Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  FRANKIE BANALI: I don’t agree with the notion that Metal Health is the first “glam metal” album, because we really were not a glam band by any stretch of the imagination. It wasn’t until later in the band’s history that the hair got bigger and the show got bigger and the stages got bigger. I’ve always had the Sicilian poodle hair thing; it’s much tamer these days. The whole idea of wearing the tights and stuff, that was really not a fashion statement, it was something that was light, easy to pack, and would dry overnight when you hung it up at the local Super 8 or Motel 6 or whatever terrible place we were staying at. We weren’t traveling on a tour bus, there was no wardrobe girl to make sure that the next day’s stuff was nice and fresh and clean. Sometimes we’d wear it for two or three weeks before we had an opportunity to wash it, which would be Woolite in the sink. Kevin would room with Carlos [Cavazo] and I’d room with Rudy [Sarzo] and it was a blessing when we got into a hotel that had two sinks because that meant that we could both put our clothes in the sink and Woolite it at the same time instead of, “I got dibs on the sink!”

  CARLOS CAVAZO: We were on tour with Black Sabbath on their Born Again tour with Ian Gillan when Metal Health went number one. The guys from Black Sabbath came into our dressing room with cocaine and champagne and we drank up and snorted up before the show. I went onstage and I felt so crappy I decided I would never play on this crap again. It was the worst feeling.

  FRANKIE BANALI: I will always, forever be grateful that [producer] Spencer [Proffer] recommended we do [“Cum On Feel the Noize”]. Spencer felt that Kevin’s vocals and [Slade singer] Noddy Holder’s vocals were very much alike, something that Kevin never agreed with. Kevin and I were aware of Slade because we both appreciated English bands from the sixties and seventies—although I will say that they were not on our top list of bands we looked at, because our bar was set so high—we’re talking the Who, Led Zeppelin, Free. So Kevin flat-out refused to do it. In order not to make waves we decided not to rehearse the song at all. Spencer would call the rehearsal studio, always, and whether it was the beginning, middle, or end of the conversation, he’d say, “Are you working on ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’?” The answer was always, “Oh yeah, absolutely, every day.” Of course, we never played it. We planned to go into the studio and play it so poorly that Spencer was going to say, “You know, it’s a great idea, but maybe not for this band.” So we go in to record and Spencer goes, “Okay, let me hear ‘Cum On Feel the Noize.’” Now, earlier that day, knowing that this day was going to come, I said to the engineers, “Do me a favor. When we play ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ hit record, because whatever we’re going to play, it’s going to be awful, and you’ll have it for comedic value.” So here we are in the live room at Pasha. I’m behind the drums, Rudy’s on bass, Carlos is on guitar, Spencer’s sitting on a stool about two feet away from the drums, and Kevin is in the far corner, and you can just see him smirking because everything was about to fall apart. I didn’t even have an intro for the song because we hadn’t worked on it. So I start an intro and Kevin’s smiling away, waiting for the total train wreck. Well, I can’t do anything intentionally poorly, so I’m playing the song, and I’m not making any mistakes, and I’m powering through it, and slowly but surely, Rudy and Carlos are finding their way through it, and now they’re joining in, and there were some errors there, but I kept playing. About halfway through, Kevin’s smirk turns into this scowl, and he’s angry. He’s trying to mess me up, so he’s making all these faces, he’s pulling his eyelids down, pulling them up. I’m laughing, but I’m powering through it. We get to the end of the song, and Spencer goes, “That sounds great; I wish we’d recorded that,” and the engineer says, “We did.” So what you have on the record is the first time we actually ever played that song! Kevin grabbed my arm, almost pulled it out of its socket, takes me out of the room, and goes, “What the fuck was that?” I said, “I don’t know, I went into autopilot.” And he goes, “That was great, but what am I supposed to do now?” I said, “You could always sing it shitty. You know how to do that, don’t you?” He kind of had a smile on his face, but he was pissed off, and it was quite a while before he actually came to terms, after everyone else had put their parts on. He finally just said, “It’s just another song,” and he sang it and sang it great.

  The stretch of West Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard, from Doheny to Fairfax, where the hippies had frolicked in the sixties, was mostly dormant for much of the seventies. But by 1983, the year Mötley Crüe released Shout at the Devil and Ratt put out its first EP, a colorful crew was giving the Strip a new identity and the kind of popularity it hadn’t experienced in years. Clubs and bars like the Whisky a Go Go, Roxy, Gazzarri’s, Rainbow, and the nearby Troubadour and Starwood on Santa Monica Boulevard were ground zero for the Strip scene, a musical and social movement based on excess, theatricality, and decadent fun. Men and women decked out in spandex, liberally applied makeup, and Aqua Net strutted the streets like high-strung transvestite gangs. Any night of the week, “flyering,” a ritual in which musicians handed out flyers and chatted up women about their gigs, was the predominant pastime of the Strip-hangers.

  BRET MICHAELS: If we were fortunate, [guitarist] C. C. [DeVille] had a car that ran. He would pick us up in the Volvo, flyers in back. We went to the Strip, parked halfway between the Troub and Roxy, and took off in different directions. Until we became friends with Steady at the door at the Rainbow, we stood in the parking lot and waited for it to dump out. We would start at 10, and get together at 2 a.m. at the Rainbow parking lot. If we were lucky, someone was having an after-party. We were below poverty level, but I think it was one of the absolute best times in my life.

  VICKY HAMILTON: I had worked out a deal with the Troubadour so that they would pay Poison’s rent and phone bill every month if they did one show a month there. I think they still owe them a show. They were due for a show in ten years and then one in twenty—and I think they did the ten year, but the twenty year one they still owe, I think.

  VINCE NEIL: We were each pseudo-famous in each one of our previous bands, so we wanted to let people know we were together in this band called Mötley Crüe. We flyered a lot. We’d walk down Santa Monica Boulevard in our high heels and dog collars flyering anything and everything that was there. It worked. It got people to come to see us, and that really started the word-of-mouth.

  PHIL LEWIS (LA Guns, ex-Girl): There were times you could walk down the street and you couldn’t tell the difference between the curb and the streets because there were so many flyers. It was like a ticker-tape parade. From Doheny down to La Cienega.

  JANI LANE: You’d be on Sunset Boulevard on a Tuesday night and there would be four hundred people in the street, let alone the clubs being packed. Afterwards, it looked like Armageddon. All these flyers blowing in the wind. What was the city going to do with all this mess? The police just started cracking down.

  VICKY HAMILTON: Eventually, West Hollywood outlawed postering on the Sunset Strip, so the kids couldn’t stand out there and free-bill. Those telephone and light poles were like three inches thick with posters and things.

  DEE SNIDER (Twisted Sister): I definitely don’t feel connected to the LA scene. I didn’t even know about it until we were heading out on our first tour—it was Blackfoot, Krokus, Twisted Sister. We were driving our Ugly Duckling rental cars out of the desert to Los Angeles for a show at the Hollywood Palladium in ’83, and at ten in the morning I hear “The Trooper” [by Iron Maiden] on KMET, and I’m like, “Where are we? I’m in heaven!” I found there was a whole scene going on, and we were welcomed with open arms. They were very aware of Twisted Sister coming out of New York. Clearly, we were inspiring people with our independent singles. Out there, they weren’t inspiring us.

  JOEY VERA: In the early eighties there was really no splintering. Heavy metal was just heavy metal—one blanket of the same kind of thing. You could be a fan of the LA Overkill and you could also be a fan of Black ’n Blue, and it didn’t matter. By ’86
, ’87, ’88, these huge lines were being drawn. There were heavy bands on the one side, which was driven more by thrash metal, and on the other side were the hair bands, the glam bands. We were totally in the middle. We kind of wanted to be both.

  TOM MORELLO: My first trip to the Strip predated my moving to LA. I had a girlfriend in Granada Hills, [California]. I was a Harvard University student and I visited her one summer and, of course, the first stop we made was the Whisky, where there were some eye-opening, unpleasant surprises. The admission price was higher than I could afford: $12 a ticket. The show was very underattended, the musicians were not great. I had anticipated this glut of Steve Vai-caliber axe-slingers up and down the Strip, and it was more a hair metal thing. I don’t even know if Poison was out yet, but that was when the scene was coming out—Jailhouse, bands like that. It was more pomposity than musicianship. I moved to Hollywood for one reason—because that’s where you went to get signed and put a band together. I didn’t go there for the party scene, which I always felt a complete stranger to.

  TRACII GUNS: A lot of people were into blow, and then there was a whole other group of people I was friends with that were into heroin. I didn’t want to get involved with that. I watched a lot of people do a lot of drugs and end up in bad places, and watched people get into horrifying fights over drugs and money. There was a seedy underbelly, because LA Guns is like half of the LA [hip college rock station] KCRW scene and half the rock scene, so we would play at these clubs like Lipstick Fixx and the Red Light District, as well as doing the Troubadour, Roxy shows. A lot of our fans are more of the hair fans, but the people we were hanging out with were more of the older punk rock scene.

  JOEY VERA: In the late eighties the scene turned into what you see in [the Penelope Spheeris 1988 documentary] Decline of Western Civilization.

  PENELOPE SPHEERIS: I watched the metal scene develop. There was a certain struggle going on: the punk movement was waning, and the metal scene was moving in. The Strip was packed shoulder to shoulder with glammed-out dudes. Just as with the first Decline [Spheeris’s 1981 LA punk documentary] when I saw such a powerful music scene developing, I felt compelled to document it. I never looked at any of the feedback as negative. For chrissakes, the movie helped them go down in history. What’s so bad about that?

  CARLOS CAVAZO: Obviously, we were achieving major success, and all our friends—Dokken, Ratt, Great White, Mötley Crüe—were also doing great. I used to see all these guys in clubs playing in front of twenty or thirty people. I saw Vince in his band Rock Candy before Mötley. I did shows with Don [Dokken]. He opened up for the band I was in, Snow, a couple times. I’ve seen the guys in Great White when they were Dante Fox. All these guys were going through the same things. So to see that evolution was amazing.

  BLACKIE LAWLESS: Once, during a show at the Troubadour, someone opened the doors and I got a glimpse out of the corner of my eye. There must have been two hundred people standing on the grass median on Santa Monica Boulevard trying to hear what we were doing. I had them open all the doors and I went back to the microphone and sang to them out there. That’s when I knew we were a part of something that was going to be really special—not just W.A.S.P., all the bands involved.

  For musicians in their twenties, “major success” meant having a record deal, a devoted fan base, and a tour schedule. It was also mandatory to have your own place when you were home, a plentiful supply of booze and drugs, and, most importantly, as Mötley Crüe so succinctly put it, “girls, girls, girls.”

  STEPHEN PEARCY: The three P’s: pussy, party, paycheck. There was so much out there, there was no competition. At one time I had a quota. I had to have three different women a day. It was like an addiction.

  CARLOS CAVAZO: I got into music for the love of guitar, not girls, but the girls were a great consolation prize. They were everywhere, and so were the drugs, and it just got worse as the money and fame came along. I had friends who would bring over big bags of coke and a bunch of women and we’d stay up all night doing blow and getting laid. Sometimes I’d be up for a day or two from all the coke. I hated that feeling. I gave up the drugs in the late eighties, but it took a little while.

  PHIL COLLEN (Def Leppard): I was twenty-four when I joined the band, and we had our first platinum album. We’re touring the States. There’s chicks coming up all the time, and you’re going, “Wow, this is fucking great. This is why I got in it.” You’re doing three girls in a day, and two the next day. It’s like, “This is absolutely great.” You’re a young kid and you’re having a blast. This was the eighties—pre-AIDS. It didn’t seem wrong at all.

  JOE ELLIOTT: The stories of us getting blowjobs under the stage are absolutely untrue. [Girls] used to get invited under the stage and have a Polaroid taken with the band, and there were more chances of success if they showed their tits. People don’t talk about the real debauchery. The myth is always more fun than the reality, so just let the myth get bigger, and we’ll just keep denying it.

  PHIL COLLEN: Pussy passes? Oh, we had those. Those were for girls who gave blowjobs to the road crew to get backstage passes. It could be a lighting guy or someone who sells T-shirts in the crew. If they went down on them, they would get this special pass that said “Dick Licker” in the logo. On our first headline tour, we had a code. There was a picture of an eye, then a little bird, and a ship with a sailor, and it stood for “I swallow semen.” So you would know how the girl got backstage. But we didn’t do anything with those girls. If anything, we reeled back in horror because we knew exactly how they got these passes.

  CARLOS CAVAZO: I think every band had guys who would look out for girls and give them passes. The ones that would suck cock to get backstage, they’d give ’em a pass with a special code so you’d know not to kiss her. They also had special codes if someone was reserved for another band member or something and we weren’t supposed to mess with her.

  NEIL ZLOZOWER: I like to consider myself family to most of the bands: Mötley, Ratt, Poison in their day. I’m the guy they used to give forty passes to go out and get chicks for the bands, because they always appreciated my taste in women. You don’t want to give it to the fucking road crew, ’cause they’d get anything—fat, ugly, no teeth, smelly, disgusting. They knew I would get legal girls of the highest quality. Ever since AIDS, it doesn’t happen as much. I don’t think they have the guys anymore who go out with forty passes. This was the age of fuck-me pumps, fishnet stockings, little short dresses, spandex; skintight clothes that let it all hang out.

  DON DOKKEN: I saw [guitarist] George [Lynch] put a girl’s high heel up a girl’s hiney while I was banging a girl right next to him. She wasn’t too happy about it. She was beautiful but on acid. Everybody including the crew saw it because it was on film, but I erased all that crazy stuff years ago to protect my kids in case I croaked and they’d find it. You’re laying there, and you whip out a high heel and shove it up her butt. Why do they accept it, how much can you dehumanize and humiliate?

  RUDOLF SCHENKER: The eighties were like a big party. In the sixties and seventies, the music was very much connected to political situations in the world—Vietnam, flower power. The eighties became more and more a kind of party music. A girl on the left side, a girl on the right side—let’s party. We were involved, of course. Pure rock and roll: it was the best time in our lives.

  EDDIE VAN HALEN: I got into the groupie thing in the beginning, but I was kind of shy, so I wasn’t a smooth operator. But Dave [Lee Roth] would have these girls come backstage, and half the time Alex would end up with them. We were bunking together, Alex and I, so I’d hear everything. Once Alex was banging this girl all night, and I was sleeping, and then he had her wake me up by sitting on my face. I woke up to this red, engorged pussy on my face. I didn’t know what it was. It fucking smelled so bad, I sat up ready to punch whoever was doing that to me.

  ALEX VAN HALEN (Van Halen): Put it this way: everything you’ve ever heard about rock-and-roll bands and pussy passes and orgies and
experimentation is true and then some. Everyone knows Connie as “Sweet Connie.” Grand Funk had that song she was in. [“We’re an American Band.”] She came to a lot of our shows. We had multiple partners and crazy scenarios. We made movies and other shit. Those were the days, man.

  “SWEET CONNIE” HAMZY (groupie): Eddie does all right in bed; Alex is fabulous. He was very warm and affectionate, which is unbelievable, because when you meet him he can be an absolute dick.

  STEPHEN PEARCY: We were playing Little Rock, somewhere around 1985, and we’d heard the famous stories about Connie. So me and Robbin Crosby were out on the bus with her after the show. She’s blowing Robbin, and she looks up at me and says, “You want some of this too?” She’s a force, man. You gotta have some big nuts to hang with Connie.

  CONNIE HAMZY: Me and another girl blew David Lee Roth at a production office in Barton Coliseum. I’ve [blown] Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson [from Rush], but I have not had Neil Peart. That I regret, but Peart doesn’t give it up very easily.

  JEANNIE CRANE (groupie): The high is being with these rock stars because you feel that you’re important and you’re famous, too, even though you might go home in the morning to your simple life. [After I was handed a backstage pass by someone in the crew] Vince Neil was like, “Why don’t you come back and party with us?” I was [sixteen] and was so nervous, and I was shaking. I went, “Yeah, I’ll be there!” I went back to the hotel and was up all night partying with the band. You’d have sex with them and then they’d very candidly ask you to leave.