Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion

By Tom Beaujour, Richard Bienstock and Corey Taylor

The New York Times Bestseller

The Explosive National Bestseller

"A backstage pass to the wildest and loudest party in rock history—you'll feel like you were right there with us!" —Bret Michaels of Poison

Nothin' But a Good Time is the definitive, no-holds-barred oral history of 1980s hard rock and hair metal, told by the musicians and industry insiders who lived it.

Hard rock in the 1980s was a hedonistic and often intensely creative wellspring of escapism that perfectly encapsulated—and maybe even helped to define—a spectacularly over-the-top decade. Indeed, fist-pumping hits like Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” Mötley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls,” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” are as inextricably linked to the era as Reaganomics, PAC-MAN, and E.T.

From the do-or-die early days of self-financed recordings and D.I.Y. concert productions that were as flashy as they were foolhardy, to the multi-Platinum, MTV-powered glory years of stadium-shaking anthems and chart-topping power ballads, to the ultimate crash when grunge bands like Nirvana forever altered the entire climate of the business, Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock's Nothin' But a Good Time captures the energy and excess of the hair metal years in the words of the musicians, managers, producers, engineers, label executives, publicists, stylists, costume designers, photographers, journalists, magazine publishers, video directors, club bookers, roadies, groupies, and hangers-on who lived it.

Featuring an impassioned foreword by Slipknot and Stone Sour vocalist and avowed glam metal fanatic Corey Taylor, and drawn from over two hundred author interviews with members of Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Skid Row, Bon Jovi, Ratt, Twisted Sister, Winger, Warrant, Cinderella, Quiet Riot and others, as well as Ozzy Osbourne, Lita Ford, and many more, this is the ultimate, uncensored, and often unhinged, chronicle of a time where excess and success walked hand in hand, told by the men and women who created a sound and style that came to define a musical era—one in which the bands and their fans went looking for nothin’ but a good time…and found it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781250195760

Tom Beaujour

TOM BEAUJOUR is a journalist as well as a co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Revolver, America’s premier hard rock and heavy metal monthly. Beaujour has produced and mixed albums by Nada Surf, Guided by Voices, the Juliana Hatfield Three, and many others.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

This book, which at times seemed more like an unruly beast about to turn on its masters and engulf them in flames than a mere collection of inert words on a page, is complete. Our sincerest hope is that with its publication, an enormous debt will be repaid.

Although we’ve both spent our careers writing about artists who inhabit any number of musical genres, it is the hard rock music of the ’80s—call it glam metal if you must, and hair metal if you’re itching for a fight in the tweet-o-sphere—that first captured our ears and teenage imaginations. It gave us the bug, as they say, and we still have it. This music, inspired by ’70s bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Kiss, Cheap Trick, and, most unambiguously, Van Halen, sounded larger than life and incorporated unforgettable sing-along choruses, chest-beating riffs, cocky swagger, Technicolor glitz, detonated drums, and, in the fleet fingers of the many guitar gods who emerged from the era, a pure athleticism that was nothing short of jaw-dropping.

There was something else fundamental to this genre, a common thread that emerged as we were reporting back to each other on a just-completed interview or on the progress of a given chapter. Almost every person we spoke to for this book exhibited a single-mindedness, work ethic, confidence, and, yes, courage, that was nothing short of indomitable. That determination, more than the outrageous dress, massive hair, pointy guitars, and not-infrequently sexist videos, is the shared DNA that connects the characters in this story. No one stumbled into this (okay, maybe Brian Baker of Junkyard did), and you won’t find a single character who confesses, I never planned to make this a career. I was in art school and sort of just joined a band for fun. The price of admission to this rarefied world was to check your backup plan at the door and dedicate yourself to endless practice, relentless self-promotion, nonstop hustling, and, often, the gobbling of enough drugs and alcohol to kill a large dog or maybe a small horse—take your pick. This was total-immersion rock ’n’ roll.

The experience of being in the audience during this era was equally all-consuming; performances were not only spectacles but also celebrations. If fans didn’t leave a show grinning from ear to ear and feeling like they had just attended the biggest, loudest party in the world then they simply hadn’t gotten their money’s worth—regardless of how many crew members and trucks were employed in the transportation and maintenance of all the towering amplifier stacks, massive drum kits, risers, ramps, walkways, flash pots, hydraulics, lights, confetti, lasers, and, of course, sound systems that were essential attractions of this spectacular rock ’n’ roll circus.

For kids living far from the bright lights of the Strip or unable to sneak out to the shows, some consolation could be found in the fact that MTV served up a steady regimen of the aforementioned music videos—clips whose production aesthetic did its best to replicate the explosive spectacle of the glam-metal concert experience while also brazenly advancing the argument that no girl or woman could resist the sexual allure of the featured players. Videos like Mötley Crüe’s woman-hunting Looks That Kill or Warrant’s firehose-flaunting Cherry Pie may have offended some female staffers at MTV, but to most American teens of the era they were one thing and one thing only: awesome.

Speaking of sex, this seems as good a time as any to address the fact that this work chronicles a bygone era where notions of sexism and gender politics and the disease of addiction were still relatively crude. Like the culture around them, most of the artists in this book have evolved and have also become fathers, mothers, and—yikes!—grandparents. That said, if you’re hoping for an outpouring of regret or a litany of mea culpas, you’ve come to the wrong place. Our primary goal was to uncover what really happened from the people who lived it, not to make them apologize for it.

If anything, glam metal’s greatest sin was arguably that by the end of the ’80s it had begun to suffer from a total lack of imagination and was functioning largely by rote mimesis. New bands looked and sounded alike and were marketed so similarly that it would have been virtually impossible for them not to blur together in the eyes and ears of the fans. Something had to change, and it did, seemingly overnight. It’s probably not a spoiler to note that virtually every musician you will meet in this book saw his or her career disintegrate soon after September 24, 1991, when, as the story goes, a meteor known as Nirvana’s Nevermind impacted the musical landscape and raised a massive dust cloud that forever altered the entire climate of the business. The decade of decadence, as Mötley Crüe dubbed it, had come to a close, and acts that had sold millions of albums, packed arenas, and dominated MTV’s rotation didn’t just slowly fade out of fashion; they slammed headfirst into an immovable wall of antipathy. Overnight, not only had glam metal become superannuated but it was deemed unmentionable and untouchable—and anyone tainted by the genre became equally undesirable. The ecosystem suffered a total collapse.

This musical apocalypse is where we initially planned to end our story. But as we assembled the chapters that chronicle the rapid demise of the genre, we realized that it was just too much of a … what’s the literary term for it? Oh right, a total bummer to finish on such a sad note. The truth of the matter is that there actually is a happy conclusion; it just took a couple of decades to reveal itself.

Our epilogue explores how in the twenty-first century, a significant subset of fans can’t seem to get enough of this music. What once was dismissed as anachronistic schlock is the new classic rock. A reunited Poison still routinely tour arenas and outdoor sheds, compelling tens of thousands of cross-generational concertgoers to raise their lighters (or cellphones) high in the air on a nightly basis. Mötley Crüe, armed with flamethrowers, flying drum kits, and enough pyro and explosions to light up a small nation-state, played to upwards of a million fans over the course of their 2014–15 final tour and were the subject of a recent Netflix biopic. Guns N’ Roses, with perennial adversaries Axl and Slash back in cahoots, have to date grossed an estimated half-billion dollars on their current worldwide jaunt, selling out stadiums from L.A. to Lisbon to Lima.

And while they aren’t out packing enormodomes, many of the other bands chronicled in this book are back on the road, playing festivals, corporate events, casinos, and themed cruises to a growing audience. The hard rock and hair metal fan base never went away—it just got older, became gainfully employed, and spawned children that wanna rock right along with them. That’s a much more uplifting way to wrap things up, right?

Now cut those houselights and cue the fucking pyro!

—Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock

PART I

EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!

Since its inception, hard rock has maintained a core audience that sustains it through times when the mainstream is occupied elsewhere. The period at the tail end of the ’70s, where our story begins, was one of these troughs in popularity for the genre. While initiates continued to fill venues when bands like Kiss and Black Sabbath rolled through town, the vast majority of the music-buying public was more interested in new wave groups like the Knack, the Go-Go’s, the Cars, the Police, and Elvis Costello and the Attractions—bands who embraced synthesizers, eschewed guitar heroics, and whose angular riffs and short, spiky hair owed much more to punk and mod fashion than to the bell-bottomed likes of Led Zeppelin or Thin Lizzy. The industry was looking at the local new wave and punk scenes, recalls Rudy Sarzo, the bassist in a struggling L.A. dinosaur act called Quiet Riot.

Both inspiring and confounding to players like Sarzo was the ascendancy of Van Halen, a four-piece hard rock band from Pasadena whose electrifying live performances, striking blond-maned front man, and resident guitar wunderkind were such an undeniable force that they transcended the record industry’s genre bias and landed a deal with Warner Bros. Rec-ords. The group’s success, however, did not trickle down to other acts occupying the same stylistic lane. No one seemed to be interested in the other bands, recalls Dokken drummer Wild Mick Brown, at the time bashing the skins in a Sunset Strip outfit called the Boyz. Which I thought was weird, because it was like, ‘Don’t you think the record companies would want, like, nine more Van Halens?’

They didn’t.

Refusing to be stymied by the indifference of the major labels, many young groups like Mötley Crüe and Ratt (then Mickey Ratt), adopted a do-or-die DIY approach, self-financing recordings and pouring their resources into over-the-top concert productions that were as flashy as they were foolhardy. Whether it was Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx slathering his leathers with pyro gel and lighting himself on fire or the young men of W.A.S.P. hurling handfuls of raw meat at their audiences and sending flames rippling across the ceiling of the tiny Troubadour club, the bands employed whatever means they could marshal to make their mark and give the fans a night they still haven’t forgotten. For the early guys it was all about the music and the shows, says Metal Blade Records founder Brian Slagel.

The record companies wanted Duran Duran. They wanted new wave, recalls Alan Niven, then toiling for an L.A.-based independent music importer and distributor named Greenworld Distribution. So if you wanted to get further you had to have some imagination. You had to have a little bit of wheel-and-deal. Because that was the only way that you were going to start building your following.

1

THE PUSSY-PLUCKING-POSSE POCKET OF HOLLYWOOD

DANA STRUM (bassist, bad axe, vinnie vincent invasion, slaughter) In the late ’70s I was playing with a band called Bad Axe. We were a Hollywood circuit band playing the same clubs as London, which was Nikki Sixx, and Suite 19, with Greg Leon and Tommy Lee. We were headlining the Starwood, headlining the Whisky, the normal thing.

STEPHEN QUADROS (drummer, Snow) The Whisky was the house that Hendrix played, Cream played, Zeppelin … the list goes on and on, the people that played that place. That’s the club you wanted to play, just because of the history. But the Starwood was the Wild West. It had no age limit. The behind-the-scenes stories, the dressing room, the wild partying, the drugs, the alcohol, it was a completely different vibe.

GREG LEON (guitarist, Suite 19, Dubrow, Dokken) There was the Hot 100 Club upstairs, which was the VIP area, and that led to the backstage area, which had these secret rooms. So if you met girls or you wanted to party or whatever, you could go back there and get away from everybody else. The policy was basically ask for it and you got it. Cocaine was rampant. Quaaludes were everywhere. The place was basically a front for drugs, as everybody knows.

MICHAEL ANTHONY (bassist, Van Halen) The upstairs area was more of like a local hangout scene. There’d probably be people up there doing some blow or something. It was more of just where the cool people would go.

NEIL ZLOZOWER (photographer) I went to see Van Halen at the Starwood, probably in 1977. But right around those years, those were the years of the Rorer/Lemmon 714’s. In other words, Quaaludes. And I used to love Quaaludes. I remember going to the Starwood, probably I was upstairs in the VIP section, probably took a Quaalude before the band came on, and all I remember is waking up at the end of the show going, That wasn’t so fucking good… I think I passed out during their whole set.

DANA STRUM Had it not been for the Starwood I wouldn’t have seen Randy.

KELLY GARNI (bassist, Quiet Riot) I met Randy Rhoads at John Muir Middle School in Burbank in seventh grade. He was an oddball kid like me and we gravitated toward each other. We started playing together, and as far as we were concerned, you had to somehow be involved in Hollywood to make it happen. That’s where all the cool clubs were. That’s where all the cool people were. That’s where all the rock stars hung out.

KELLE RHOADS (musician; Randy Rhoads’ brother) Randy and I played together in a band called Violet Fox when we were kids. But by late ’72 that had already broken up. Once Kelly and Randy met, it was always Randy and Kelly. They had like six or seven different bands before it turned into Quiet Riot.

KELLY GARNI Quiet Riot was formed in 1974, largely because of our meeting with Kevin [DuBrow, vocalist]. He really wasn’t what we were looking for. We were so into Alice Cooper and David Bowie and that really glam, shock rock kind of thing. Whereas Kevin was more of a Rod Stewart/Steve Marriott kind of a guy. We didn’t think his look went with us, either. But he was extremely persistent and knew how to create a band and drive it forward, and we really kind of lacked that. He recognized that Randy overshadowed everyone with his talent, and he said, I need to be with this guy. He saw the same thing I saw, to be honest with you.

KELLE RHOADS When Kevin met Kelly and Randy, they were playing backyard parties and just doing local, jamming, garage-type stuff. Kevin was the one who brought them into Hollywood. He told them, No, we can play in the clubs, we can make money, there can be a career strategy here. And Randy liked that. Randy listened to Kevin and took his advice.

BOB NALBANDIAN (journalist) Locally, everyone knew who Randy was. He was supposed to be the next Eddie Van Halen. That’s what everyone would say.

KIM FOWLEY (impresario, Producer, L.A. Scenester) There wasn’t any vibe around L.A. when Van Halen first started playing. They were these guys who played Gazzarri’s and now and then would sell out in Pasadena. They were a big deal at the Golden West Ballroom in Norwalk—the guitarist was hot and the singer was a James Brown version of Cal Worthington [a famous car dealer who advertised on television] and that was about it. A few nymphomaniacs, these four blondes with big tits, used to talk about the group quite a bit.

ALEX VAN HALEN (drummer, Van Halen) Gazzarri’s, we auditioned twice. The Starwood we auditioned a couple of times. Walter Mitty’s, The Rock Corporation, Barnacle Bill’s, you name it. You name any club that was around at that time and we were there.

BOBBY BLOTZER (drummer, Airborn, Dokken, Ratt) Edward was just fucking unbelievable. And David Lee Roth was, you know, front-man king.

STEPHEN PEARCY (singer, Mickey Ratt, Ratt) I met Roth in the late ’70s. And I eventually told my guys, Hey, you gotta go and see this band. You’re gonna shit when you hear the guitar player. He’s nothing like you’ve ever seen or heard. They’d go, Yeah, sure, sure. And when they did they went, Holy fuck!

MICK MARS (guitarist, White Horse, Vendetta, Mötley Crüe) They kicked ass. I had a band called White Horse who played with Van Halen a few times. At Gazzarri’s. Ed was always great … My mouth would fall open.

KELLY GARNI Randy did go and see Van Halen at Gazzarri’s, and he met Eddie Van Halen and Eddie kind of blew him off a little bit. But that was okay with Randy, because Eddie wasn’t anybody to him. He wasn’t in competition with him. He never saw one guitar player in his life as competition.

ROSS HALFIN (photographer) Randy Rhoads was more tasteful than Edward, who was just jerking off.

KELLY GARNI Van Halen were sort of an oddity in our world. We were familiar with them, but the best way to put it is, that we sort of ran in different circles. We were pretty much the house band at the Starwood, something we had worked our way up to from the first time we played there and got paid with a case of beer. And Van Halen was down the street at Gazzarri’s, which in the ’80s became a very popular heavy metal club but back in the ’70s was more of a college-kid hangout. It was a different type of person that came to see us at the Starwood.

RODNEY BINGENHEIMER (club owner, promoter, DJ) There wasn’t really very many local bands happening at that time, 1976. My friend and I went to Gazzarri’s to see Van Halen and the crowd was just incredible. A lot of girls; I always thought that bands who had a lot of girls going crazy were gonna make it big. I used to see them setting up and they had this big bomb onstage and I guess Eddie would play off that bomb. They did You Really Got Me and Runnin’ with the Devil. Their fans used to park right in front and that’s where they’d meet their girlfriends. And I’d say, You should come over to the Starwood, and Eddie would say, No, we like it here. Bill [Gazzarri] treats us so well. I said they should get more happening and then they finally said, Yeah, maybe you’re right.

WILD MICK BROWN (drummer, the Boyz, Xciter, Dokken) You know what? Gazzarri’s was the pussy-plucking-posse pocket of Hollywood. Every goddamn rich girl who had a mom or dad that hated her and was gonna be a stripper later got started at Gazzarri’s, man! When I went in there I thought I was in the movies. Gazzarri’s, they’d have like a Playboy night and it was, Holy shit! Girls were everywhere. And these girls were more than willing to just take you home. My mom and dad are out of town… You’d go to these gigantic Beverly Hills mansions with these pools and you’d eat everything in the house you could and try to hitchhike back to where you lived. It was amazing.

MICHAEL ANTHONY David Lee Roth was our real connection to Gazzarri’s. Bill Gazzarri, the owner, would say hi to us or whatever, but Dave was the guy that would hang out, you know, a lot.

DAVID LEE ROTH (singer, Van Halen) Bill Gazzarri called me Van for the first two years the band worked at his club. He was a video pioneer. These huge cameras mounted on tripods, with these huge tape decks the size of a suitcase. He would stop me as everybody was filing out to pack our equipment into our cars. Hey Van, hey Van, wanna see some of my films? I’d say, Sure. He’d show me these films, and they’d always be cut off from the tits down, and here’s this little dick surrounded by gray pubic hair with some hot little go-go mama just gorgin’ herself.

WILD MICK BROWN George Lynch and I were in a local Los Angeles band at the time called the Boyz, beating our heads against the wall. Actually, Van Halen and the Boyz had a real following.

DON DOKKEN (singer, Airborn, Dokken) I knew the Boyz and we played a couple shows together. I thought they were really a good band. Honestly, I thought they would be the next band to be signed after Van Halen. They were very Van Halen–esque, you know? They had the gregarious blond-haired singer, they just had the vibe. George was a shredding guitar player like Eddie.

MICHAEL WHITE (singer, the Boyz, London) To this day, I believe George was the best guitar player that I ever was in a band with. When we used to play with Van Halen, they had similar styles but different. George was way heavier. And, I mean, when you think of Eddie Van Halen you think of heavy guitar. But George had a more evil sound than Eddie, and his vibrato was more intense. Way ahead of his time.

GEORGE LYNCH (guitarist, the Boyz, Xciter, Dokken, Lynch Mob) We were very loud, we had a lot of angst, we were very bombastic. We were not refined. A little hit-and-miss on the compositions.

MICHAEL WHITE The Boyz had a run-in with Kim Fowley around that time. Kim wanted to manage us. He was getting us gigs and stuff, and the gigs he was getting us were opening for the Runaways.

WILD MICK BROWN Because we were the Boyz, and they were the girls. Which was good, because they had their first record out and they had a big audience.

MICHAEL WHITE He would come to our rehearsals in Hollywood. And Kim, if you knew about him, he was very eccentric and very crazy and very high, I think. But anyway, he would come in with a group of people and they would sit and watch us rehearse and he would give us suggestions of things to do. I just remember specifically him saying, "I want you guys to be space punks. From outer space. I want you to dress like space punks and I want you to write your lyrics about being from outer space and coming down to conquer Earth and all that. And I want you to have costumes. I’ll make you stars!" And we all kind of thought about it, like, Really?

GEORGE LYNCH When we were first in the band with Michael, he tried to be very theatrical, and he was kind of a combination of Robert Plant and Ian Anderson in that he would play flute. But he had this thing where he insisted on … His gimmick was he would blow fire out of his flute. So he would experiment with that a lot and practice and try to do it at shows. And it never went well because he ended up just spitting Bacardi 151 out of the end of his flute on the audience. And then he would insist on wearing these, I don’t know what you’d call them, they’re kind of like nylon material but they’re pants. Stretchy pants. Kind of like a leotard but you can see through it? He would wear these things to shows but he wouldn’t wear underwear. You gotta understand, we’ve got this guy, he’s like six-two, he kinda looks like Robert Plant, and he has platform shoes on and he’d have one leg up on the monitor with these stretchy see-through pants with no underwear, standing in front of the audience, playing flute, and trying to blow fire out of his flute.

MICHAEL WHITE We did a gig at the Whisky and I had on a leather jumpsuit that was made at a place called Granny Takes a Trip. But the guy made it really tight. I was onstage there and I spun, I did a spin-around, and my crotch ripped and my balls hung out.

WILD MICK BROWN Rodney Bingenheimer, the DJ, brought the guys in Kiss down to see a show where the Boyz played with Van Halen.

RODNEY BINGENHEIMER I spoke to this guy Ray who was at the Starwood at the time and he said, Well, I don’t know. We’ve never heard of Van Halen and they’re a Gazzarri’s band. Back then, if a band was labeled as a Gazzarri’s band, they never played outside of Gazzarri’s. But I said, Yeah, but these guys attract a lot of beer drinkers, and he said maybe they’d give it a shot. So we got them into the Starwood. After a few times, I brought Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley down to see them and the rest is history.

GENE SIMMONS (bassist, Kiss) I was invited in 1977 to go see a band called the Boyz play at the Starwood, by, I believe, Rodney Bingenheimer. My date that evening was Bebe Buell. They were the headlining act but I never got to them because the first act up was a group called Van Halen, which I thought was the dumbest name I ever heard; I thought it was like Van Heusen, a shirt company. I thought the name really blew, they won’t go anywhere. The first thing I thought was Dave looked like Jim Dandy [from Black Oak Arkansas] and they had kind of an old-fashioned look. But within two numbers I thought, My fucking god, listen to these guys!

MICHAEL WHITE Kiss came to see us, one thousand percent. They came into our dressing room and they were talking to us about going to New York. They said they were looking to take a band back and we were really excited.

WILD MICK BROWN And obviously Van Halen got picked to go to New York and record demos with Gene Simmons instead of us. As soon as that door was opened, Van Halen went in and that was slammed shut. There was a word called new wave that came out. Everyone had thin ties, was doing that poppy Joe Jackson thing. And punk rock came in, too.

2

DINOSAUR MUSIC

KELLY GARNI Van Halen got signed first. They got a great deal. We got the shitty deal.

KELLE RHOADS All the record companies, especially the main ones, had passed on Quiet Riot. RCA, Capitol, they all passed, sometimes two or three times. They didn’t want anything to do with them. Partly out of desperation, their managers at that time negotiated a deal with Sony Japan. But that relegated their product to import status. People couldn’t find those records. Still can’t.

RUDY SARZO (bassist, Quiet Riot, Ozzy Osbourne) The first time I saw Quiet Riot they had one record out. I was new in town and I went to the Whisky to see Van Halen. They were already signed and it was sort of like a homecoming gig for them. But it was so packed I couldn’t get in. So I went over to the Starwood, which was more of like the local band hangout. And Quiet Riot was playing. And you know, they came off playing at the Starwood like an arena band playing in a club. And I thought that was a very unusual and very unique approach.

I joined the band about a year later, when they were mixing the second album that came out in Japan. I’m in the photo on the cover of that record, even though their old bass player, Kelly, actually played on it. But they didn’t want him in the photo. It was not my call.

KELLE RHOADS By the way, Nikki Sixx was up to replace Kelly Garni in Quiet Riot. He was with a band called London at the time. Man, did the women like that band! When London played the Starwood there wasn’t a dry seat in the house. So Kevin wanted to bring Nikki in but Randy said no. He said, Let’s go with this other guy. He looks like he might be good. And that’s when they got Rudy.

RUDY SARZO By the late ’70s, places like the Starwood were not even the popular places anymore. It was new wave and punk places like Madame Wong’s and these really underground venues that became the hot spots.

BOBBY BLOTZER The Motels, Bates Motel, Devo … I’m trying to resurrect these bands in my brain. Nobody knew what was coming next. It was hard to understand where we all fit in, you know?

JUAN CROUCIER (bassist, Dokken, Ratt) If you went to the Starwood on a punk night and you were a hard rocker, that could turn ugly. So you really had to be selective of what night you went to what club.

RUDY SARZO I saw Devo at their first show ever in L.A., at the Starwood. And I was blown away because they were so different. So outside the box, so original. And we were being told by all the local labels that Quiet Riot, basically what we were doing was dinosaur music. It was never going to come back.

DANA STRUM The Rainbow Bar and Grill, which was the famous hang, went from long-haired rocker people to skinny-tie people that looked like the Knack almost overnight.

STEPHEN QUADROS A lot of the hard rock bands were starting to make concessions. They were starting to wear, you know, white shirts and skinny ties, putting a The in front of their name so they would be accepted by the new wave crowd. They were starting to compromise.

CARLOS CAVAZO (guitarist, Snow, Quiet Riot) I remember me and the members of Snow, we even tried to cut our hair shorter to fit in with the new wave kind of scene and help us achieve more success. It didn’t work because our music was still metal.

GEORGE LYNCH The Boyz morphed into Xciter. We weren’t making any progress and we weren’t having any luck getting signed, so we started second-guessing ourselves and decided to become like the Pretenders. We got a girl singer.

BRIAN SLAGEL (owner, Metal Blade Records) Xciter were probably my favorite band when I was in high school. I used to go see them a zillion times. George Lynch was amazing. But the thing about L.A. at that time, you had the punk rock scene and the new wave thing, and bands like Oingo Boingo and Wall of Voodoo and the Go-Go’s and that sort of stuff.

BOB NALBANDIAN But Quiet Riot, even though they had long hair and were kind of glammy-looking, they were also real poppy. They were one of those bands you heard on Rodney on the ROQ [Bingenheimer’s show on L.A. radio station KROQ] next to, you know, the Adolescents or the Circle Jerks or whatever. Rodney would play Slick Black Cadillac, which was kind of a local hit back then. So that’s how I remember Quiet Riot. And then when Randy Rhoads joined Ozzy it was like, Oh, that’s the dude from Quiet Riot!

DANA STRUM I saw Randy play at the Starwood and my mouth was just on the floor. I thought, How is it possible nobody’s really getting this? How is nobody seeing what I’m seeing? I looked around and I just felt personally moved and motivated by my love for music and that style. I was like, Jesus, he’s so good! He shouldn’t be here! And in my mind on the way home from the Starwood I thought, You know what? I’m gonna do something about it. He’s not gonna be here. That was kind of a pivotal moment.

Within weeks of that, Ozzy was out in L.A. looking to put a band together. This was right after Black Sabbath. He met me at the Starwood and he told my band at the time, Hey guys, fuck off! Dana’s going with me! But he had no band at the time. This was just his early steps. So I said, Look, I know the guy you need. You don’t need to look any further. Without question this is the guy. I thought in my mind, He’s gonna change everybody’s lives, Randy.

KELLE RHOADS What a lot of people don’t realize is who Ozzy really wanted was Gary Moore. But Gary Moore turned him down because he was making his first solo record. So he went on this big expedition to find a lead player. He looked in L.A., he looked in New York, he came back to L.A. again. And Ozzy happened to know Dana Strum. So Dana says to Ozzy, Have you seen Randy Rhoads? And Ozzy said no.

OZZY OSBOURNE Quiet Riot, I never heard of ’em!

KELLE RHOADS So Dana got hold of Randy, but Randy told him he really wasn’t interested because he did not like Black Sabbath. But our mom made him do it. She overheard at least one side of the conversation when Randy was talking to Dana on the phone and she told him, You know, Randy, this might be your shot. You’re going to go to that audition. So he went and played for Ozzy in a hotel room. Ozzy was all fucked up and drunk, but he recognized the talent immediately. He said, You’re the greatest guitar player I’ve ever seen in my life. You’re in.

OZZY OSBOURNE When I met Randy Rhoads I was out of my fucking face! I was staying at Le Parc Suite [Hotel] and I’m sitting there, I’m fucked up, it’s about six o’clock in the evening, and Dana Strum says, Fucking wake up! You gotta hear this! I met Randy and I said, Are you a woman? In high heels, a thin little man. Dana says to me, You’ll see him later, in the studio. So next time in the studio I’m still fucked up, Randy has a little amp on his chair and he says, What do you want me to play? I said, Play anything! Because I wanted to go home. But he started to play and even in my fucked-up state I went, Oh, good god. And I said something to Dana like, If he’s as good as I think he is … look out, world.

RUDY SARZO Was Kevin DuBrow upset when Randy left for Ozzy? Yeah, of course he was. But then again, that was maybe the best thing that happened to him because as long as Randy was in the band, Kevin was always more focused on promoting Randy Rhoads. Then after that, when Kevin was left on his own, he focused on himself. And he was able to develop what Quiet Riot became later.

KELLE RHOADS It took a while, but Kevin prevailed.

3

INTERVIEW: MICHAEL ANTHONY OF VAN HALEN

Van Halen famously cut their teeth playing now legendary backyard parties in and around Pasadena, and eventually moved into Hollywood clubs like Gazzarri’s, the Starwood, and the Whisky. Soon enough, they signed to Warner Bros. Records, became arguably the biggest and most notorious rock act of the late ’70s and early ’80s, and served as the template for many of the hard rock and hair metal bands that would follow.

Van Halen began playing in Hollywood in the mid-’70s. What were some of your early impressions of the Strip?

I wasn’t really a Hollywood guy until I joined Van Halen. That wasn’t my thing. But I think the reason Van Halen was playing gigs in Hollywood had a lot to do with David Lee Roth, because he was into the whole fashion scene and that’s what was really happening out there. That’s when David Bowie was really big—Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, all that stuff. Everybody was walking around in platform shoes and it was like a fashion thing to go out there at night and parade around in your clothes and socialize. But if there were bands playing, for the most part it’d be local bands—except for the Starwood, which would hire name acts. As opposed to Gazzarri’s, where we played, which was more like, you know, Bill Gazzarri hired whoever he could get for the cheapest.

What was Gazzarri’s like at that time?

Gazzarri’s was … I mean, we used to run the dance contest every week there. So it’d be like, Hey, contestant number one! Come on up! And we’d play about ten bars of Tush by ZZ Top or something and these chicks would dance. I mean, the club didn’t really even want us to play original material. They wanted us to play dance stuff and what was happening on the radio. But we’d play five 45-minute sets a night, and sometimes there’d only be a handful of people there for the first set. But as the night went on the place would start to fill up and we would start to inject some of our own original stuff into the sets. After we’d been playing there for quite a while, they didn’t really bother us too much about it because we were pulling in a lot of people.

One thing that was interesting was my sister was a Gazzarri’s dancer for a very brief period of time, and her picture was on the wall there. I remember flipping out when we played there, going, You gotta be kidding me…

At that time two of the hottest guitarists on the Strip were Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads. Was there a rivalry between them?

No. The only time I think we ever played with Quiet Riot was at a gig at Pasadena College. Randy was with them, but there wasn’t any kind of competition. But there were a lot of guitar players that started trying to copy Eddie’s tapping and all the hammer-on stuff that he was doing. A lot of gigs that we would play, Dave would say, Hey, we don’t want all these guitar players stealing your stuff. And he would tell Eddie, When you play your solos, turn your back to the crowd. Because nobody was doing what Eddie was doing. Although I think Randy Rhoads was probably the closest guy at the time.

How about with George Lynch?

At that point George wasn’t really a name yet, so no. But I remember playing with his band.

Van Halen was playing with George’s band, the Boyz, at the Starwood when Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley from Kiss came to see you.

It was funny because Paul Stanley actually liked that band. But then Gene said, "No no no no no. This is the band right here," talking about Van Halen.

So what did Gene say to you?

I remember going upstairs after the show and Gene comes walking in and he’s telling us about the business, this and that, and that he would like to do a demo with us. At that point I think he was having visions of maybe managing us. And he had an idea to change the name of the band because he wasn’t sure about Van Halen. I probably still have a copy of the drawing somewhere packed away, but he had an idea to call the band Daddy Long Legs. I remember there was a picture of a spider, you could see the bottom half of the spider with the legs coming out, and then on his head he had a top hat or something. And we’re like, Hmmm… We weren’t really going for it. But, you know, he was in the business and we weren’t.

Obviously it didn’t work out.

No, it didn’t. But it sure got the buzz going around town. You know, you’re talking about the late ’70s—Kiss were big. So when the name Van Halen came up, it was that band that Gene Simmons secretly flew to New York to record a demo with. All of a sudden we had no problem getting a lot of people in Hollywood to come and see us. I think it was about a year after the thing with Kiss, at the same club, the Starwood, where Mo Ostin, who was chairman of Warner Bros., and Ted Templeman, who would end up producing us, came and saw us and we got our deal.

After Van Halen hit big, did it seem like the bands that began to populate the Strip in the ’80s all wanted to be you guys to some extent?

Well, after Van Halen got signed, then all of a sudden you see these bands like Mötley Crüe and Poison and, geez, what’s the common thread between all these bands? All their singers had bleached-out blond hair, they all wanted to be David Lee Roth. But you know, we did not wear makeup. And I don’t know where they got that part of it from. One of those bands probably started doing it and then they all started. But it wasn’t

Reviews for Nöthin' But a Good Time

[Nadia Salim · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I lived through this era during my childhood and it was great to relive the stories in written form.

[kevinrubin · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I just finished reading “Nöthing’ But a Good Time” by Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock, and it was amusing.It’s a bunch of snippets of interviews with various rock stars, producers, photographers and other people associated with the hard rock or “hair metal” scene in the 80’s to early 90’s. The cover promises “a backstage pass to the wildest and loudest party in rock history” in a quote from Bret Michaels of Poison.I wasn’t a fan of most of these bands back in the 80’s and early 90’s when it was on MTV, I was more into much harder edged heavy metal than any of them, and I particularly loathed the power ballads that most of these bands sprang to popularity with. However, in the intervening decades I’ve listened to more and more of them and enjoyed many of the songs, though I still can’t get into the vast majority of those power ballads…The book itself is just so-so…. The format, with small snippets from the authors’ interviews with the musicians and other people make it hard to follow along. The vast majority of snippets are just a couple of sentences long, so there’s not much at any time to follow all of what someone is telling us. This works in a few places where a musician says something about another, then there’s a snippet from that other one in response, but for most of the book, it just makes it hard to follow a theme.Then if you’re more accustomed to reading novels then sometimes when the next paragraph starts with who that speaker is it’s easy to feel more like it’s the previous speaker addresses the new one, which isn’t the case.The first time a speaker is introduced it mentions what band, record label or job they have, which is good. But there’s so many people that it’s hard to keep track of most of them, especially as I was never obsessed with these bands to know all their members names by heart. Fortunately there’s a “cast of characters” at the beginning with all that for reference. But still, maybe if they’d repeated it each time a person appears in a chapter it would be less flipping around.The various people have some interesting things to say about what they remember from that time, how they worked hard to get successful, how they failed, how others interfered. Some make a little mention of the sex and drugs, but it’s nowhere near what the cover promises will be in the book.Overall, it was fun to hear the stories the people told and see what I can remember from a scene that didn’t interest me at the time. Some of it certainly brought back the feeling of being a teenager again, since I was exposed to the videos, the songs, band t-shirts and things in school.

[norinrad10 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a fun trip back to a time when rock and roll were big, loud, and fun. The story is told as an oral history, and it's a pleasure to read descriptions of the times in the voices of those who created the genre that came to be known as "hair metal".While the book is arguably short on depth, it certainly makes it up for it with breadth. Bands like Dangerous Toys, Junkyard, and Tuff share the stage with the usual suspects, Motley Crue, Poison, and Guns and Roses. All strung together to tell a tale of big hair, bigger guitars, and lots of debaucheries. A great read for anybody looking to remember a time when we took ourselves a little less serious.