Jeff Vrabel is back on his Steel Horse again, and this time, he’s taking us back to a power ballad that arrived just in time for the death of hair metal.
STRYPER
Title: “Honestly”
Album: To Hell With The Devil
Release Date: Oct. 24, 1986
Why You Remember Them: Because at one point you stood with your fist in the air and shouted “To Hell With the Devil” like a hot banshee on fire. Didn’t you?
Alarming Sales Figures: 2 million moved for To Hell. The damn thing spent three months on Billboard’s album charts. Even the, ahem, poppier follow-up In God We Trust moved half a million, although that was mostly from older fans who mistook it for currency.
Recent News: Well, that’s the thing; evidently these fellas are on a 25th anniversary tour, according to this Press Release I have just received, which is accompanied by a very thoughtful-looking blood-red tinted photo of four guys looking downward in a pose of either deep prayer or a nap. One of them is wearing Archie’s ascot, or maybe five candy-cane ties. Whatever. All I know is, Jesus would hate this tie. (more…)
SLAUGHTER
Title: “Fly To The Angels”
Album: Stick It to Ya
Release Date: January 27, 1990
Why You Remember Them: Credit Slaughter with arriving (late) to the hair-metal party without any even vague designs on rocking it. Slaughter’s tapes, available at Kmart and Venture stores nationwide, were solely prom-theme delivery machines; their attempts at lip-licking lasciviousness, mostly in titles like “Stick It To Ya” and “Up All Night,” were about as dangerous as a Tuesday night episode of Jay-Walking. “Fly to The Angels,” the video for which was made for $49.50, most of which was spent on airplane stock footage and an oscillating fan, is 50 minutes of viscous cheese puncutated by seagull sound effects, in case you were unclear about that whole flying thing. (Sorry – I’m told it’s actually only 4:30. How about that!)
Sales Figures:Stick Moved over 2 million copies, and was nominated for an American Music Award for best metal album in 1991. Yeah, I said it. AMERICAN MUSIC AWARD. Suck on that, haters. (more…)
Why You Remember Them: You cannot imagine how often, in the research of this column, one comes across the phrase “lumped into the hair metal category,” as though being a cornball Southern-rock outfit with a wacky-eyed lead singer and a schlong obsession is better. Jackyl formed in 1990 as a hair meta … ahem, Southern-rock boogie band, but if you’ve read this far you’re probably going, “The jags with the chainsaw, right?” Right.
Total Sales: Jackyl moved 1.35 million units in 1992, making me sad for 1992.
OK, But I’m Pretty Sure Those Are Dogs on the Cover of This Album: Right, you tell the chainsaw-wielding redneck he’s got his canids misidentified.
GET THE EFF OUT OF HERE, BRENDAN O’BRIEN?: Before resorting to producing hillbilly crap by “Bruce Springsteen” and “Pearl Jam,” O’Brien ran with the big dogs. I am desperately hoping these are people who still keep in touch.
Jesse: “Brendan, it’s Jesse, listen, I have a great idea for a new track that…”
Brendan: “(interrupting) Does it have a chainsaw?”
Jesse: “Yes.”
Brendan: “Christ.” (click)
STEELHEART Title: I’ll Never Let You Go Album:Steelheart Released: May 10, 1990
Why You Remember Them: Previous installments of this award-winning series have included bands with numerous hits, if not multiple albums, to their names, but we bring that streak to a screeching, flaming halt with Steelheart, whose sole contribution to the poufy-hair zeitgeist is “I’ll Never Let You Go,” a song whose fierce, animalistic coda explodes with such visceral fury that it is entirely likely that lead singer Michael Matijevic, a man with a consonant-y name so clunky and Eastern European-sounding that I’m sure we’re related, exploded his carotid artery straining for the last note and is still lying in a pool of blood and Aqua Net in a studio somewhere. It is quite simply impossible to achieve that level of valkyrie screaming without attaching a car battery to your face.
But Suck on This Little Bit of Kevin Bacon Game Madness: Matijevic in 2001 provided the voice for the Mark Wahlberg character in Rock Star, itself modeled on the story of a Judas Priest cover band singer-turned-actual-Judas-Priest frontman. The film featured a version of “We All Die Young,” which originally appeared on Steelheart’s third (!) album, Wait. So, good for Matijevic. (more…)
Why You Remember Them: For a guy who expends so much effort trying to sustain an image as such a carnivorous, twitchy Amurcan, Ted Nugent is responsible for an unusually high amount of sissypants cotton-candy girl songs, many of which delivered by a band inexplicably named after a vivacious Broadway musical. To call Damn Yankees a “supergroup” would imply a world where that word could include someone from Night Ranger, yet here we are: Aside from Nugent, the group included Styx’s Tommy Shaw, looking like the Eurythmics dude that wasn’t Annie Lennox (what? too soon?), Night Ranger’s Jack Blades and Michael Cartellone, one of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 400 drummers but a guy who had the sense to forge a second career in painting. “Where You Goin’ Now” isn’t even the Damn Yankees song most often played as the soundtrack to trembling hands fumbling their way around bra straps in the early ’90s — that would be the execrable “High Enough” — but thinking that the last two songs anyone gave a damn about were these would probably turn me into a goofball hunter/reality-show cartoon too.
Album Sales To Date: The band’s self-titled debut went double-platinum in 1990; Don’t Tread went platinum? Really? Jesus wept. (more…)
Why You Remember Them: Much like the poor suckers in Extreme and the Goo Goo Dolls, Mr. Big spent years producing extraordinarily forgettable rock music before backing into an accidental hit with a marshmallowy ballad, forcing them into the uncomfortable position of determining whether it was best to continue rocking in obscurity or turn into a prom-or-Nic Cage-movie-theme production factory. Unfortunately while Mr. Big was deciding which color pill to swallow, people ceased to listen.
Chart Attack: “To Be With You” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Follow-up single “Just Take My Heart” was their only other charting single, peaking at No. 16. That’s in America, though. Apparently in Japan, Mr. Big is like what Led Zeppelin would be if they had Jesus on guitar, but more on this later.
Other Key Tracks: None.
Bunch of tools: Kickoff track “Daddy, Brother, Lover, Little Boy (The Electric Drill Song)” was easily the third-best power-tool themed rock track of the early 1990s, behind Jackyl’s chainsaw-powered “The Lumberjack Song” and Neil Diamond’s “Searing Hot Love,” recorded entirely in a smelting yard. (more…)
WARRANT
Song Title: “Cherry Pie”
Album: Cherry Pie
Release Date: Sept. 11, 1990
Why You Remember Them: Arguably, and along with Winger, Warrant for one reason or another has become something of the go-to punching-bag band of the state fair-metal universe. Scientists believe this is due to the cover of Cherry Pie, which depicts a raspberry-lipped waitress dropping a piece of the titular pie — that’s right, titular, we hear your snickerings — and the plummeting treat was photographed just as it passed her nether regions, an art-directed “metaphor” that’s responsible for making Warrant the hair band of choice among English grad professors.
Worldwide Album Sales To Date for Cherry Pie: 3 million
But Why Would Such Nice Rockers Objectify Women Like That? Well, you’d be traumatized too if you walked in on your best chick tagging some other dude, as singer Jani Lane did on “I Saw Red,” the power ballad of choice on Cherry Pie and sort of the slutty cousin of the band’s previous “Heaven.” “I didn’t need to see his face … I saw yours,” Lane howls, heartbreakingly, and though we don’t see his face, the other guy is Mark Sanford. (more…)
Why You Remember Them: This song was a decent enough hit, but it was the band’s 1990 Five Man Acoustical Jam live disc that cemented their status as a band who could successfully cover “Signs” in a way that involved several pointless f-bombs.
Worldwide U.S. Album Sales To Date: 6 million
Five Man Acoustical Jam = like paying $14 at Musicland to go to the Wild Wing Cafe: Seriously, who else would have the stones (zing) to cover “Mother’s Little Helper,” “Lodi,” “Signs,” “Truckin’” and “We Can Work It Out” all on the same album? Amazing. And they’d go on to do “Honky Tonk Women,” “Street Fighting Man,” “Do You Feel Like We Do” and countless others. Nothing in the rock catalog is safe from Tesla!
Why You Remember Them: Rode to fame by digging fingernails deep into Bon Jovi’s coattails in the post-Slippery When Wet epoch.
Worldwide Total Album Sales To Date: 18 million
How You Can Tell This Cinderella From The Cartoon Princess On Google: Be sure to click on “Cinderella * Rock N Roll.” Pretty much everything else is wicked Disney.
Humiliating Personal Memory: I dubbed (high-speedly, like I even have to say that) this tape from a friend’s brother in Upland, Ind., in 1986. The song that came after “Somebody Save Me” was called “In from the Outside,” and I was briefly obsessed with “In from the Outside,” except the extended prog-rock outro thing. Whatevs. (more…)
With the exception of whichever one Mase was in, perhaps no musical genre has endured a swifter or less celebrated mainstream extermination than Hair Metal, whose predominant 1980s celebrants – generally uncomplicated fellows who came to town with nothing more than hearts of gold, dreams of fame and lady makeup – wanted nothing more than to have a good time, even if you couldn’t get one to write a decent lyric about it by electro-shocking him in the shoulder pads.
Once that floating naked baby record and the flannel people materialized, of course, such bands couldn’t do much but struggle to quote-fingers evolve (anyone remember Poison’s gospel-tinged ode to individuality “Stand?” Pfft.), but surprisingly, most fans resisted the abruptly spiritual carpe-diem stuff emerging from the very same people who just minutes prior were panting out songs like “The Hunter” and “Wanted Man” and “Slip of the Lip” and “You Are The Saint, I Am The Sinner” while thrusting, into the MTV cameras, anything attached to them that was thrustable. Eight minutes later “Beavis and Butthead” put a dingus named Stuart in a Winger T-shirt and the coffin was closed. For a while.
Because these days, a great many hairtacular bands have circled their wagons on the middle-tier nostalgia package-tour circuit looking, if not to conquer the Earth, to at least ruin some more of its ozone. These are the lucky ones, of course, as some are surely moving used cars in Lexington, some are assembling weird simulacrums of their former bands and releasing “Chinese Democracy” and still others are smacking their noses into parts of the Tony Awards. It’s a mess, is what I’m saying. But regardless, somewhere on its plummet down from the wild ’80s schmaltz-glitz years of Bon Jovi, Poison, Motley Crue and the 250 bands that started with W, hair metal — and this was really nice of it — forgot to die. (more…)
STRYPER![918992c008a0bc976f888010.L._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/918992c008a0bc976f888010.L._SCLZZZZZZZ_1.jpg "918992c008a0bc976f888010.L._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]")
SLAUGHTER![61wShbNdWZL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/61wShbNdWZL._SCLZZZZZZZ_1.jpg "61wShbNdWZL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]")
JACKYL
STEELHEART 
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MR. BIG
WARRANT![0e8ff0cdd7a0b46b88908110.L._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/0e8ff0cdd7a0b46b88908110.L._SCLZZZZZZZ_1.jpg "0e8ff0cdd7a0b46b88908110.L._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]")
TESLA