When I was a wee lad I thought Stryper were hot. In early photos (check out Robert Sweet on the left!) they looked like Lita Ford (or Lorraine Lewis in the late ’80s). I mean blonde, blue-eyed, and heavily salon-ed. Easy infatuation for a pre-teen, no? Except for the ugly brunettes. But then I might’ve seen this photo. From that point on I made damned sure chicks were chicks and not dicks that look like chicks. Basically, if they weren’t Susanna Hoffs or Belinda Carlisle they were dudes. (more…)
Horror film soundtracks gave metal bands a steady source of coke money in the mid-to-late ’80s. In retrospect, it seems like Megadeth only did soundtrack work during that era, most of which (except for a cover of Alice Cooper’s “No More Mr. Nice Guy” on the Shocker soundtrack) is beyond awful. While I dig the inclusion of Slayer’s “Angel of Death” during a key scene in Gremlins 2, nothing touches the-somewhat-campy-but-adorable anthem Dokken crafted for the Nightmare on Elm Street 3 in 1987. As an added bonus, the video for “Dream Warriors” ties in directly to the film and features Dokken inhabiting a popsicle stick house and a young Patricia Arquette having nightmares about George Lynch’s monster riffs. Mick Brown drumming atop a pile of skulls in the furnace is weird enough (check out his facial expression at 2:01), but do you remember that totally meta- ending? Who are those guys, indeed. It’s worth noting that Don Dokken is still performing this song 20 years later (albeit in a lower register and on an acoustic guitar), and it still rules.
The following documents were covertly obtained by the Deciblog from an unidentified source. Written by Darkthrone’s Fenriz to former Peaceville owner Hammy in 1991, pages one through three contains detailed notes on the layout of the classic A Blaze in the Northern Sky LP. Highlights include drummer-cum-turntablist Fenriz wondering aloud, “I would wear my Skid Row t-shirt on the album photos. Do you think it will affect record sales? Will you refuse me to wear it like the other members of the band did? I’m quite a glam rocker actually.”
Not to be outdone, D-throne frontman Nocturno Culto authors love letters to Hammy (circa 1993) on pages four and five of the PDF. Though not quite as entertaining as Fenriz’s notes, I gotta admit I wish dude followed through on his idea to release a “maxi [single] of slow, sad, evil black metal on [Peaceville’s electronica-laden subsidiary] Dreamtime.” It would have almost certainly beat the shit out of this:
Here’s Human Waste Project, one of better nu metal casualties/ Ozzfest second stage acts of the ’90s, performing “Dog” during a surprise reunion at Aimee Echo’s birthday party last month. Anyone who cared about nu metal ten years ago was not paying attention to Human Waste Project, but the group’s 1997 full-length e-lux has aged reasonably well. The less said about the group’s terrible duet with Jonathan Davis on a cover of the Go-Go’s “This Town,” the better. But e-lux sports solid Ross Robinson production, Echo’s weirdly-expressive vocals and the kind of spacey sound experiements that get the Deftones a “Get Out of Jail Free” card when the topic of nu metal comes up. Judging by the hoots and howls, there’s a few people who wouldn’t mind a full-blown comeback — your typical Warped Tour band is way more toothsome than the New Wave-y pap Echo has been churning out with theSTART. The timing’s much better now, too, even if the most “punk rock” thing any of these guys have been associated with lately has nothing to do with Human Waste Project:
Teddybears f/ Aimee Echo, “Punkrocker” [live in NYC, 9/27/07]
The skaters that I hung out with all had a perverse and overdeveloped sense of irony. These kids listened to all kinds of cool stuff, though. I probably never would have heard DRI if my friend hadn’t made me the ultimate crossover mixtape to appologize for the time his mom (a nurse) accidentally hit a vein while changing an IV and made me almost bleed to death. These dudes also had a huge hard-on for goofy shit like Mojo Nixon and Skatemaster Tate, too — and that’s pretty much how I approached Old Skull when I got my hands on Get Outta School. The idea of a bunch of prepubescent punks seemed like such a joke then, even to my prepubesecent self. Now that I’m an old fart who thinks that Stuff on My Cat is the epitome of funny, it seems like a really cute and earnest joke. Except for the part about the Toulon brothers’ father (the band’s svengali) going homeless and more-or-less dying on the streets of Madison. The kids seem like they’ve done ok for themselves: Jamie is currently playing legitimate crust punk in Doomsday Cauldron, while J.P. does vocals for a really weird IDM/ quasi-black metal project called Planned Collapse. But when I look into their eyes, I still see sadness:
Here’s Peter Kitts (aka Rivers Cuomo of Weezer) and One AM Radio’s Kevin Ridel, performing with their hair-metal band Avant Garde. Cuomo has already been “outed” by Metal Sludge, but he’s a good sport about his hair-metal past. It also doesn’t hurt that the Weezer fan community is made up of the type of obsessive-compulsives who’d create an Avant Garde tribute page, and digitize and upload a bunch of tracks from the group’s multiple ‘87-’90 demos. Listen to “Tongue of Fire” and “Never Forget” (which may as well be a Grim Reaper demo) for a reminder of what life was like in the mid ’80s and everyone wanted to sound like Iron Maiden. Judging by the original clip for “We Are All on Drugs” from Make Believe (a rearranged and dubbed version of Grim Reaper’s 1985 video for “Fear No Evil”), Cuomo still wants to sound like Maiden. There’s a new Weezer album and a collection of Cuomo’s demos on the horizon in 2008, but the world doesn’t really need either. Meanwhile, Kevin Ridel occassionally performs with a heavy metal cover band called The Masque of Red Death — bring on the Avant Garde reunion!
There’s a great moment in VH1’s History of Heavy Metal series where Dave Mustaine quips, “I always thought glam stood for ‘Gay L.A. Metal.’” If that’s true, Sleeze Beez never really got the message, but maybe the worst aspects of the genre never crossed the Atlantic — what you’ve got with the Dutch quintet is sort of a lost-in-translation approximation of hair metal’s pomp and bombast. None of the group’s records has had the sort of lasting impact of, say, Skid Row, but I’m still surprised they haven’t received an invite to reform for Rocklahoma or at least a little lip service from Andrew Aversion or Bring Black Glam. I get the sense that these guys actually had really good taste – former vocalist Andrew Elt now plays in an AC/DC tribute band and the group’s early 90s output hewed a little closer to the Def Leppard/ Mötley Crüe side of things. Check out “Heroes Die Young” below; sure, it’s as dumb as the band’s name, but it’s suitably big and anthemic and — if you don’t already have a foul taste in your mouth — you can go buy the group’s 1990 record Screwed Blued & Tattooed, one of the lost second-tier classics of hair metal.
…have in common besides Arkansas, guitarist Chuck Schaaf (who was in Rwake before forming Deadbird) and a love for psychedelic sludge?
Mutha’s Day Out! As seen on Beavis and Butthead, and with an improbably still-functioning Geocities fan page! Both Schaaf and Rwake drummer Jeff Morgan (bass in MDO) were founding members of Mutha’s Day Out back in ‘91.
At least Morgan kept it real in the company of such luminaries as Mark McGrath, Candlebox and Korn. Nice shirt!
