and prosper in their variant forms, hundreds of other hair-metallers disappeared. However, the merest whiff of hairspray and power chords is more than enough to bring them flooding back to the forefront of our minds.

Essential Albums

Mötley Crüe – Girls Girls Girls (Elektra, 1987)

The Crüe reached a formidable peak of excess off the back of Girls Girls Girls. But as they hit a commercial high, they also ran out of control. That spirit is best captured here. The album has all of the vivid hormonal thrust of their first, Too Fast For Love, but the band – or at least principal songwriter Nikki Sixx – had added a little artfulness, too. Girls Girls Girls was loud, fast and dumb: the perfect representation of Mötley Crüe.

The band never made it to the UK to support it, famously blaming “too much snow on the roof” of Wembley. “Too much snow up my nose, more like,” Mick Mars remarked years later.

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Guns N’ Roses – Appetite For Destruction (Geffen, 1987)

Released the same year as the Crüe’s Girls Girls Girls, Appetite For Destruction appeared to have come in from a parallel universe. GN’R might have looked like Mötley in their publicity shots, but the similarities ended there. It’s pointless to recap on the music because it quickly became ubiquitous. What’s interesting is the world view. Where Crüe and others were insiders on the LA scene, Axl was an outsider, and it showed. Welcome To The Jungle and It’s So Easy were about violence and fear, about yearning to fit in. Allied to such powerful tunes, Appetite… quickly became a code to live by.

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The Albums That Defined The Genre

Poison – Look What The Cat Dragged In (Capitol, 1986)

Recorded for just $23,000, Look What The Cat Dragged In is an instant, disposable trash metal classic. Intoxicating while it lasts, the record is too flimsy to withstand close examination, yet it perfectly captures its time.

Poison were too pretty to pull off anything other than lightweight sentiments like Talk Dirty To Me and Cry Tough, but they didn’t need to do anything else. They were a cheap date, and by the end of the night you knew you’d had a lot of fun. The subsequent Open Up And Say… Ahh was bigger, but Look What The Cat Dragged In said the same things faster and just as well.

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Warrant – Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich (Sony, 1989)

Warrant seemed to have been invented for people who found Poison too difficult to understand, and their album title pretty much said it all. They had hitched up to the wagon and were along for the ride.

Undisturbed by original thought, Warrant made a record so blatant and bare-faced it could hardly have failed, given the prevailing climate. Singer Jani Lane had an ear for a tune, as demonstrated on the album’s two big hits – Down Boys and Heaven – but something of a storm followed, with accusations that the band hadn’t actually played on the record.

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Hanoi Rocks – Back To Mystery City (Maverick, 1983)

Fronted by the impossibly pretty Michael Monroe, Hanoi Rocks created much of the trash aesthetic with this record. Yet the aura of premature doom that permeated it was to prove horribly prophetic, and the band disintegrated soon after drummer Razzle was killed in a drunken car crash.

The Finnish band had relocated to London when they cut Back To Mystery City, and what it lacked in substance it made up for in charm and naked ambition. The wonderfully titled Tooting Bec Wreck hinted at their humour, while Malibu Beach Nightmare showed they had a way with an edgy, dirty tune too.

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Cinderella – Long Cold Winter (Polygram, 1988)

With their debut album Night Songs, Cinderella seemed happy to offer up some unchallenging ear candy to go with their ultra- glam looks. But, perhaps sensing a change in the air, their singer Tom Keifer attempted to shift gears before both the band and the scene got left behind. Adding some blues rock to their more standard hair metal was only partially successful, yet this album has still stood up well to the passing years. Bad Seamstress Blues and Falling Apart At The Seams are only average bluesers, but Gypsy Road and Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone) are classics that have stood the test of time.

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Faster Pussycat – Faster Pussycat (Elektra, 1987)

Contemporaries of L.A. Guns and Guns N’ Roses, Faster Pussycat were as brassy and sleazy as the Russ Meyer skinflick from which they took their name. Their singer Taime Downe was at the centre of the LA movement, thus both Taime and his band were scenesters, a fact reflected in their debut record. Don’t Change That Song was raucous and memorable, as was their other stand-out tune, Bathroom Wall, a touching paean to the kind of girl Taime picked up in the Cathouse. Faster Pussycat never quite broke out of LA, but this is a salacious documentation of their attempt.

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L.A. Guns – L.A. Guns (Polygram, 1988)

Tracii Guns was the man who’d put the Guns in Guns N’ Roses, and in Phil Lewis, a pretty-boy ex- pat who’d been in the British glam band Girl, he thought he’d found a frontman for his new band to rival Axl Rose.

L.A. Guns were as tough as GN’R and pointedly more sleazy. They had all the looks, if not quite as many songs, and this self-titled debut generated plenty of heat. Raw, and reeking of cheap booze and late nights, Sex Action and Hollywood Tease were pretty typical of the Guns/Lewis combo. What the band lacked in flair, they made up for in attitude, and for many this record remains a classic of its kind.

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Ratt – Out Of The Cellar (Atlantic, 1984)

Ratt revolved around big-mouth singer Stephen Pearcy, even bigger-mouthed drummer Bobby ‘The Blotz’ Blotzer and the sunny and dumb guitarist Robbin Crosby. They took their cue from Aerosmith and Cheap Trick rather than from contemporaries like Mötley Crüe, but Ratt were neither as smart nor cool. What they were tremendously good at was having a good time, and this record sums up their appeal: its best song, Round And Round, is ineffably stupid but impossible to forget.

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Skid Row – Skid Row (Atlantic, 1989)

Skid Row epitomised the latter stages of hair metal. With the blueprint established, their mentor Jon Bon Jovi and manager Doc McGhee simply applied a tried and trusted formula. With a pretty, OTT frontman in Sebastian Bach, they had a man willing to sell his mother for the slightest whiff of fame. And it duly came along with this record. The rest of the band were seasoned players, so songs like 18 And Life and Youth Gone Wild were immediate and anthemic. Given the material, they knew exactly how to treat it. Bach was living it large, and Skid Row quickly became the rock monster he craved.

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Motley Crue: "We'd Play To 20 People In A Sandwich Shop And Set Nikki On Fire"

Izzy Stradlin: Life And Death, Sex And Drugs And Guns N' Roses

The living embodiment of ‘80s rock excess, Mötley Crüe often seemed to be way more interested in the sex and the drugs than the rock ‘n’ roll. Don’t believe us? Well listen to these 10 turkeys…

10. She Needs Rock N’ Roll (2000)

She may very well need rock’n’roll, but not like this, surely. This song, from New Tattoo, sounds like some old rock lags trying hard to summon up the spirit of glories past, but coming to the conclusion that their hearts really aren’t in it. I wonder why. Not out and out awful. But not far short.

9. Toast Of The Town (1981)

The accepted wisdom is that Mötley’s debut is all killer, no filler. Not true. Toast Of The Town is a ham-fisted attempt at glam metal that features a host of dummkopf riffs plodding all over the place and a vocal that’s desperately – and unsuccessfully – searching for a tune. Quick tip. Avoid the guitar solo at all costs.

8. Sumthin’ For Nuthin’ (1987)

There’s always been a suspicion that beneath the Crüe’s stadium straddling exterior there lurks the beating heart of a bad bar band. Here’s the aural proof from Girls, Girls, Girls. The song’s hackneyed title isn’t the only thing that’s second-hand about this re-tread of a re-tread of a re-tread. The riff sounds like something a roadie plays to check a guitar sound before the lights go down.

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7. Slice of Your Pie (1989)

There are times when the Crüe want to be Aerosmith so bad it hurts. This third track from Dr. Feelgood is one of them. But here the band display none of the funky fluidity that gave the ‘Smith their edge. And Vince Neil really is no Steven Tyler, is he? There are some attempts to weld on some Beatles-esque psychedelia, here. Unfortunately, that’s just another epic fail.

6. Poison Apples (1994)

Taken from self-titled album, known as “the one that doesn’t feature Vince Neil”, the fact that this doesn’t sound much like the Crüe is no excuse. Vocalist John Corabi tries his best to inject some life into a gossamer-thin idea by summoning up the spirit of Mott The Hoople in the lyrics and even letting off a couple of fucks. But a poor tune is a poor tune.

5. Brandon (1997)

Sung by Tommy Lee, this album closer on Generation Swine tries to summon up the ghost of John Lennon at his most mawkish. But this is a particularly ham-fisted attempt at a tear-jerking ballad in ‘honour’ of the Crüe drummer’s son. Probably very touching for the people involved, including mum Pamela Anderson. But embarrassing and awkward for the rest of us.

4. Louder Than Hell (1985)

Should be retitled ‘Lamer Than Hell’. This is two minutes and 32 seconds of metal sludge from Theatre of Pain that the band would doubtless have felt had ‘a groove’. It doesn’t. It’s just slow and tedious, dragged down further by an impossibly irritating Vince Neil vocal. Check out that high-pitched wail at the end of the chorus. Or rather, don’t!

3. She Goes Down (1989)

Mötley in their pomp was more of a soap opera than a rock band. Interest in Tommy Lee’s penis and Nikki Sixx’s heroin addiction was far greater than interest in the music. This song from Dr. Feelgood is the kind of tossed-off tune that makes you suspect that at times the band felt the same way.

2. Jailhouse Rock (1987)

Why Mötley felt the urge to include this live version of the Elvis classic on Girls, Girls, Girls is anyone’s guess. But what we do know is that this is a god-awful version of the song – over-fast, ultra-clumsy and mega-irritating. You think you’ve just about escaped this musical hell when Vince Neil decides to scream, ‘one more time’. Aargh! Run for cover!

1. Save Our Souls (1985)

Taken from Theatre Of Pain, this is about as painful as it gets. Save Our Souls is a dreadful walking-paced dirge that makes four minutes 13 seconds feel like four hours and 13 minutes. Slow metal needs to convey a sense of oppression, claustrophobia and even fear. This just makes you want to go to the bar.

The 60-Second Mötley Crüe Quiz

Those who witnessed London-based band Silverhead in the early 70s when they were slogging round the clubs and colleges of Three-Day Week Britain remember them fondly as the missing link between glam and punk. That they never made it big adds to their charm.

Fully bonused up, the reissue of two studio albums, plus a live in Finsbury Park set, when they supported Nazareth during the height of Bowiemania, doesn’t tarnish their reputation as a cut-above neo-metal act. Playboy frontman Lord Michael Des Barres does his best to steer the lads into sonic areas occupied by the New York Dolls and Aerosmith.

Using the literature of rock with lashings of gratuitous sex, Silverhead’s self-titled debut (⁷⁄₁₀) was produced by Martin Birch and kicks up a storm on Sold Me Down The River. With guitarist Rod Davies chopping the riffs out (he’d been in the 1967 version of the Riot Squad with Mr Bowie) and future Ray Manzarek/Blondie bassist Nigel Harrison adding gravitas, Silverhead might be compared to The Only Ones for standing out while standing aside.

The non-PC 16 And Savaged (see Spinal Tap’s Smell The Glove) (⁸⁄₁₀) is a masterpiece of louche swagger thanks to More Than Your Mouth Can Hold, stage favourite James Dean, the fanciful Hello New York and the decadent conceit of This Ain’t A Parody.

Live At The Rainbow London (⁷⁄₁₀) wrapped the band up before they could finish Brutiful. Axe man Robbie Blunt went on to bigger though not necessarily better things with Robert Plant. Good old Silverhead: what a Brutiful bunch of cults.

The Hollywood Brats - Sick On You: A Brats Miscellany album review

Every Home Should Have One: New York Dolls' Debut Album

The ‘80s were a simpler time, when hair was high, rock was loud, clothes were minimal and ladies were plentiful. Nobody cared how much rain fell in Seattle and life was just one long party. At least that how the world looked viewed through the medium of hair metal videos. Here are 10 classics…

10) Bulletboys - Smooth Up In Ya (1988)

Disappointing on two counts. There’s very little hairspray being used on this 1988 video from LA’s next best thing that never was. And there are no identikit strippers cut into the ‘live in the studio’ performance. Never mind. Bulletboys more than make up for it, though, with the most insane amount of girly man posing ever seen on a soundstage. Four boys incessantly prancing around like little show ponies for four and a half minutes is clearly a visual must.

9) Danger Danger - Naughty Naughty (1989)

Starting with a sexy woman silhouetted in a window and a frankly creepily distorted voice encouraging her to “get naughty”, things only get more preposterous from thereon in. Sounding like Foreigner on Viagra, the band rocks out while vocalist Ted Poley reassuringly says, “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you.” He also lets the object of his affections know “That dress you’re wearing, makes you look so cute, but girl you’d look better, in your birthday suit.” Smooth.

8) Kiss - (You Make Me) Rock Hard (1988)

Given that (You Make Me) Rock Hard comes in at approximately number 312 in the list of greatest ever Kiss songs, you could easily be forgiven for not having seen this hair metal classic video. What do we learn from it? That Gene Simmons looks hilarious with or without a wig, and that Paul Stanley’s neither very good on the trapeze, nor very interested in the sexy girls in their underwear who are supposed to be making him “rock hard” here.

7) Winger - Can’t Get Enough (1990)

Sub-Jovi beefcake Kip Winger had clearly been listening to Whitesnake’s 1987 album before writing this mid-paced bump and grinder. The accompanying video features all sorts of sexy shenanigans, as a girl gets her kit off in a photo booth, while another ruins a perfectly good fruit bowl by roughly straddling her lover on top of it. Some folk have no decorum.

6) Helix - Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’ (1984)

Canadian hair metallers Helix used their video budget wisely, creating their very own ‘Third Annual Miss Rock Fantasy Rock Pageant’. This featured the band doing some unconvincing Quo-style formation boogie on a cover of a good time anthem by the band Crazy Elephant, but mainly tons of strippers and dancers doing their thing. That ‘thing’ somewhat surprisingly includes ‘smoking’ and ‘getting covered in pillow feathers’. But it takes all sorts – and who are we to judge?

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5) Britny Fox - Girl School (1988)

These Philly hair metallers didn’t waste too much time thinking about subtle video concepts. Not when there was plentiful rocking and loving to attend to. So after precisely 1.76 seconds of contemplation, the idea for Girl School was born. The end product features the Britny boys playing in front of, wait for it, a schoolroom full of girls. But here’s the twist: these girls are almost all blonde, sexy and, of course, ready to rock. And er, over 18. Obviously.

4) Nitro - Freight Train (1989)

Worth its place on the team for lead vocalist Jim Gillette’s ‘high hay bale’ hairdo alone, it’s hard to describe quite how awful Nitro’s music is. The vocals are hi-pitched hokum, the guitar solo is the sound of someone trying to tune their car radio in to a distant station, and the song’s melody is hiding under your sofa trying very hard not to be found. The video does, however, feature a four-necked guitar, which is absolutely, definitely not to be sniffed at!

3) Warrant - Cherry Pie (1990)

LA pretty boys Warrant went all out for the big MTV hit here, all muscular riffs, gang choruses and cheeky but not too dirty lyrics. The result is a classic hair metal song and video, with the band goofing around like their lives depend on it, and of course a very hot girl (in this case model Bobbie Brown) strutting her stuff throughout. Being a hair metal legend, lead singer Jani Lane only went and married her, didn’t he?! It didn’t last…

2) Mötley Crüe - Girls, Girls, Girls (1987)

In which the hair metal era’s shaggingest band reveal their intimate knowledge of all the best strip clubs the States have to offer. In a video featuring any number of long legged pole dancers, ‘da Crüe’ show that they’re very comfortable indeed in this sort of nightclub environment, especially when they can get some chubby fella to give up his prime seat by jamming a flick knife into the table he’s sitting at. Bad, bad boys.

1) Poison - Talk Dirty To Me (1986)

If you really want to know why hair metal was so big, then this is all you need. Poison’s breakout hit was based around a hoary old Eddie Cochran riff, but it was dressed up with such fun and style here that you can’t help but be sucker-punched by its charm. The band give it everything they’ve got, hamming it up for the cameras, but with enough tongue-in-cheek self-awareness to leave in the crap bits, like drummer Rikki Rockett falling off his drum stool. If ever a video made you want to be in a band…