Nothin' But a Good Time

The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Glam Metal

Justin Quirk

• Publisher: Unbound Digital
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789651362
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

From 1983 until 1991, Glam Metal was the sound of American culture. Big hair, massive amplifiers, drugs, alcohol, piles of money and life-threatening pyrotechnics. This was the world stalked by Bon Jovi, Kiss, W.A.S.P., Skid Row, Dokken, Motley Crue, Cinderella, Ratt and many more. Armed with hairspray, spandex and strangely shaped guitars, they marked the last great era of supersize bands.

Where did Glam Metal come from? How did it spread? What killed it off? And why does nobody admit to having been a Glam Metaller anymore?

Chapter 1

1983: Shout At The Devil

As a cultural decade, the 1970s was a tough one for America. Looking back on the biggest cinematic hits of the time, two themes dominate: a desire for escapism, whether into outer space (Star Wars, Close Encounters) or an idealised memory of America’s past (Grease). Even when films dealt ostensibly with the here and now, they contained a recurring idea of America’s downfall lurking in its midst. In the likes of Jaws, Taxi Driver and The Towering Inferno the constant sense was that, in the most everyday situations, something completely mundane was always lurking and ready to kill you. Much of rock music broke into two similar camps: escapism and fantasy could be found in the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack (1970) and Frampton Comes Alive (1976), but elsewhere neurosis and paranoia were the order of the day. Neil Young’s Harvest (1972) told melancholic stories of heroin death and failed Southern states. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (1977) was, sonically, the high watermark of glossy, AM rock – but dealt almost entirely in the bitter emotional fallout of the band’s collapsing relationships. Even the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack (1978) had an edge and menace that often got lost in the wash created by its visual flair and lush orchestration. The title track’s portrayal of a life in New York where the city is ‘breaking’, and its desperate refrain that life is going nowhere, struck a chord with millions of listeners.

This is perhaps unsurprising when the context of the years around this art is considered. The decade began with the Kent State Shootings, America already embroiled in the Vietnam War, and totemic figures of the Sixties’ revolution dying of overdoses in quick succession (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison in a ten-month window). The Watergate scandal, in which President Richard Nixon’s administration oversaw the burgling of the Democratic National Convention’s headquarters in June 1972, became a byword for presidential sleaze and corruption. The years 1973–4 saw an energy crisis triggered by the Arab Oil Embargo, which spiked petrol prices and necessitated daylight saving time being brought in four months early to conserve energy, and 1975 saw the Vietnam War end in ignominy and American President Gerald Ford survive two assassination attempts in quick succession. In 1977, widespread rioting, arson and looting gripped New York as a city-wide blackout occurred overnight following lightning strikes on the city’s key electrical substations that put TV stations off air, shut down transport networks and plunged the city into darkness. The same year, Elvis Presley died, an American icon reduced to a lumbering, cholesterol-choked parody of his former self. Before the decade was out, America would also have seen the partial meltdown of its nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, the mass suicide of 900 members of The People’s Temple (following its relocation to Jonestown in Guyana) and the assassination of openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk by his former colleague Dan White.

Finally, with Iran consumed by its Islamic Revolution, the US Embassy in the capital city Tehran would be overrun by hard-line theocratic students who swarmed over the compound’s gates and proceeded to take fifty-two American diplomats and civilians hostage for 444 days. Members of the embassy staff were paraded before photographers, blindfolded and with their hands bound. The subsequent rescue raid ordered by US President Jimmy Carter, Operation Eagle Claw, was intended to send a Delta Force team into the heart of Tehran to liberate the hostages; mechanical problems, fuelling issues and an enormous freak haboob dust storm conspired against the mission and led to it being aborted. As the craft and troops attempted to retreat, one of their helicopters crashed into a transport aircraft laden with jet fuel, killing eight service personnel. The hostages were eventually released twenty minutes after the inauguration of Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, in return for the US unfreezing billions of dollars of Iranian assets. Carter’s presidency and the entire decade ended in abject public humbling and humiliation for the world’s greatest superpower.

Against this backdrop, heavy metal was at something of a transitional point. Judas Priest had spent the second half of the Seventies evolving their sound from something prog-inflected to the focused, riff-driven punishment of British Steel (1980), largely fixing their attention on America while punk played out back in the UK. Rob Halford’s development of his leather-bound, S&M frontman persona suited their new sound perfectly. From the opening of ‘Rapid Fire’ onwards, Priest tore out of the speakers, sounding as inspired by the amphetamine punk of Motörhead as by anything from Deep Purple’s family tree. ‘Breaking the Law’ – with its thumbnail sketches of life on the dole in the early years of Thatcherism, and its frustrated cry of ‘You don’t know what it’s like’ – marked British Steel out as too grounded in reality to be thought of as glam. But in the band’s sense of theatre and the boosting of Halford’s character to cartoonish extremes, they had the sense of occasion and drama that would shape the look and feel of what would come next.

Priest’s fellow Midlander Ozzy Osbourne enjoyed a huge reinvention the same year with the Blizzard of Ozz album. Largely due to his recruitment of pint-sized guitar virtuoso and California native Randy Rhoads, Osbourne sounded re-energised and fully equipped for a new decade, with the corrosive doom of Sabbath’s sound replaced with something lighter, more melodic and distinctly transatlantic. Since his work on 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Ozzy’s talent seemed to be buckling under the weight of his own lifestyle, and the pressure to live up to and sustain the epoch-defining work that Black Sabbath had originally released. Listening through their mid-to-late Seventies’ output there’s a steady sense of a talent not in decline – but steadily running out of energy. By 1978’s Never Say Die, Osbourne’s vocal tone – plaintive and naturally suited to a minor key – is like the sound of someone begging for a way out. Even on the few bright spots like the title track, the effect is roughly akin to watching a video of a hostage where they’re telling the viewers they’re fine but frantically signalling with their eyes that they need help.

But on Blizzard of Ozz, all that had changed. Osbourne himself sounds in fine voice, but a huge amount of the credit must go to Rhoads. Tiny and blond haired, Rhoads bore a passing resemblance to Mick Ronson, David Bowie’s guitarist in the Spiders from Mars, and had played in a series of bar bands around LA from the mid-Seventies, as well as recording in the first incarnation of Quiet Riot.^[1] Throughout his childhood he both played and taught at Musonia, the music school established and run by his musician mother. With a huge technical expertise and improvisational aptitude, his playing on this album sounds like a quantum leap ahead of the blues-derived style that dominated most of the hard rock music of the Seventies. On opening track ‘I Don’t Know’ alone he flits between galloping rhythm playing, spiralling lead fills and clean, arpeggiated interludes. Throughout the album his strength lies not just in the virtuosity that he so evidently possessed, but in his ability to support Osbourne’s voice – an instrument that, charitably, you could describe as ‘untrained’. Throughout his career, Osbourne’s worst performances have shown a tendency to lose focus, wandering approximately around the tune or behind the beat, where his keening, nasal tone sounds flat and desperate (there’s a performance from April 28, 1981 of ‘Crazy Train’ on the TV show After Hours which is particularly hard on the ears). But Rhoads’ playing and arrangements turned these potential limitations into bonuses: on ‘Crazy Train’ he propels Osbourne through the hardest sections of the vocal line, cranking out a dense rhythm track to support his frontman; on ‘Goodbye to Romance’ he plucks out a kind of optimistic, gentle psychedelia that harks back to the Beatles of Osbourne’s childhood.^[2]

What comes across most strongly is a sense of the personal bond that Osbourne and Rhoads enjoyed. Sonically, they seem meshed together creatively to the point where it’s hard to imagine the same material working with either party replaced by another. Osbourne’s evident affection for the musician who had largely resurrected his critical and creative standing was matched by a near-telepathic ability to work together despite the punishing levels of alcohol abuse that Osbourne was already subjecting himself to. ‘I have a lot of fond memories of Randy,’ Osbourne told Revolver magazine in 2013. ‘He lived with me for a while. We had an apartment together in London. And I always was out of my mind shitfaced and passed out somewhere. I came around one time and I heard Randy, he was having a lesson in this room with me. A classical lesson. And I come around and I heard, [sings notes]. I said, “That’s next.” “What?” “Remember that.” And it became “Diary of a Madman”, the song.’

The songs they produced on Blizzard of Ozz weren’t just a leap forwards for Osbourne, they were perfectly in tune with where metal was about to get to. The big rock releases of the first couple of years of the decade, such as Rainbow’s Straight Between the Eyes (1982), certainly had elements which were moving towards glam metal (the single ‘Stone Cold’ is a pretty exemplary glam metal power ballad) but they couldn’t quite shake off the flourishes and swagger of a more operatic Seventies’ sound. Aldo Nova’s ‘Fantasy’ single (1982) veers close to a glam sound, but the song’s keyboard lines and lush arrangements are reminiscent of the harder end of Jefferson Starship’s output (plus, Nova’s sensible collar-length hair meant he couldn’t look fully glam metal). Blizzardof Ozz had a few residual elements of this Seventies’ influence (the aforementioned ‘Goodbye to Romance’ particularly), but by 1983, Ozzy’s sound had focused down into something with all the blues and swing frozen out of it for his Bark at the Moon album.

However, this completion of Osbourne’s revival in fortunes would take place without the guitarist who had done so much to reinvigorate him personally and creatively. On March 19, 1982, Osbourne’s band were en route to the Rock Super Bowl XIV festival in Orlando, where they would be headlining the Tangerine Bowl supported by Foreigner, and had stopped off overnight at a property in Leesburg, Florida. Early that morning, Osbourne’s band’s driver, Andrew Aycock – a trained pilot – took one of the property’s ’55 Beechcraft Bonanza F-35 planes and ran a short test flight with keyboard player Don Airey and tour manager Jake Duncan. Two more flights followed, this time with Rhoads and the band’s hairdresser Rachel Youngblood on board. For reasons that are still unclear, during this third flight, the pilot began flying as low as possible, attempting three times to ‘buzz’ the static tourbus on which other members of the band were still sleeping. Osbourne’s subsequent statement to investigators recounted what happened on the fourth flypast from his perspective:

At approximately 9:00 a.m. on Friday, March 19, 1982, I was awoken from my sleep by a loud explosion. I immediately thought that we’d hit a vehicle on the road. I got out of the bed, screaming to my fiancée, Sharon, ‘Get off the bus.’ Meanwhile, she was screaming to everyone else to get off the bus. After getting out of the bus, I saw that a plane had crashed. I didn’t know who was on the plane at the time. When we realized that our people were on the plane, I found it very difficult to get assistance from anyone to help. In fact, it took almost a half-hour before anyone arrived. One small fire engine arrived, which appeared to squirt three gallons of water over the inferno. We asked for further assistance, such as telephones, and didn’t receive any further help. In the end, we finally found a telephone and Sharon phoned her father.

Sharon Osbourne’s statement concluded: ‘I did not see the crash. All I saw was fire.’ The subsequent report concluded that the plane had been just ten feet from the ground when its wing struck the bus, before it cart-wheeled into a tree and then crashed into the roof of the house. On impact it exploded, with all three passengers dying instantly. Rhoads was identified by his jewellery and Aycock through his dental records, with toxicology tests showing up only nicotine for Rhoads, but cocaine for the pilot.

The immense trauma of this loss for Osbourne and the rest of his band was cruelly heightened by its contrast with the rich seam of form he was entering. Osbourne would replace Rhoads with Jake E. Lee who had played in an early incarnation of Ratt and Rough Cutt, semi-protégés of Ronnie James Dio and his wife. The first fruits of this new incarnation of Osbourne’s band, the Bark at the Moon album, was emblematic of a year that marked a step change in metal – the music that cut through and connected had a glossy sheen, a tight, processed sound and a spunky self-confidence. The cover saw Ozzy transformed into a moderately convincing werewolf by Greg Cannom who had previously been responsible for the key scenes in 1981’s An American Werewolf in London. Plans to originally record at the Compass Point studios in the Bahamas were shelved after a visit to scope the location ended badly (‘I was pissed, I fell flat on my face in the studio,’ Osbourne told Kerrang!) with Ridge Farm in Surrey eventually hosting the sessions.

Despite Ozzy’s disaffection with the prevailing trends in chart music (‘I watched Top of the Pops the other week and I nearly threw up. There’s this one record, I think it’s called “Superman”, well, I’ve never heard such a pile of shit in all my life.’) and late jitters about the quality of the final mix, the album which emerged managed to not only replicate the propulsive, treble-laden screech and galloping attack of its predecessors, but it scored genuine chart hits. ‘So Tired’, a wistful ballad again drifting into a Beatles-ish psychedelia with a video sympathising with a tormented theatre-prowling hunchback, made it into the Top 20, with the far heavier title track of the album narrowly missing out on the same placing. Whatever genuine tragedies Ozzy had suffered in the preceding years – and whatever worrying signs were visible as to his future wellbeing – 1983 was a professional and creative triumph for him.

In America, the paranoia and nerves of just a few years earlier seemed to be mutating into a bolshy, overcompensating boosterism across the country as a whole. Interest rates had fallen by almost half since their 1980 peak, and while unemployment which had peaked at 10.8 per cent in December 1982 was still at 8.3 per cent, through this period almost twice as many Americans now reported feeling optimistic and positive about their economic prospects as those who felt negatively. An artificial, hyped-up optimism was in the air – one that Reagan would tap into perfectly with his 1984 election campaign proclaiming that ‘It’s morning again in America.’ America – like Ozzy himself – had at least superficially come back from the brink.

Against this backdrop, music that was aggressive, obnoxiously loud, self-promoting, gleefully escapist and larger than life was strangely in keeping with the times, despite its countercultural trappings. Often, the artists responsible were veteran performers who had been scratching around for much of the previous decade. As well as Bark at the Moon, there were strong albums from Seventies’ journeymen Quiet Riot (Rhoads’ former band who had been reactivated for the new decade by frontman Kevin Dubrow and scored a huge hit with the anthemic title track of their album MetalHealth and a cover of Slade’s ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ which joined the cultural dots between two countries, eras and genres) and Dio, the new vehicle for Osbourne’s former replacement in Black Sabbath, Ronnie James Dio. In Quiet Riot’s case, at this stage, their importance wasn’t just musical, but in their success in scoring a major label deal with CBS/Sony. One of the first LA area bands to be signed to such a deal after Van Halen, Quiet Riot served as a proof of concept to the other major labels circling the LA scene. Meanwhile, Ratt – w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• [Dedication]
• Super Patrons
• Table Of Contents
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Postscript
• Further Exploration
• Acknowledgements
• Patrons