Poll: Hair Metal during/after "Grunge" takeover - who still carried the flame?

I agree and I'm not really much of a Warrant fan but I thought that album was solid.

I still stand by Motley Crue's 94 album as one of their best. Whether you admit it or not, they managed to survive in the 90's. Of course reuniting with Vince had a lot to do with it but I wish they would have stuck it out with Corabi. They would have had more solid albums with him imo.

Poison's Native Tongue album was also a solid album and again I'm not really a Poison fan but they matured and Richie Kotzen was a great songwriter for them.

People seem to mention that some of the "hair metal" (I still hate that term) went grunge but I think the ones that survived a bit more seemed to get more bluesier.

IMO grunge made a lot of those 80's glam bands re think a lot of their ridiculous posturing and forced them to mature and perhaps look at things a bit differently which was a good thing imo because the scene got so watered down with crap. Then again grunge itself also got watered down by the late 90's with all the post grunge crap that came in. All music scenes eventually eat themselves up with mediocrity. Everything goes in cycles...

 

Is Ozzy hair metal? He has the look here..............because I always have trouble with these categories. He certainly would fit the poll.



Does Judas Priest fit this category because they put out some questionable stuff during the period also? How about The Scorpions? MTV loved them.

 

What about right now with bands like Santa Cruz, Crashdiet, Crazy Lixx, etc.? There's more happening right now than in 1998.

 

I'm well aware of Into the Now, but that was released in like, 2000 or something. My post was addressing the grunge years (the mid 90s), and which bands were not influenced by grunge in its heyday. I thought that's what the OP was talking about. I agree with you on Slaughter, but Great White definitely let some grunge influence seep in on the Let it Rock album in the mid 90s on tracks like "My World" and "Lives in Chains".

 

Def Leppard and Firehouse were pretty successful in the early '90s. Bon Jovi was as well, but they moved away from glam towards more traditional hard rock.

 

Based in sales alone, I'd say Bon Jovi and Def Leppard

But based in music, I think Def Leppard

Most other classic hard rock bands (or "hair metal" if you like) ceased to exist or radically changed their sound in the early 90s.
Bon Jovi's 'Keep The Faith' and 'These Days' sound nothing like their 80s
Motley Crue's classic line up died. Same with Poison
Europe disbanded for a long time
etc

 

i've always had soft spot for Warrant as they were the 1st 'club' band that i saw.
i was too young for Motley/Ratt days, even too young for Poison/GNR and (technically) still too young for Warrant but had a fake id by then so...
people laugh at it now but Warrant was the Next 'It' band around LA in the late 80's...everyone knew they'll be the next to breakout and...they did.
part of the blame has to go to them for letting the corporate control them, wearing white leather & stuff but they were fun live band, underrated compare to their merciful reputation.
i did see them a few times even in the early~mid 90's when they had to go back to playing in clubs. it must've been a demoralizing experience, headlining arena one year then back to the clubs the next.

 

I've actually come to appreciate Warrant more now that I'm older. Their later albums were very solid with more mature songwriting. Jani Lane was pretty underrated in that respect. He was a great vocalist as well. To bad he couldn't overcome his demons. A shame because he was a talented guy.

 

You might be focusing too much on visuals, rather than the style of music that a band played.

 

I went with Extreme for the awesome "3 Sides To Every Story" album released in 1992.

 

Extreme made 'Waiting for the Punchline' in 1996. It's a great record!

 

I always thought Motley Crue's s/t was really underrated and failed simply because it had the name Motley Crue attached to it, which wasn't "cool" in 1994. I bet had they changed the name for the new lead singer, the album could've gone over bigger. Hooligan's Holiday did get a bit of radio/MTV airplay but at that point in time, the name Motley Crue carried baggage of 1980s excess... a different band name could've led to a bigger album. I remember people who mostly listened to grunge and the sort who were actually shocked at how good that album was, but were hesitant to actually buy the album simply because they were teens and owning a "Motley Crue" cd to them would've been like owning Vanilla Ice or Tiffany.

 

Didn't recover? Almost all the bands are still going and doing great stuff today.

 

MAybe outside the US, but most of the class of '86/87 who were once doing 5000- 15000 seaters now are lucky to do clubs and state fairs.

 

Heavy Metal has endured as well as any other genre of music. Motley Crue can still play at major arenas. Def Leppard, Dokken, Tesla, and Bon Jovi still play arenas. That's on par or better than what Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Four Seasons, etc. were drawing in 1986.

 

Not sure what this has to do with the 86/87 hair metal acts ala Winger, Warrant, Trixter, etc., whose economics have changed dramatically.

BOn Jovi, Crue, and Def Leppard may have pull to do arena's on their own, but Tesla and Dokken do not, unless they are opening for someone bigger or are part of a multi act bill.

 

The point is that those bands are all playing arenas while most grunge bands haven't had nearly the staying power as the heavy metal bands of thirty years ago. Candlebox might be playing a show at a bar and grill, Alice in Chains plays theaters, L7 plays clubs and theaters, Soundgarden plays theaters, etc. Given that Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Tesla, Dokken, and Def Leppard are actually older bands than the grungers, those older bands are doing well for themselves.

 

Quite a bit...all those bands are mentioned in the original poll. It's easy to just pick out a few to try and downgrade the fact that a lot of these bands have endured and while maybe not pulling the numbers still playing well and making great records.

 

Mr. Big - Lean Into It from 1991 went Platinum. To Be With You Was wasn't realeased as a single until December 1991 and was Billboards #1 single for 3 weeks in Feb-March 1992.

 

I think you are on to something there, I do think many DL and GnR fans don't want their favorite band to be tarred with a discredited brush like Hair, and likewise, those who hate Hair don't want to acknowledge that any good bands were ever Hair bands. They want to say that Hair was totally mired in suckitude start to finish.

That said... FWIW, I always (meaning 30 years ago) thought that both DL and GnR were somehow separate from Hair, and that's coming from someone who liked Hair, and felt that way long before Hair met its demise via Nirvana. But your comment got me thinking more precisely about that: Maybe it's not either/or, but rather a continuum. If bands like Poison, Bon Jovi, Crue, and Warrant were 100% Hair, then IMO bands like Def Leppard and the Scorpions were quasi-Hair. Yes, from 1982 on their output was Hair music. I think that one could even argue that 1982's Blackout and Pyromania were the first true Hair albums. Those two records were, musically, Hair before Quiet Riot's Metal Health put a name on it.

But Hair wasn't strictly about music, it also had a big image component, and Hair as it came to be known was quintessentially American. So the British/German roots of those bands, and the fact that they predated Hair in their earliest incarnations, meant they weren't fully Hair.

I'd say Guns and Roses fits the same kind of bill. Yes, some of GnR's songs, like "Don't Cry", are clearly Hair music, and yes, Axl is clearly wearing teased up hair in the Welcome to the Jungle video. But they also had a bluesy heaviness and raspiness to them that wasn't Hair, that harkened back to a pre-Hair era of hard rock. So their Hair quotient was IMO even less.

I do recall that when GnR broke big, they were at that time, not retrospectively, accorded a respect that wasn't given to other Hair acts. Appetite for Destruction drew comparisons to classic works like Van Halen's debut album, Aersomith's mid-70s landmark LPs, and many even whispered the holy names of Led Zeppelin II and IV about it. Nobody ever talked about Poison or Warrant or Bon Jovi in those terms.

The lesser Hair quotient of those acts allowed them to survive the Nirvana Extinction Level Event better than the Pure Hair acts were able to.

 

Yes, this. These bands still exist, but they're really just working the nostalgia circuit.

 

I voted Bon Jovi. They seem to be a band that survives to be unfashionable with the popularity intact.

 

Whenever I read things regarding the way things changed in the early 90's, it seems like a lot of people either think or convince themselves that it all happened in an instant. The way I remember it was more like a snake shedding its skin. Not a snail's pace, but like a flash of lightning either. Just gradual.

I think the saving grace for a lot of bands, who came about and hit or came close to the top during the 80's, was CMC International Records. Even the mighty Iron Maiden and Judas Priest ended up there for a time. Though I loved a lot of bands from the 90's, it was a pretty bleak time for many bands I dug from the 80's.

 

In fairness to Hair, that's true of basically all bands of all genres that had their peak before the 1990s, save for a few acts that have always remained huge, like the Rolling Stones. And heck, from a musical point of view, even the Stones are playing the nostalgia circuit, in the sense that 99% of everyone who comes to their concerts does so to hear them play songs that are 35+ years old not their new stuff, they are just popular enough to do it in baseball stadiums rather than state fairs and hard rock cafes.