Well-Tuned: When the Bell Tolled for Hair Bands

Circus Circus with Joey Palermo, Blackie Lawless, Jimi Image and Randy Piper 1981. Photo by MDSanker at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Guns-n-Roses.

If you listen to rock, you know who they are. This summer marks thirty-five years since the release of their debut album Appetite For Destruction. In 1987, which just happened to be my senior year of high school, MTV was still playing actual music videos. At that particular time in the rock world, it was over-saturated with videos from the various “hair bands” that also dominated radio.

Back then I was not a fan of the hair bands and was a straight up classic rock guy. To me they were just too polished, to predictable. Although they strived for it with the hair and the make-up, they lost their individuality once the floodgates broke wide open and the genre was overtaken by copycat bands that soon made it hard to tell who was who if you heard the music playing.

My parents, who were content with living life with no cable until right around the year 2000, probably had a hand in my opinion since the only access I had to MTV was at my friends’ homes and when I was that age my friends and I were not spending hours in front of the television watching videos too often. My music was still influenced by my classic rock upbringing and radio however, even being sheltered from it was like there was absolutely no escape from it.

One night at a garage party in 1987, everyone was having a good time doing the things teenagers in small town West Virginia do when The Doors came on and granted, it was Light My Fire nevertheless, it was all good until this interloper yells out, “TURN THAT CHUCH MUSIC OFF AND PUT ON SOME CRUE MAN!”

It was like in the movies, where the needle gets pulled from the record and the room goes quiet. We all looked at this skinny young kid in his freshly bought dark blue Levi’s jean jacket that looked like it still had the tags on it (which wearing said jacket was a statement about who you hung with back then-I still have mine somewhere, minus the Van Halen pins and Led Zeppelin patch) and asked him politely to please feel free to leave at anytime he saw fit to do so. Of course, half of the last sentence was true, the other not so much. We were not very polite and yes, he did end up leaving rather abruptly and not by the power of his own legs, I will just leave it at that.

As that summer rolled on I prepared for my next step in life, moving to North Carolina. Then one day in early August I heard it for the first time. Welcome to the Jungle. It was gritty, it was hard and it was in your face via Slash’s opening riff. The lyrics written by Axl Rose spoke about the darker side of big city life, the perils behind all the glitz and glamor. “Welcome to the jungle, we got fun and games…we got everything you want, honey we know the names…we are the people that can find whatever you may need…if you got the money, honey, we got your disease!”

Of course I wanted more so I went to the now defunct National Record Mart and bought the cassette tape Appetite for Destruction. I had to wait until I got home to play it, no cassette player in the car (hey, we were not rich, I still had to crank roll up my windows too). Once home I went straight to my room, shut the door, put the tape and and let it fly. From the beginning, Slash’s guitar riff on his Les Paul hooked me in with its distinctive sound.

Then came It’s So Easy, Nightrain…followed by a relentless assault of some straight-up hard rock that grabbed me by the throat and did not let go.

After listening to it cranked in its entirety, I laid there on my bed and was blown away by what I just heard. My first thought was, do they dress like the other hair bands because damn, they sure don’t sound like them then I pressed play and listened to it again.

What I heard was a new sound to me. One that was in a class by itself when you compared it to the stuff you were hearing out of other bands at the time. Def Leppard’s hit machine Hysteria came out around the same time. When you compare the rawness of Guns-N-Roses to Def Leppard’s polished for the masses sound, you can see why I felt the way I did about Guns-N-Roses.

At eighteen years of age I was by no means an expert on rock and roll but my ears knew something was about to change. Rock for the most part had become homogenized in my opinion back then, which Is why I stuck with classic rock. To me, the stripped down and straight up rock that Guns-N-Roses provided was refreshing and gave me hope that they might start a new trend that would bring back rock to its roots. Nobody out at the time could match their sound, not even close. They came out of the same L.A. Sunset Strip club scene as all the other hair bands that were popular at the time but they had more edge. They were gritty, aggressive in how they played their instruments and laid down their lyrics.

I look at bands like The Stones, AC/DC, ZZ Top and their no frills rock and roll. Music that you could enjoy just as much in a garage as you would in a stadium. Guns-N-Roses had that same vibe right out of the gate.

During the next four years Guns-N-Roses released three more albums, G N’ R Lies, then Use Your Illusion I and II and continued to dominate the rock scene. In 1991, about the same time Use Your Illusion dropped, a trio from Seattle exploded like an atom bomb on the rock world. Nirvana’s Nevermind dominated MTV with their unvarnished version of rock. “Here we are now ENTERTAIN US!” That album and the first single from it Smells Like Teen Spirit, finished what I believe Guns-N-Roses started, the demise of the hair band era. Guns-N-Roses pulled the knife and drew first blood, Nirvana took that knife from them and plunged it into the heart of the hair bands, sending many of them off to oblivion, almost overnight.

The Grunge Revolution is something I will get into more down the road because there were many bands who came out of that era too that put their own spin on that type of music. Many good, some bad. The music altered the landscape of rock for years to come. Grunge eventually spawned what was called Nu-Metal which arguably had a hand in trying to kill of rock for good (thanks A LOT Fred Durst).

Nobody imagined thirty-five years ago that a band like Guns-N-Roses would slither on to the stage and alter the course of rock and roll forever with the release of Appetite For Destruction, that their austere brand of music would deliver a round house kick to the head of the hair band era. By doing so they separated themselves from those bands from the very beginning to blaze their own unique path.

To this day, Guns-N-Roses sound has never truly been replicated whereas Nirvana ended up spawning a few apers like Australia’s Silverchair, Hole (for obvious reasons) and Bush. There are many more that were influenced by Nirvana but you do not hear about too many bands that were inveigled by the distinct sound and style of Guns-N-Roses.

Appetite and Nevermind come up in comparison from time to time. Which was better? Who is the better band? To me, that is a tough question to answer. The easiest is that we will never know the true answer because of the untimely suicide of Kurt Cobain at what was the peak of the band’s career. Both bands stepped into and out of the spotlight together as the Grunge Era rolled on through the 90’s. Some of those instances were notorious enough that feuds were born from them. In the end though, after Cobain’s death the members both bands would bear no malice and found ways to put the past behind them.

When Guns-N-Roses went out on their Not in This Lifetime Tour in 2016, Axl Rose injured his foot opening the tour in Los Angeles. Former drummer for Nirvana, now frontman for the Foo Fighters Dave Grohl, loaned Rose his famous light-up throne that he used when he broke his leg in 2015 while touring in Sweden. Rose even used the throne that same year when he sat in with AC/DC after their lead, Brian Johnson stepped away from the microphone due to hearing issues.

As the old saying goes, “the show must go on” and these performers who were once rivals, embraced that theory by respecting each other enough to lend a kind word or a helping hand in support when necessary as time has moved forward in their storied careers.

We may never know who the better band was and I know there are some very strong opinions about that out there but one thing is for sure, they both had a hand in changing rock and roll forever.

Even though thirty-five years have gone by and some of those hair bands are now being given respect they lost in the late eighties and early nineties (even by me as I have been diving into some if their music in my advanced age), Appetite For Destruction still stands above them all as the album that started what was to be a tectonic shift in universe of rock and roll.

Makes one wonder who is the next band out there that is going to show the world that rock is indeed not dead, but alive and well.

I hope I live to hear it, even if that means rocking out with all the other “olds” in some retirement community; way, way down the road.

Till next time…

E Pluribus Unum