{"id":140109,"date":"2019-10-10T09:00:21","date_gmt":"2019-10-10T13:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=140109"},"modified":"2019-10-10T12:39:03","modified_gmt":"2019-10-10T16:39:03","slug":"nostalgia-for-a-less-innocent-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/10\/10\/nostalgia-for-a-less-innocent-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Nostalgia for a Less Innocent Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the glory and depravity of hair metal.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years<\/em> is a documentary that often feels like a mockumentary\u2014in part because of the inherent absurdity of the LA metal scene in the late eighties, in part because of Penelope Spheeris\u2019s directorial choices. Spheeris, of Wayne\u2019s World<\/em> fame, let her subjects decide how they wanted to be filmed. Gene Simmons of Kiss did his interview in a lingerie store\u2014\u201cI don\u2019t want to do anything tacky,\u201d he\u2019d told her. Simmons\u2019s bandmate Paul Stanley suggested, \u201cHow about in bed with a bunch of women?\u201d His segments were filmed from above, with lingerie models absentmindedly stroking his spandex pants. Chris Holmes, the lead guitarist from W.A.S.P., suggested, \u201cHow about drowning in a pool with my mother watching?\u201d<\/p>\n

In what is probably the film\u2019s best-known scene, Holmes floats in a pool chair, wearing black leather pants, and tells Spheeris he\u2019s a \u201cfull-blown alcoholic.\u201d To prove it, he pours vodka from a liter of Smirnoff down his throat and all over his face for almost ten seconds. His mother, Sandy Holmes, who has strong June Cleaver vibes, is indeed there watching from the side of the pool, looking disappointed but resigned. He says, \u201cI\u2019m a happy camper.\u201d Spheeris asks him if he wishes he was a bigger star. \u201cI wish I was a smaller star,\u201d he answers. \u201cI don\u2019t dig being the person I am.\u201d Later, after we\u2019ve seen several musicians say that metal is better than sex, Spheeris cuts back to Holmes in the pool making a jerking off motion and saying, \u201cIt\u2019s like this, I love it, it\u2019s great,\u201d with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. We hear Spheeris off camera: \u201cIt\u2019s like beating off?\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s worse than that,\u201d he says. (I can\u2019t explain why, but I love him.) Simmons, back in the lingerie store, says that anyone who claims \u201cit\u2019s lonely at the top\u201d is \u201cfull of it\u201d: \u201cIt\u2019s the best.\u201d Back to Holmes in the pool: \u201cI would rather be broke and happy than rich and sad.\u201d If only we were given that choice.<\/p>\n

Most everyone in the film ends up looking ridiculous. Some random scenester tells Spheeris, \u201cI don\u2019t work, I can\u2019t stand work.\u201d She asks, \u201cWhat was the last job you had?\u201d \u201cUh,\u201d he says, \u201cI\u2019ve never had a job.\u201d Paul Stanley remarks thoughtfully, \u201cOnce you have money, you realize that it\u2019s really not important.\u201d In one of my favorite moments, Spheeris goes to the Cathouse, Riki Rachtman\u2019s \u201cbig fun sleazy\u201d club a couple miles south of the Strip (Rachtman later went on to host MTV\u2019s Headbangers Ball), and asks some people why they go there. The response is just metal word salad: \u201cFucking rock!\u201d \u201cHeavy metal!\u201d \u201cParty!\u201d \u201cDrink!\u201d \u201cGuns N\u2019 Roses!\u201d \u201cLA!\u201d In another notorious scene, Spheeris films Ozzy Osbourne making breakfast in a leopard-print robe; there\u2019s a close-up shot of him attempting to pour orange juice into a glass and spilling it all over the counter. Spheeris later admitted in an interview that part was a stunt: \u201cI faked the orange juice spill.\u201d But most of the stupid excess was real\u2014or maybe in the metal years it was hard to distinguish between stunt and reality.<\/p>\n

In their tell-all collective memoir The Dirt<\/em>, the members of M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce show the extent of the era\u2019s depravity in great detail. Bassist Nikki Sixx describes a day on tour when Ozzy Osbourne announced he \u201cfancied a bump,\u201d but they\u2019d run out of coke. (Picture broad daylight: \u201cWe rolled out of the bus under the heat of the noonday sun and went straight to the bar.\u201d) \u201cUnfazed,\u201d he crouched down on the sidewalk and snorted a line of live ants. Trying to keep up (\u201cwe wanted to maintain our reputation as rock\u2019s most cretinous band\u201d), Sixx \u201cwhipped out [his] dick in full view of everyone\u201d and pissed on the floor. Ozzy crawled over and licked at the puddle. At that point Sixx had to admit defeat: \u201cFrom that moment on, we always knew that wherever we were, whatever we were doing, there was someone who was sicker and more disgusting than we were.\u201d <\/p>\n

And they are profoundly disgusting. When I picked up the book, I looked at the table of contents, figuring I could just skip to the depravity chapter. But every chapter is the depravity chapter, with titles like \u201cBorn Too Loose,\u201d \u201cSave Our Souls,\u201d \u201cGirls, Girls, Girls,\u201d \u201cSome of Our Best Friends Are Drug Dealers,\u201d and \u201cSome of Our Best Friends Were Drug Dealers.\u201d The first paragraph has the word \u201ccum\u201d in it. (It also opens with an epigraph by Wilkie Collins. Their ghostwriter outdid himself.) In the early days, the apartment they shared, which was near the Whisky A Go-Go and functioned as a de facto nightly afterparty, had alcohol and bloodstains all over the carpets; the walls were scorched black because the band \u201ccouldn\u2019t afford pesticides\u201d so they torched the roaches with hairspray and a lighter. They also \u201ccouldn\u2019t afford\u201d toilet paper, so the bathroom was littered with \u201cshit-stained socks.\u201d As much as they brag about their substance abuse and sexual exploits, metal dudes also love to brag about how broke they were before they hit it big. In \u201cWelcome to the jungle: The definitive oral history of \u201980s metal,\u201d published in Salon<\/em>, Jani Lane of Warrant claims \u201cWe went down to the store every day and got a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread and put the peanut butter on the bread using a Social Security card.\u201d Because, I guess, they couldn\u2019t afford a plastic knife? I hope the card was laminated.<\/p>\n

W.A.S.P. was known for throwing raw meat at the audience. There is no why. Wrongness was the point, an amorality unto nonsense. In The Dirt<\/em>, Sixx describes some \u201cideas\u201d he had for M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce\u2019s second album, Shout at the Devil<\/em>: \u201cI had grand ideas of creating a tour that looked like a cross between a Nazi rally and a black church service.\u201d They actually did a photo shoot in Nazi regalia, but their record company drew the line there. It\u2019s not that the band held any fascist beliefs per se; they held no beliefs, apart from embracing provocation and \u201cevil\u201d in all forms. Front man Vince Neil once said, \u201cNobody\u2019s really into the devil. It\u2019s showmanship.\u201d But Sixx seemed to get confused by his own antics, flirting with genuine satanism for a while, as if it were the only logical endpoint of the atmosphere of escalating chaos. When he crashed his Porsche into a telephone pole, he interpreted the accident as a sign that maybe he\u2019d been dabbling a bit too much in devil worship. He got into heroin instead. Sixx was once legally dead from an overdose for about two minutes, but woke up, left the hospital, and shot up again. I think of the \u201cBehind the Laughter\u201d episode of The Simpsons<\/em>, a parody of VH1\u2019s Behind the Music<\/em>, where Homer says, \u201cFame was like a drug, but what was even more like a drug was the drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The members of M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce were generally encouraged in these directions. \u201cThe more fucked up we got, the greater people thought we were,\u201d Sixx writes. \u201cRadio stations brought us groupies; management gave us drugs.\u201d I won\u2019t go so far as to say they were blameless for their \u201ccretinous\u201d behavior\u2014but in a way everyone around them was also to blame. Reading The Dirt<\/em> made me feel guilty\u2014not in the sense of a guilty pleasure, but with actual guilt. (I was alive in the eighties, I watched MTV\u2014I share in the blame.) I got a little nauseous. After reading it for most of the day, I went to a housewarming party, took one sip of white wine and felt already addled, as if I couldn\u2019t remember how many drinks I\u2019d had.<\/p>\n

Things get weird for the guys when they finally suffer some consequences worse than a hangover. On the fourth night of a debauched celebration to kick off their third album, Theatre of Pain<\/em> (amazingly, it\u2019s an Artaud reference), Vince Neil and Razzle from the Finnish band Hanoi Rocks run out for more liquor and Neil wrecks the car. \u201cWe were both fucked up and shouldn\u2019t have driven,\u201d Neil writes, \u201cespecially since the store was only a couple blocks away and we could have easily walked.\u201d Razzle died in the accident. Neil was charged with involuntary manslaughter and eventually sentenced to thirty days in jail and five years of probation. It created a divide between him and the rest of the band, a cloud of resentment and cognitive dissonance. Sixx writes, \u201cWhen I thought about Vince, it wasn\u2019t with pity; it was with anger, as if he was the bad guy and the rest of the band members were innocent victims of his wrongdoing. But we all did drugs and drove drunk. It could have happened to any of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through the fog of vice and perversion, there are occasional hints of remorse and something close to moral clarity\u2014like the part where Sixx remembers a woman he knew grabbing his hand and pulling him, \u201cslurring and stumbling,\u201d into a closet at a party. \u201cWe fucked for a while,\u201d he writes, then he sent Tommy Lee in. The next day she called him, \u201cher voice trembling,\u201d and told him, \u201cI got raped last night.\u201d \u201cMy heart dropped into my stomach, and my body went cold,\u201d Sixx writes. But the woman wasn\u2019t talking about him or Lee: \u201cI was hitchhiking home from the Hyatt House, and this guy picked me up and raped me in his car.\u201d At first, Sixx was relieved, \u201cbecause it meant I hadn\u2019t raped her\u201d\u2014as if rape is only rape if you\u2019re accused of it. \u201cBut the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I pretty much had,\u201d he writes. He almost gets it\u2014there is almost a reckoning\u2014but he moves quickly on: \u201cI was in a zone, and in that zone, consequences did not exist. Besides, I was capable of sinking even lower than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

It seems fatuous to linger long on the politics of the scene. It\u2019s not as though what was happening is troubling merely in hindsight, by today\u2019s higher standards. It\u2019s disturbing by any standards; it was disturbing at the time. It was a low point for innocence in pop culture, or a high point for nihilism. The counterculture of the sixties may have given us the principles of sex, drugs, and rock \u2018n\u2019 roll, but at least they believed in peace and love and freeing the mind to reach a higher consciousness. Metal in the eighties was about pure filthy hedonism for its own sake. As Nikki Sixx sums it up in a VH1 special called \u201cThe Fabulous Life of M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce,\u201d \u201cwe fucked the chicks, we shot the drugs, we wrecked the cars.\u201d (The show, narrated by Robin Leach, is mostly a celebration of how M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce spent all their money\u2014Sixx built a custom pool in the shape of a vagina, while Neil had thirty-two cars and a mud-wrestling pit.) Misogyny was endemic in the music industry, but metal in particular wore its misogyny with pride. They performed<\/em> it. It was used to disguise the paranoia they must have felt about their androgynous costumes, as if the only way they could get away with wearing that much eye makeup was by coupling it with incandescent sexism and homophobia. They take pleasure in violence to demonstrate their high testosterone. In that same VH1 show, Vince Neil announces, \u201cJust cuz we wear lipstick don\u2019t mean we can\u2019t kick your ass.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, there were women in the scene who wielded their own kinds of power. Legendary groupie Patti Johnsen said meeting the bands was \u201ca huge high.\u201d Some just wanted the same right to rock and get obliterated as the men. According to Iris Berry, formerly of bands including The Lame Flames, Ringling Sisters, Pink Sabbath, Leather Mumu, The Bittersweets, The Flesheaters, and Honk If Yer Horny, \u201cIf you remember the Rainbow [Room] clearly, you weren\u2019t really there.\u201d (I love the names of metal\u2014the lead singer of London called himself Nadir d\u2019Priest.) Two unnamed girls in The Decline of Western Civilization Part II<\/em> claim that sex is their favorite pastime: \u201cEvery day. At least three or four times.\u201d Vicky Hamilton, who worked as a manager and promoter for bands including Guns N\u2019 Roses, M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce, and Poison, was a \u201cfreakin genius\u201d according to GNR\u2019s original drummer Steven Adler. Rachtman once bragged, \u201cLita Ford puked in my club!\u201d like it was a true honor. In another (great) VH1 show called \u201cWhen Metal Ruled the World,\u201d Tawny Kitaen\u2014the redhead who dances on the hoods of two Jaguars in Whitesnake\u2019s \u201cHere I Go Again\u201d video\u2014says of the time, with starry-eyed reverence, \u201cIt was magic.\u201d Maybe some of these women were brainwashed, I don\u2019t really know. I do remember, as a kid, watching the \u201cchicks\u201d in those videos with a sense of real awe, as though the male gaze transmitted superpowers. I couldn\u2019t wait to be a teenager, to be cinematically seventeen. Alas, even at seventeen, I never looked the way seventeen looks on TV.<\/p>\n

People think of nostalgia as a yearning for \u201ca more innocent time.\u201d But I\u2019m nostalgic for a less<\/em> innocent time, or maybe for the way it felt to watch these scenes of decadence from the perspective of childhood innocence. I was a good kid, too, a teacher\u2019s pet type. I obediently ate all my vegetables, while my older brother snuck into the bathroom and spit them out into the shower stall. But I fucking loved hair metal. (The first comment, with thousands of likes, under a YouTube countdown of the top ten best hair bands is \u201cMotley FUCKING Crue baby!!!\u201d This is the simplicity of sentiment I crave.) My first tapes were Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Poison. My favorite Poison song was \u201cFallen Angel\u201d\u2014a play on the clich\u00e9 of the Hollywood hopeful just off a bus from the Midwest. The guys from Poison were the actual bus-hopping wannabes; they formed in Pennsylvania and then moved to Los Angeles in 1983. But the song is about a girl who leaves home with dreams of becoming an actress or model, then gets chewed up by the machinery of the scene: welcome to the jungle, sweetie.<\/p>\n

In my endless quest for more hair metal documentaries, I found a compilation of clips titled \u201cVintage Glam\/Hair Metal Interviews Collection (3),\u201d which includes a snippet of an interview with a band I\u2019d never heard of named Bang Tango. (I couldn\u2019t locate parts 1 and 2.) Here\u2019s the lead singer, Joe Lest\u00e9, waxing on about their first album, Psycho Caf\u00e9<\/em>: \u201cThis is only Psycho Caf\u00e9<\/em> \u2026 we\u2019ve got umpteen albums to go \u2026 we\u2019re going to continue to make albums and albums and albums \u2026 like each album is a kid, like we just had a kid. This is Psycho Caf\u00e9<\/em>, this is our kid.\u201d He\u2019s completely earnest. They must have felt they were on the verge of true rock-stardom\u2014what M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce, in a section of The Dirt<\/em> called \u201cAn Introduction to Cog Theory,\u201d terms \u201cthe big cog.\u201d Cog theory \u201cis an attempt to pull back the curtain of the popular music business and examine the mechanics of success.\u201d Artists start on a conveyor belt, and if they release an album and \u201cexperience a degree of success,\u201d they get \u201ccaught in the machinery\u201d of the first cog. Some musicians move up to the second cog, where \u201cthey realize that the machinery is stronger\u201d than they are and \u201cthere is no way off.\u201d Most bands roll around and around on the second cog and eventually get dropped back at the bottom. But a few, like M\u00f6tley, make it to the big cog:<\/p>\n

The big cog is a huge grinding gear, and there\u2019s nothing artists can do about it if it picks them up. They can stand up and scream, \u201cI hate everyone in the world and you all suck, and if you buy a single record of mine I\u2019ll kill you.\u201d And all that will happen is more people will run out and buy their records. Trying to get off the cog is futile: It only makes the process hurt more.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bang Tango certainly never made it to the big cog. I posted that quote about Psycho Caf\u00e9<\/em> on Twitter, and a friend responded with a link to their video \u201cSomeone Like You,\u201d saying, \u201cThis is certainly vintage 80s hair band, but I have heard of exactly zero of their songs.\u201d I\u2019d never heard the song, either. A 2015 documentary about the band called Attack of Life<\/em> tries to make the case that Bang Tango never made it really big because they were too unique. (The director, Drew Fortier, later joined the band; I don\u2019t think it\u2019s objective.) To me \u201cSomeone Like You\u201d looks and sounds like an amalgam of the rest of the genre. It\u2019s not good, exactly, but I can see that they might easily have been as famous as Cinderella or whatever, or as any of what Twisted Sister\u2019s Dee Snider once referred to as \u201cthe W bands\u201d (Whitesnake, White Lion, Winger, Warrant). So much of history is interchangeable.<\/p>\n

Gene Simmons might think fame is the best, but I\u2019m much more interested in the banality of fame, its emptiness. In my favorite hair metal videos, fame is exhausting, lonely, and boring<\/em>. (Vince Neil said that he understood why rock stars have such big egos when he first played for a giant stadium crowd: \u201cFrom the stage, the world is just one faceless, shirtless, obedient mass, as far as the eye can see.\u201d) The banality of fame is best captured by the tour montage, an especially popular choice to showcase a power ballad. Take Bon Jovi\u2019s perfect video for \u201cWanted Dead or Alive,\u201d which has it all, in slow motion\u2014the grainy black-and-white footage of hands holding up lighters and flashing the sign of the horns; the women in the audience screaming and sobbing and lip-synching, one clutching a single drumstick; the band dragging themselves on and off different modes of transportation, gazing contemplatively out the windows of planes and buses; Jon finally collapsing after the show, dripping with sweat, on a sofa backstage. It\u2019s exhaustion pornography\u2014exhaustion as a trophy of excess. M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce\u2019s video for \u201cHome Sweet Home\u201d is similar, with its time-lapse footage of stage sets being assembled and concertgoers milling around outside stadiums like something from Koyaanisqatsi<\/em>. Inside, women are diving onto the stage and being dragged off by security. But they all still look like they\u2019re having a great time\u2014\u201cHome Sweet Home\u201d is from the band\u2019s third album, before Girls, Girls, Girls<\/em> and then Dr. Feelgood<\/em>; they hadn\u2019t yet made it to the big cog.<\/p>\n

Guns N\u2019 Roses wasn\u2019t really a hair metal band, but they were inextricable from the Sunset Strip scene. The \u201cWelcome to the Jungle\u201d video starts with Axl Rose as the pretty, na\u00efve ingenue stepping off the bus with his life packed in a suitcase. He\u2019s even chewing on a stalk of grass. This was the closest to the hair\/glam look they really got\u2014Axl\u2019s hair is teased and sprayed and he\u2019s wearing visible eyeliner. The rest of the band just looks how they look. (The only thing that ever changes about Slash\u2019s look is whether he\u2019s holding a guitar or a bottle of Jack.) Appetite for Destruction<\/em> put GNR at the big-cog level, so when they released \u201cPatience\u201d as a single from their follow-up G N\u2019 R<\/em> Lies<\/em>, they were easily in a position to do an exhaustion porn video.<\/p>\n

In my opinion, and also in the realm of undisputed fact, \u201cPatience\u201d is the greatest rock video of all time. I watch it at least once a week before bed. It\u2019s not a montage of live footage, more a short film that approximates a typical day in the life of a touring band. It was shot in LA\u2019s Ambassador Hotel, best known as the site of Bobby Kennedy\u2019s assassination. Shots of the band playing the song are intercut with scenes of them hanging around the hotel: Duff McKagan is tall and sexy in a white blazer with no lapels, carrying a tray of room service. Slash reclines in bed, handling a large snake (literally) while a series of beautiful women in lingerie try to seduce him, dissolving into one another. They can\u2019t hold his attention; fame is boring. Steven Adler looks sheepish on a couch in the lobby, scratching his head with his drumsticks, while two women sitting next to him laugh and gossip and ignore him. Adler\u2019s there although the song is acoustic, with no drum part (Dee Snider, on \u201cunplugged\u201d metal: \u201cWhat\u2019s metal about that?!\u201d), and it was his last video with the band, before they kicked him out for being too wasted to keep time. A writer I know, a fellow fan, once told me her favorite part of the video is when Adler stays occupied by playing with candles. My favorite part is when Axl watches the \u201cWelcome to the Jungle\u201d video in his hotel room, a visual echo of the parts in the \u201cWelcome to the Jungle\u201d video where Axl watches TV\u2014in someone\u2019s apartment, through a store window on the street, strapped to a chair in a straitjacket. Screens within screens. In \u201cWelcome to the Jungle,\u201d Axl can\u2019t look away (he\u2019s on some of the screens). In \u201cPatience,\u201d he\u2019s slumped over with his chin in his hand: the banality of fame. He\u2019s sick of himself.<\/p>\n

By the early nineties, people were tired of the nonstop party, the too-much-ness of hair metal. When Nikki Sixx got \u201cthe orgy of success, girls, and drugs\u201d he had always wanted, he was \u201cconfronted with a new problem\u201d: \u201cWhat do you do after the orgy?\u201d Everyone in M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce eventually went to rehab. Hair metal was starting to look formulaic, plasticky. \u201cIt got so processed and so refined that it became pablum,\u201d Snider said. Grunge, with its apparent authenticity, its gestures toward a value system other than hedonism, was moving in to deliver the death blow. At the end of \u201cWhen Metal Ruled the World,\u201d George Lynch from Dokken says he realized, \u201cI gotta go buy a flannel shirt.\u201d<\/p>\n

For me, \u201cPatience\u201d represents peak metal, the sliver of time when scene fatigue was setting in but it hadn\u2019t yet all gone to shit. Rock stars were still capable of magic. The video seems to know how ephemeral it is. The people in it keep fading to nothing\u2014the staff, the groupies, the hotel guests. They go transparent and then disappear, like hallucinations, like ghosts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elisa Gabbert, a poet and essayist, is the author, most recently, of\u00a0<\/span><\/em>The Word Pretty<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(Black Ocean).\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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