80’s Hard Rock is often used as a punchline. To hear the words “Hair Band” brings a different response, depending on the age of the ears hearing it. It’s Mom and Dad’s music to the kids today. Some kids embrace it to be different as kids in the 80’s who cried the praise of The Doors led you to believe you were missing out or just were not cool enough to understand. For adults it brings back memories, good or bad. Even those that were not into it at the time inadvertently found themselves sucked in with the exposure on radio and MTV. If anyone between the ages of 30 and 40 tells you that they never sang along to ‘Wanted Dead of Alive” they are likely lying.
I dove into the 80’s Hard Rock head first…literally. In 8th grade I started letting my hair grow. I’ll be honest, the intentions were for a rat tail. Remember those? One strip of long hair hanging off the back as the rest was short? Yes, the rat tail was going to be my first rebellion tool against my mother. Then I realized it could be so much more. It was 1984.
My earliest exposure to hard rock came from a source that it did for many. Siblings. I was the youngest of five in the house and the closest one in age to me was six-years older. In the 70’s we lived in the L.A. area. Often you could find Led Zepplin, Black Sabbath, or Ted Nugent blaring somewhere in the house. My earliest memory comes from a party they had. I was lying on the couch and I remember “Stairway to Heaven” playing. Scared the shit out of me as before me was the stairs heading up. I was about 6-7 at the time. Then came a song from a new local band. “Running with the Devil” by Van Halen did not help my shivering on the couch cause. I just remember hearing the chorus over and over. No good can come from a 6-7 year-old hearing devil over and over.
In 1978 my mother transplanted me to small town Iowa. I had escaped the devil that was running up the stairway to heaven. In a few short years that hard rocking music, as Huey Lewis would put it, would return…and with a vengeance. It would become my mission to embrace it and force feed it to this community pf about 5000 surrounded by cornfields.
My brother, who was six years older than me, liked KISS. I hated everything my brother liked so KISS had to be included. This went on until a friend of mine would foce feed me the “Lick it up” tape on his big ass boombox we carried around. He was more enlightened as his brother had taken him to see two KISS shows already. My efforts of hating my brother’s band were futile. The foot started tapping and head nodding no matter how hard I tried to stop it. Then I thought of a way to like KISS and not give in to my brother. They had taken the make-up off! My brother liked KISS with the make-up! Make-up off KISS could be mine and I don’t have to acknowledge any influence from my brother!
Let’s go back to where I left off with 1984 above. Hard Rock was starting to get some TV love by shows like “Night Flight” (I think that was the name) on USA and MTV was starting to make the turn. Van Halen was getting a lot of air play with “Jump” and the video was taking off. In my small town Iowa community they had this event where all the downtown stores would have a sidewalk sale and slash prices called “Ridiculous Days”. Looking back on it this was likely a way just to dump their broken and over stocked merchandise. Anyway, the local record store cut a couple bucks off the prices and I talked my Mom into letting me get one. I had my eyes on the Van Halen 1984 album. Mom gave me the money to get it and went on her way shopping. Had she not done that things may have been different. I may not have been permitted to get the album I did. Everyone had “1984″ and could just record it off them onto a tape. Instead I took a different albmu to the counter. One with pictures on the back that would have scared that little kid in 1978 who was laying on the couch during a party. I was no longer afraid though. I was going to be different.
I rushed home and took the wrapper off the record. For the kids out there, a record was like a CD only you didn’t put it in anything, It played in open air on a thing called a record player. It’s ironic to think back now what the name of the first song on that record was. It wasn’t so much a song as it was a scary little story. I laid the dusty record needle down on the vinal and what started playing was “In the beginning…” from Motley Crue’s “Shout at the Devil” album. Things were about to change for this small town Iowa boy.
If you would like to join me looking at the various Hard Rock bands and watch some videos, check back!
