Hair Metal

Back in those days there were the heavy/thrash metal guys that were supposedly tough, and they would call all the glam hair band guys “posers.” So if you dressed up in women’s clothes and had the wild hair and makeup you were always called a “poser,” and if you wore just jeans and a T-shirt and had long stringy un-kept hair they thought you were the “real deal.” They thought glam guys cared more about how they looked than playing.

But if you really boiled it down, the glam band guys were way crazier than the thrash guys – they would kick your ass in a minute. All those supposed tough thrash guys were essentially wimps. If they ever got into a scrap with any of the hair band guys, the hair band guys would always kick their ass. We wouldn’t bother the thrash metal guys, but they always had something negative to say. I guess because they were insecure or thought we got more girls, but that’s when it would start.

The whole concept of dressing up and the makeup came from the band The New York Dolls.  They were the first androgynous rock band that dressed in women’s clothes. It could go as far back as David Bowie, but he was more of an alien. Some groups like Motley Crüe were more like KISS, in the beginning, in the sense that they wore stage costumes, a lot of makeup and a lot of hair, and eventually got into wearing women’s clothes. In the ‘80s it just got real crazy, Poison kind of took it that way.

We used to go to women’s clothing stores and go shopping. We were in there trying to find women’s size 11 shoes to wear. For our hair we always used Aqua Net hair spray. That was THE hair spray for all the hair bands because it worked like glue. You would turn your head upside down so your hair hung and spray until it was glue. Then matte it down and shape it a bit. Till this day if I smell Aqua Net, it brings back memories. Back then, the bigger the hair the better. You would end up looking like a chick most of the time, but the girls really dug it.

I think maybe we thought we had to be tougher because we were dressed in women’s clothes, but we were never really fighting over anything of real substance.  I don’t know what it was about that scene but we would get drunk and high and messed up and want to fight with anyone. I mean I was forever just diving into the audience and pouncing on somebody. We didn’t want anyone fucking with us. If there was someone in the crowd giving us a hard time and we wanted to shut him up, and you add drugs to the mix – you think you are Superman. We were forever brawling; we just didn’t take any shit.

We used to do a lot of partying with Motley Crüe back then. I can honestly say there is probably nobody who partied harder than Motley Crüe. Any story you have heard about them is probably not crazy enough. Those guys were really out of their minds. They would fight at the drop of a hat. We would come up to their hotel rooms when they were in New York. Nikki would be by himself with the lights low in the room, so we used to go to Tommy Lee and he would have all the girls and booze. He would have chicks partying in the room right next to a photo of Heather Locklear. The wildest girls would be in places you don’t think of, Kansas City, North Dakota – they weren’t exposed to as much as the girls from the cities. After a while it wasn’t about sex anymore for the guys because they had so much of it. It was about who was doing the wildest stuff. I remember the guys would get the girls to do stuff like have the phone receiver up inside them as they would call their mothers.

Cocaine was the drug of choice. That was the ‘80s drug. When you do cocaine it allows you to drink more. You could drink a bottle of vodka and still walk around because the drugs were keeping you going, keeping you wired. I remember one night Rat played at Pier 84 in New York with Twisted Sister. The drummer from Rat came off the stage, after the show, and he literally walked off stage down the steps, and right under the stage he started snorting it. It was just constant. You just couldn’t get enough. It was just day after day after day. Cocaine was just so mentally addictive.


The spot back then to party at was the Hustler Mansion. Larry Flint’s wife Althea would be at The Rainbow and all these Rock clubs and would invite everyone up to the Hustler Mansion. Once you got there, you wouldn’t leave for three days. Althea was nuts, but that was Hollywood at that time.

The whole scene started to fade once grunge came around. When groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam came around dressing normal and singing songs with a lot of anger and depression they hit big and the kids really took to that. But it was about that time to end anyway. Once you have seen all that, you can’t get much lower. You just feel death creeping under the door. You think that is what you want and what you want to be around, but you can’t get much lower.