Hair Bands Part 1: Feel the Noise

00:00:00 Dwayne: Hey everyone. Welcome back to whatever. I’m Dwayne
00:00:08 Heather: and I’m Heather.
00:00:10 Dwayne: And together we’re reliving some of the most epic things that Gen X has got to experience. Last week, we spent the entire episode talking about the grunge era of popular music and what happened to that movement.
00:00:20 Heather: Yeah, last week we spent a whole episode talking about grunge and why we stopped listening to music and went country. And this week we’re talking about the best part of music, the hair band.
00:00:30 Dwayne: That’s right. And we’ve got a lot to discuss here. So much, in fact, that this is going to be a multi-part conversation. There’s just so many great bands and so much great music to discuss that we’re going to tackle this one in several parts this week. It’s the first part of our discussion on hair bands, the Sunset Strip, and the ultimate demise of this genre. So let’s set the Delorean’s time circuits back to the early nineteen seventies to see where it all began. But first, it’s time for this week in Gen X history.
00:00:57 Heather: On Sunday, August thirtieth, in nineteen ninety two. Thanks for giving me this one. Nirvana headlined the Reading Festival in England. It’s remembered as one of the most defining live performances of the whole era. Kurt Cobain was wheeled out on stage in a hospital gown and a blonde wig.
00:01:13 Dwayne: We had to look that one up. I saw it’s on YouTube. It’s out there.
00:01:16 Heather: Yeah, I had to look it up just to see. And it’s ridiculous per se. But it was a joke because everybody was speculating he was too sick to play.
00:01:25 Dwayne: For someone who didn’t like being the front man and all, he sure was wearing that. That night. They were pretty big, though, because he was playing it up. Yeah, he was all right. Moving on. Uh, on August the thirty first, nineteen ninety seven, Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris being chased by the paparazzi. I guess her car plunged head on into the entrance of a tunnel. Yeah, she was just thirty six years old. Her companion, Dodi Fayed, and the driver, Henri Paul, were both killed as well. I remember where I was at when it happened. I was in an airport on my way, flying from the US back to Europe at the time. And it was all that was on any television, anywhere, anywhere.
00:02:02 Heather: I was I was riding back from the Nebraska State Fair. It was like eleven thirty at night when I heard it on the radio. It was awful. Wow. The only one that survived was her bodyguard.
00:02:12 Dwayne: I didn’t realize anyone survived.
00:02:13 Heather: Yeah. Her bodyguard survived. On September first, nineteen eighty five, a joint American-french expedition found the wreck of the Titanic. Seventy three years after it sank in twelve thousand feet of water in the North Atlantic. The team was led by Robert Ballard out of Woods Hole and Jean Louis Michel from France. They found the debris field first at about twelve forty eight in the morning, and followed it to one of the ship’s boilers, which is now confirmed that they actually found her. But what most people don’t know is Ballard didn’t get funding for the search on his own. He was a Naval Reserve officer, so he went to the Navy, and the Navy agreed to pay for it on one condition. He had to use the mission to go find two lost American nuclear submarines. First, the Thresher and the Scorpion. The Titanic search was essentially a cover for a classified Cold War operation, and he only had about twelve days left when he went looking for the ship.
00:03:09 Dwayne: I had no idea on that one until we went researching it. And yeah, sure enough, the guy had to go basically begging to the Navy. And the crazy thing was they did find the other two subs as well. That’s cool. So they found three boats. Yeah, they found three boats during the operation.
00:03:23 Heather: Well, I’m sure they didn’t advertise that either.
00:03:25 Dwayne: They did not. On Thursday, September the fifth, nineteen ninety one, the MTV Video Music Awards aired live from the Universal Amphitheatre hosted by. Here’s an. Here’s a name, a throwback. Arsenio Hall. Yeah, REM just ran away with the night. With Losing My Religion. Got video of the year. They took home six awards total with ten nominations. But the. The part that really everyone remembers is Pee Wee Herman coming out. Paul Reubens walked out in full costume, his first public appearance after being arrested that summer for lewd and lascivious behavior. I gave him a standing ovation and it went on from there.
00:04:18 Heather: Yeah, that was awesome.
00:04:20 Dwayne: And that’s going to wrap it up for this week in Gen X history.
00:04:28 Heather: All right, before we get into the eighties bands, we should probably define what we’re even talking about because glam gets thrown around. And it means a couple of different things depending on which decade you grew up in.
00:04:40 Dwayne: Yeah, glam was really a British thing. Went from about, I don’t know, seventy to seventy four. You know, the music itself was kind of simple. It was, you know, good guitar rock with melodies that were more bubblegum pop ish. What made it glam wasn’t the sound, it was more the delivery. It was theatrical. It was campy.
00:04:58 Heather: It was think Ziggy Stardust.
00:05:01 Dwayne: It was David Bowie. Yeah. It was, uh, bands like sweet. There were, you know, platform boots, glitter costumes. It played well in Britain. It did not play that well in the US. I don’t think America, especially not in middle America, wasn’t ready for it.
00:05:16 Heather: Yeah. No no they were not. It split into two schools. On one side you had the arty and Bowie, Roxy Music, Lou Reed, the New York Dolls. Yeah. They were smart, subversive, playing with the whole idea of what? Of what a rock star even is. And then on the other side, you had the pop end, Marc Bolan, T.Rex, Slade, Sweet Suzi Quatro, that that was aimed straight at teenagers watching the top of the Pops on Thursday night.
00:05:41 Dwayne: Yeah, supposedly back in like nineteen seventy one. It’s when a lot of people point to glam really taking off. T.Rex appeared on top of the Pops and Marc Bolan had these glitter tears painted under his eyes, and it was a hit. And that’s the thing that really kind of launched the whole glam.
00:05:58 Heather: I was definitely too early for T Rex.
00:06:01 Dwayne: Oh, I had honestly never heard of them until we went looking into this. I’ve heard a million times various bands from this era as they’ve conducted interviews, and you go and you ask them who their greatest influences were. And they always mention bands like Sweet and Bowie. Bowie definitely slayed these bands that were definitely these, or they just referred to the entire glam era. Uh, there’s, there’s one piece that connects both of these here. Uh, the eras that were known as the glam era and then the hair bands. And that is a song we’re going to talk about here in just a bit. And that’s come on, feel the noise. That song was a Slade original Quiet Riot covered it. Didn’t even want to release it. That was glam song that was taken from them. They actually did several Slade covers.
00:06:46 Heather: So the New York Dolls are the other half of that bridge. They took glam fashion and glam attitude, ran it straight into what became punk.
00:06:54 Dwayne: Oh yeah.
00:06:55 Heather: Every band on the Sunset Strip a decade later is a downstream of the dolls, whether they realize it or not. Like, come on, look at the bands.
00:07:02 Dwayne: Oh, yeah. Really? And I had never really heard the New York Dolls. There’s nothing that was ever on radio.
00:07:08 Heather: Not something I really listened to.
00:07:10 Dwayne: But they’re very early punk.
00:07:11 Heather: And they had influence.
00:07:12 Dwayne: An influence bands like Kiss.
00:07:15 Heather: Poison, Mötley Crüe.
00:07:18 Dwayne: Just very simple music. Not the craziest, craziest at all. But when you put pyrotechnics behind this with guys in makeup and platform boots, it was a whole show. And then you’ve got.
00:07:35 Heather: Everybody knows this song.
00:07:37 Dwayne: Everybody knows this song. School’s out. And if you’ve ever seen an Alice Cooper show, which we are so happy to say that we finally got to see Alice a couple years ago. The man puts on one hell of a show.
00:07:50 Heather: Show?
00:07:51 Dwayne: Even in his mid seventies. Yes, Dude is still carrying that torch.
00:07:56 Heather: Birthday when we saw him too.
00:07:57 Dwayne: Yeah, sure was seventy seven. Yeah, but his entire performance is a show.
00:08:02 Heather: Yeah, a huge theatrical performance.
00:08:05 Dwayne: A dozen costume changes, all sorts of things on stage.
00:08:08 Heather: He brings the boa back out.
00:08:10 Dwayne: You’ve got Alice Cooper, the big Alice Cooper monster out there. It is an insane show. If you ever get a chance to go see it, man, go see it.
00:08:19 Heather: Yeah. I mean, lyrically, is he the greatest?
00:08:22 Dwayne: Not necessarily. But the man has put out something like, I don’t know, seventy five albums.
00:08:26 Heather: Yeah.
00:08:27 Dwayne: Like or the band. Alice Cooper is one of those that it was not his name. No, Alice Cooper was the name of the band until the point when the band broke up in the mid seventies and he legally had his name changed to be able to carry on with that name. All right, so we’ve talked a little bit about where this all came from, how some of the big influencers on some of the bands we’re going to talk about a bit here. You had these bands, The early glam bands were the early 70s, and then you had the theatrical rock bands like Kiss. There was no stopping kiss in the mid to late seventies. A lot of folks tried, but more folks tried to copy them and were successful out of it. Coming out of that was probably what I consider the real album that kicked it all off, and that is Van Halen’s debut album. Uh, that thing hit in seventy eight. It was pretty much the hardest thing going. You had, uh, Eddie Van Halen with eruption on there, and there’s just no stopping that. It was a different sound. It was not what we would come to call hair metal by by any stretch.
00:09:31 Heather: I mean, Eddie Van Halen.
00:09:33 Dwayne: But it just because he had long hair, all rockers had long.
00:09:36 Heather: Hair. No, not not because he had long hair. He was a great guitar player.
00:09:41 Speaker 4: A guitar god.
00:09:42 Heather: I mean, come on.
00:09:43 Dwayne: They were able to prove in nineteen seventy eight this was the height of disco. That rock was not dead. And they started bringing more and more bands out, and they were based in Los Angeles, and because of that LA home base, their other bands started migrating themselves to LA just to be able to recreate the success that Van Halen had. It was really the Sunset Strip nineteen between seventy eight and eighty to eighty one, was when a lot of the bands first started getting together and trying out there. But really, what was it, eighty one, I think with Motley Crue when they hit the ground running, this was the opening riff from their very first album. And we all knew right then that Rock was back, rock was alive, and this was nineteen eighty one. Man, that was that was crazy.
00:10:39 Heather: They were doing a lot of hard work, a lot of groundwork, you know, getting their stuff out there EP and push nuts, doing, um, pay for shows, um, down on the Sunset Strip. Oh yeah. Trying to give their CD to anyone and everyone who could hear it.
00:10:51 Dwayne: Yeah, they were one of the early bands that were charging cover charges.
00:10:56 Heather: Yes. Cover charges. That’s what I was trying to think of.
00:10:58 Dwayne: We also had that same year Dokken released their first album. Which I was really surprised. I thought Dokken was later in the.
00:11:10 Heather: I was very early, but they didn’t. They didn’t come out big until they hit Dream Warriors from Nightmare on Elm Street.
00:11:18 Speaker 4: Sure we had.
00:11:18 Dwayne: Dokken kicks had also come out at that time.
00:11:21 Heather: Kicks. Yeah. So the Sunset Strip, it’s still around the whisky a go go. It’s still active and they’re still doing shows. Uh, the Roxy Theater, they’re still open and hosting concerts and they’ve been on open for over fifty years now.
00:11:35 Speaker 4: Jeez.
00:11:35 Heather: Yeah. The Rainbow Bar and Grill, um, they were kind of a classic rock and roll restaurant adjacent to the Roxy. The Viper Room still technically operating, though. The historic buildings slated for demolition for, of course, a luxury high rise development. The Viper Room is also where River Phoenix had its fatal overdose. Oh, wow. Yeah, the House of Blues on Sunset Strip. It’s permanently closed. The Key club, it closed many years ago and it’s been long gone, too.
00:12:03 Dwayne: Well, coming out of all that, the album that really broke the door down was when Quiet Riot released Mental Health. That was not their first album. I think Mental Health is about their fourth album or so. This thing went to number one on the Billboard chart on this song. Quiet Riot, they released this thing. It shot to number one on the Billboard chart, took the album to number one, which was the first time a heavy metal album had ever done that. This song, as I mentioned earlier, was a cover song from Slade. They have been grinding away for like eight years at that point, and the only place they were experiencing any kind of record sales up to that point was in Japan, Asia.
00:12:58 Heather: They love their rock metal.
00:12:59 Dwayne: They do.
00:13:00 Heather: They really do. A lot of these bands that we talk about are still really famous in Asia.
00:13:05 Dwayne: Yeah. Uh, once Metal Health hit number one, that’s when every record label wanted their own band that would move like that one had. And that’s just all the record labels had offices down there by the Sunset Strip.
00:13:17 Heather: Yeah. And you could almost say this was almost the beginning of the end, because this is exactly what happened with grunge. All the record labels, they all were out on the Sunset Strip every night, signing any and every band that sounded like these guys.
00:13:30 Dwayne: It was the same kind of thing that killed grunge a decade later. Saturation was just saturation because they were they found a formula that worked and they just kept pushing it.
00:13:39 Heather: Yeah. They would not stop pushing it. Just literally any and every band. And then they all started sounding like.
00:13:45 Dwayne: So that was nineteen eighty one, On an eighty three eighty four. There were a number of other bands that did hit big. I remember one of the first ones, these guys rotation.
00:13:59 Heather: Yeah, this was on all the time.
00:14:01 Dwayne: Which is funny because we had discussed this before. I never had MTV as a kid growing up. I wasn’t exposed to MTV until I was an adult.
00:14:11 Heather: You lived down in the hallway.
00:14:12 Dwayne: I lived out in the hollers of West Virginia. That’s right. But I did see this video. I remembered it when I was looking it up here this past week. I remember watching it in the in the record stores, they would often have videos playing. I did remember seeing this one here. Got Milton Berle in it. Yeah. And Milton Berle in drag. Uh, I got so tired.
00:14:31 Heather: Of this song. They played it all the time. And I loved MTV. And of course, I watched the infamous Headbangers Ball with Ricky Rickman, and they played this all of the time.
00:14:47 Dwayne: You got to admit, though, Stephen Pierce’s voice.
00:14:51 Heather: He’s got such a distinctive voice. It’s really good.
00:14:54 Dwayne: Loved his voice. Yeah. And Warren DeMartini, yeah. Who he has recently reunited with, apparently, uh, on guitars there. They made a really good pair. They did really good songwriting. And Stephen Pierce’s voice I just thought was.
00:15:08 Heather: Yeah, he had a he had a distinctive voice. That’s what I like about a lot of these bands. Yeah. Musically, they sound a lot alike.
00:15:18 Dwayne: We’ll see here in a bit. There are there are some of these bands that’s very hard to distinguish the vocalists from.
00:15:23 Heather: Yeah. Unless you know the bands. Yeah.
00:15:25 Dwayne: But Stephen Pierce’s voice was one of those that. I never had a problem with that. Oh yeah. These guys here is another one with an exceptionally talented lineup. But the vocalist vocals here. Okay. Yeah. So Tom Keifer there with Cinderella, they were I always felt Cinderella was highly, highly underrated.
00:15:57 Heather: Oh for sure.
00:15:58 Dwayne: They put out night songs in June of eighty six and it really didn’t go anywhere. They had released Shake Me. It didn’t do much.
00:16:06 Heather: Which it surprises me because Tom Keifer. Oh, I tell you why they didn’t do great bluesy metal.
00:16:13 Dwayne: Wasn’t it wasn’t a thing thing. But when they did release this one here, nobody’s fool, it exploded. It went into heavy rotation on MTV.
00:16:20 Heather: And the reason why is because it was a great power ballad, and you cannot deny Tom Keifer’s luscious.
00:16:27 Dwayne: They had one other thing that would carry them into superstardom at this time, too. And that’s the fact that they were on the road with Bon Jovi. Bon Jovi, slippery when wet. These guys opened for them. I was lucky enough to be able to see them on this tour. I had barely heard of Cinderella at that time, but when we saw them live like, Holy crap. Just.
00:16:48 Heather: Which, incidentally, is how we find most of our bands that we listen to is by going to concerts.
00:16:53 Dwayne: Still, to this day.
00:16:54 Heather: To this day, that’s how we’ve found so many good concerts.
00:16:57 Dwayne: I have always said, though, that Cinderella categorized as a hair band because of them opening with Bon Jovi because of the hair and the look. But. You can’t tell me they aren’t the best damn blues band ever signed a record contract.
00:17:15 Heather: Yeah, these guys had a completely different sound.
00:17:19 Dwayne: Thom’s voice is just unlike anyone else’s. I’m sure he strained it by now, and I’ve seen some of their more recent performances and he’s. He has to sing in a lot lower key these days, but at least he can still sing.
00:17:30 Heather: Well, it’s like, you know, look at Axl Rose. He had a huge octave range when he was younger. If you’ve seen some of his stuff now, he’s definitely got a much lower octave.
00:17:40 Dwayne: Yeah.
00:17:41 Heather: And everybody says he can’t sing, but if you listen to him, he can still sing. It’s just not the original Axel voice, right?
00:17:48 Dwayne: Yeah, it’s nowhere near where. Where it used to be, for sure.
00:17:51 Heather: All right. So speaking of Slippery When Wet, it came out in August eighteen, nineteen eighty six. I was eleven years old.
00:18:00 Dwayne: Just a baby.
00:18:01 Speaker 5: Just a baby.
00:18:12 Heather: They recorded it up at Little Mountain in Vancouver, and it spent eight weeks at number one and made Bon Jovi the first glam metal band to put three top ten hit on the hot one hundred off a single album. You give Love a Bad Name, Livin on a Prayer and wanted Dead or Alive.
00:18:46 Dwayne: Yeah, that’s just classic. That is classic rock and roll. I don’t care if you want to call it hair or what. That is classic rock.
00:18:52 Heather: I definitely wouldn’t put them in the glam metal band era.
00:18:57 Dwayne: They still cite, uh, bands like kiss though, and such as as influences, which carries it right on back. You know.
00:19:03 Heather: They all have Kiss and Bowie as influences, but I wouldn’t necessarily put these guys in glam metal.
00:19:10 Dwayne: Well, that album ended up being the best selling album of eighty seven. It beat out appetite for destruction. It beat The Joshua Tree, it beat out bad. It’s certified twelve times platinum, and Livin On a Prayer Alone has sold over fourteen million, which puts.
00:19:27 Heather: It a couple.
00:19:28 Dwayne: Yeah, it’s like the twelfth best selling single that was released before the year two thousand.
00:19:32 Heather: One thing that sort of makes our point from last week, they brought in an outside songwriter, Desmond Child, to co-write two of the biggest singles on that record. This was not a band being discovered. This was a band and a label making a very deliberate commercial play. And it worked. It worked very well for them.
00:19:47 Dwayne: Their first album, the one, the four thousand eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit, that one had runaway on it. Yeah. Runaway. That’s a good song. But the rest of that album was mediocre at best.
00:19:58 Heather: Yeah, mediocre.
00:19:58 Dwayne: But when they brought in Desmond Child, which we could do, and many folks have.
00:20:03 Heather: Episode.
00:20:04 Dwayne: On, many folks have done entire episodes on the works of Desmond Child. The man is a musical genius. He’s right up there with Mutt Lange in my book. I think he overtakes Mutt Lange.
00:20:15 Heather: I’m sorry.
00:20:15 Dwayne: Well, Mutt Mutt put his chops into not just being able to produce great albums. He played the instruments. He could sing. Well, yeah, he. According to Phil Collen of Def Leppard, he sang on damn near every song that they’ve got. He’s just uncredited.
00:20:29 Heather: Mutt lost my respect. Sorry.
00:20:31 Dwayne: Well, you love the art. Hate the artist. I can do that.
00:20:35 Heather: Seven thousand eight hundred degrees.
00:20:37 Dwayne: Seventy eight. I was totally off. Four thousand six hundred and ninety, two hundred, now There we go.
00:20:43 Heather: So do you think Bon Jovi with a hair band, or were they something else? Where in the costume.
00:20:47 Dwayne: At that time they were one hundred percent hair.
00:20:50 Speaker 5: They were.
00:20:50 Dwayne: Because not only did they have the hair, they had the look, they had the spandex, they had the, uh, the amazing over the top arena rock show.
00:20:59 Heather: Bon Jovi kind of started the, the look in a way.
00:21:02 Dwayne: In a way they, they really did. When people, when this thing blew up, it was everywhere.
00:21:07 Heather: People started paying attention and yeah.
00:21:09 Speaker 5: Oh, wow.
00:21:10 Heather: That’s a good band.
00:21:11 Dwayne: We had rock bands before that, like we had just mentioned Ratt and Cinderella were. Cinderella was opening for them. Cinderella’s portion of the show was not near the theatrical show that Bon Jovi was. I remember Tom Keifer out there in a long black trench coat.
00:21:25 Heather: Which she still wears.
00:21:26 Dwayne: Did not move much at all on stage a little bit, but not a whole lot.
00:21:29 Heather: But Bon Jovi was, you know, main main character.
00:21:33 Dwayne: He yeah, he definitely main character. He was running around all over the place. But not just him. Richie was all over the place. Uh, their drummer, Tico Torres. He was. He put on a hell of a show just by himself back there. But the entire band was they were very animated. They were all over the place. John literally flew across the stadium at one point. He’s on the high wire being lifted, flying over everyone. They put him down on a box in the middle of the. Yeah, they were like.
00:21:58 Heather: The pioneer of the big stadium shows.
00:22:01 Dwayne: That was awesome. It was so much fun, but it was different than what had come before. Now, other bands saw this and what was going on and they jumped.
00:22:09 Heather: On the bandwagon.
00:22:10 Dwayne: They had to jump on it too. That’s when Crue, you know, Motley Crue in early Motley Crue, they wore makeup. Oh yeah, they were they were heavily dressed up, heavily glam. But they. When Bon Jovi came out with this, they started putting on more and more of the theatrics throughout their show as well.
00:22:26 Heather: Aka Tommy drumming upside down.
00:22:29 Dwayne: All right, well, there’s another band we want to spend a little bit of time on because their story is, um, really just kind of this whole thing in one package. They came out of Pennsylvania. Bret Michaels, Bobby Dahl, Rikki Rockett they all moved out west in eighty four to the Sunset Strip to they grinding it out on Sunset Boulevard. Their original guitarist got tired of it and went home to Pennsylvania, and that’s when they brought in C.C. Deville. These guys signed with Enigma Records, which was at that time an independent label for something like thirty thousand dollars. They produced Look What the Cat Dragged In. On May the twenty third, nineteen eighty six, they cut that whole thing at Music Grinder Studios in Hollywood in about twelve days for about twenty three thousand dollars, and some of that money came out of their own pockets and from their families. Bret later called it a glorified demo.
00:23:16 Heather: Wow. So that album did flop at first. It debuted at number one hundred and ninety seven on the Billboard chart. The first single, Cry Tough, basically did nothing in the States, which is actually a really good song. Yeah, that’s just crazy. It is. And then MTV put Talk Dirty to Me into heavy rotation, and that changed everything. And that song was literally everywhere on MTV.
00:23:51 Dwayne: And there, you got it, man. You’ve got the big guitars, you’ve got the big hair and you’ve got the guitar slide.
00:23:56 Heather: Yeah. They finally went up to number nine on the hot one hundred and the album climbed all the way up to number three, went gold in eighty seven and was triple platinum by nineteen ninety. Became the best selling album in Enigma record history that I didn’t know me either.
00:24:10 Dwayne: At twenty three thousand dollars. Record made in twelve days going triple platinum. That’s kind of, uh, a thing that is that is amazing. Especially at that time, you had, you know, big labels were coming out there. This was already eighty seven by the time they did this. By that time, you had big, big money was flowing into this whole thing here. And for the strip to take that gamble on a small and unknown band, really sign them a little bit of money. They throw basically all that cash right back into making that album and boom!
00:24:39 Heather: Yeah. And talking about the record companies and how they oversaturated grunge in this era, the record companies owned these bands. They were very strict with these bands and they held them prisoner.
00:24:52 Dwayne: The bands didn’t make money for the most part. The bands were all held prisoner.
00:24:55 Heather: If you go back and look at everybody, these guys were held prisoner to their contract.
00:24:59 Dwayne: The record companies would sign these guys for, you know, with what they called millions of dollars and give them money up front. However, it was always with the stipulation that they make that much money back in album sales. They would sign.
00:25:11 Heather: They also, you know, supply them with the drugs and.
00:25:13 Dwayne: Yeah, lots of that as well. They, yeah, they kept them, they kept them happy to keep them complacent, to keep them in the studio.
00:25:20 Heather: In.
00:25:21 Dwayne: Line Road. Yeah. Really to keep them in line.
00:25:24 Heather: Which is really sad.
00:25:25 Dwayne: The business was dirty. It was the business is still dirty today. If you’re unfortunate enough to be in it. I think it’s become a lot more publicly known how a lot of this works between all the, uh, autobiographies that have come out. And then you see, you know, folks like Kelly Clarkson and Taylor Swift and what they’ve had to go through. They had to they had to make millions in order to buy the rights to their own music back so that they could get.
00:25:50 Heather: To their own music.
00:25:51 Dwayne: Their music.
00:25:52 Heather: So that’s why you see so many independent labels now.
00:25:54 Dwayne: I think that’s a part of why so many artists are attracted to something like Spotify, in that you have just as much likelihood of getting your band and your name out there as you ever would, going and begging to the labels without having to go through the hell that the labels are known for putting people through. Uh, look what the cat dragged in, though. Also had this one on it.
00:26:18 Speaker 6: All right.
00:26:26 Heather: I played the shit out of that album.
00:26:30 Dwayne: I actually owned this. This is one of the very few vinyl records I ever owned.
00:26:34 Heather: Oh, yeah. I had this on vinyl, too.
00:26:35 Dwayne: I was, I was never really big into vinyl because to me it sounded dirty. Yeah. You know, it was. It was a pain keeping everything clean. They would get scratched so easily. They skipped cassettes, were more compact, were easier to carry around. I could, you know, pop.
00:26:50 Heather: My.
00:26:50 Dwayne: Little.
00:26:50 Heather: Briefcase of.
00:26:51 Dwayne: Pop it in my in my Walkman and and have two or three in my pockets as well. At any one time. I just wasn’t a huge fan of vinyl. But this particular one here, I didn’t want to buy the album and have it be known that much of the. Are these girls or are they guys? But I’ve heard of poison, so I bought the album. It’s really hard to tell when you look at that album cover.
00:27:11 Heather: They all make very beautiful women.
00:27:13 Dwayne: They were so.
00:27:14 Heather: Pretty, they were so pretty. But definitely guys. You know, it’s funny how music changes and how people change. And, you know, people complain about guys wearing makeup today. And like, if you.
00:27:25 Dwayne: Have you seen musical history?
00:27:27 Heather: Right?
00:27:27 Dwayne: That’s what I thought was hilarious. One of the, the silent generation’s biggest heroes in all of media was Milton Berle and one of Milton Berle’s most well-known and favorite acts was when he was cross-dressing, dressing up as a woman. In the video we talked about there earlier, he literally plays himself and himself dressed up as a woman, and he’s flirting with himself, and they go to sneak off for a little rendezvous upstairs.
00:27:53 Heather: It’s all you complain about guys wearing makeup. You all need to just chill.
00:27:57 Dwayne: Get over.
00:27:57 Heather: Yourselves. Yourselves.
00:27:59 Dwayne: Amazing. Let’s just. I had to throw this one in the mix here just because it was one of my personal favorites off this album. I won’t forget.
00:28:16 Heather: You. Yes. It’s such a good song. That whole album. Look what the Cat dragged in the whole album was. It’s a really good a really good album.
00:28:23 Dwayne: Say what you want about Bret Michaels or Poison? It was a really good album.
00:28:28 Heather: I like Bret Michaels. Yeah, yeah, he was a little bit of a man hoe back in the nineties. I feel like a lot of that is just I think a lot of that was just, um, it’s for show.
00:28:38 Dwayne: I think a lot of it, he was kind of being like the Jean Simmons type man. Ho. I think I’m doing it for the media.
00:28:44 Heather: Yeah. I think it was just a persona that was made up because I mean come on. He’s still with that girl.
00:28:50 Dwayne: The one poison song that everyone knows came off of their second album, Open Up and Say Ah! Came out on April twenty seventh, nineteen eighty eight, and it hit number two on the Billboard chart, eventually went five times platinum had four singles off of it, Nothing But a Good Time, fallen Angel, which was a Loggins and Messina cover, and every Rose Has Its Thorn.
00:29:12 Heather: And Bret Michaels wrote every Rose Has Its thorn in a laundromat in Dallas, perfect for that great song. He was out on tour, called his girlfriend from a payphone and heard a man’s voice in the background. He says he still has the yellow legal pad he wrote it on, and that there was something like a bazillion verses before he cut it down.
00:29:55 Dwayne: Yeah, I can play that whole song there. And then we get in trouble with the. Yeah, with the with the police that come after us for one.
00:30:01 Heather: Of their best songs.
00:30:02 Dwayne: Michael was going through a big heartbreak, a breakup.
00:30:05 Heather: Again, heartbreak in music. Perfect combo.
00:30:07 Dwayne: I saw an interview where they were talking about his girlfriend at the time. She called him up. She was kind of upset. This is me. This song is about me, isn’t it? You wrote this song about me, and yeah, he made a lot of money off of writing that song about her. So I guess that heartbreak wasn’t all bad.
00:30:22 Heather: He didn’t put her name in there.
00:30:24 Dwayne: No. Capitol Records didn’t want to release it. Michael says the label told him flat out it would end their career because it opened with an acoustic guitar. I had this cowboy thing going on. It just wasn’t poison.
00:30:35 Heather: Yeah, well, they.
00:30:36 Dwayne: They put.
00:30:36 Heather: It out. Companies aren’t always perfect.
00:30:38 Dwayne: Yeah. They put this thing out on October the twelfth of nineteen eighty eight. And by Christmas Eve it was number one on the hot one hundred. And it stayed there for three weeks. And it’s the only number one the poison ever had.
00:30:49 Heather: It was a great, great song, and it basically was a country song with a rock theme behind it. Kind of the argument we made last week about hair, metal and country not being that different. Yeah, it was, you know, country and metal. It’s all about heartbreak, love.
00:31:04 Dwayne: Well, to carry on in that same vein, we have seen MTV crossroads episodes. We’ve seen them with Def Leppard. Yeah. Did one, Bon Jovi did one. Hell, Bon Jovi went and released a couple of singles back in the mid twenty tens. Okay, folks, that’s going to wrap it up for this week. Not to worry though, we’ve got plenty more next week and a whole lot more to discuss. If you enjoyed this week’s episode, we invite you to subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen. We’re available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all the other podcast outlets. You can even listen on your smart speaker. Just ask it to play the most recent episode of Whatever the Next Podcast. We also invite you to follow us on the socials. We’re on Facebook and Instagram at whatever Gen X pod and show notes, guest information and sponsorship opportunities are on our website at w w w dot whatever dot com. You can even leave us comments or a voice message. Some of our listeners have asked how they can support the show, so we’ve set up a link on the website. Just click on the support link to learn how you can help keep us in ibuprofen to help relieve some of the aches and pains of growing older without growing up. If you can’t support us that way, we ask that you spread the word about the podcast and invite your friends. It’s free, it’s easy, and it really helps us out a lot. This is a labor of love that isn’t exactly free or cheap to produce, and we truly appreciate everyone who’s reached out to show some support. You can’t believe how much. Just a little bit helps. Until next week.
00:32:23 Heather: Okay, bye.