Don't change that song, it's my favorite record

Was glam metal the true garage rock of the '80s?

I’ve been doing some freelance A&R projects with the U.K. label Cherry Red, learning how to navigate the choppy waters of catalog licensing. I’m still working on what I hope will be a definitive history of the ’80s underground psychedelic revival scene, but the first one up was a bit easier to clear.

Young & Wild: A Decade of American Glam Metal 1982-1992 comes out on May 23rd.

Here’s my pitch to Cherry Red:

While glam was ruling the U.K. charts in the ’70s, American radio listeners almost completely missed out on the sparkle. Kids in the suburbs were paying attention, though, and they went on to start garage bands that mixed Bowie’s hooky glitter with Led Zeppelin’s thunder.

With KISS and Van Halen as their heroes, aspiring rockers formed bands that pissed off their parents and scared the local radio programmers. Loud and tasteless, the music struck a chord with the kids and delivered the youth anthems of the ’80s.

Glam metal gave us the true Nuggets of the decade, irresponsible racket delivered by frustrated kids to a hungry audience of rebellious youth. (Before you lose your mind over that idea, I checked this theory with Lenny Kaye and he blessed the comparison.)

I want to be up front with any metalheads who read this: I was not part of the scene. I was seeing Dinosaur (Jr.) at the Anti-Club instead of partying with Faster Pussycat at the Cathouse. I was far more interested in the next Rhino Records store parking lot sale than hanging around the pool at the Tropicana Motel.

That means I don’t have any clue about scene politics. I only know what the records sound like to me. I’m sure a few of the bands on Young & Wild were either truly terrible live or deeply annoying to everyone backstage after the show. I understand those issues from punk rock, so it was bliss just to be able to pick tracks just by how they sounded.

Whenever anyone talks about the metal ’80s, we hear about the decadence and the clothes and the girls girls girls instead of the music. That’s mostly the fault of the bands, guys who thought that bragging about bad behavior would build up their street cred (cf. The Dirt).

I’m not sure they were actually worse than the alt rock guys, only that metalheads were naive and/or arrogant enough to broadcast their degenerate ways. If Penelope Spheeris had decided to make Decline of Western Civilization IV: The Weenie Roast Era, most of you would be shocked by the unforgivable tales of depravity.

The records are great. Like most popular music, many of them were made by deeply flawed individuals. For this collection, I wanted to focus on the good parts.

As mentioned above, the official release date is May 23, 2025 with a list price of £24.99, a bargain for a 3-CD, 57-song collection with extensive liner notes. You could order directly from Cherry Red and pick up a few more titles You could ask your local record store to order it for you. If they aren’t in the habit of stocking Cherry Red titles, tell them to talk to Alliance Distribution to get a copy.

I know that Dusty Groove Records in Chicago stocks a lot of Cherry Red compilations and they have an excellent mail order service and great prices on used CDs and LPs as well. And, if you still trade with them, you can always try Amazon. I get paid on those Amazon sales, but I hope everyone tries to trade with their local shops as much as they can.

Cherry Red agreed that I can share the introductory essay from my liner notes. There are a lot more stories in the booklet in you decide to buy a copy for yourself, along with an excellent essay from Richard Anderson that gives the U.K. perspective on the era.

Notes from the box set

It’s 1982. Sixties bands have reached middle age, and they’ve brought their audience along with them. Rock’s rebellion has transformed itself into tasteful music for adults. A few of the snotty American garage bands inspired by the British Invasion have learned to play and extended their careers. The rest have fallen by the wayside.

Kids in America got a brief taste of the first wave of glam rock with isolated hits by T. Rex and The Sweet, but U.S. rock radio otherwise broadcast a steady diet of country rock and the smoothed-out prog known as arena rock. Hip listeners in the big cities knew about Bowie and (later) punk, but there wasn’t much subversive music aimed at the kids in flyover country. The grassroots garage scenes of the ’60s had mostly dried up, and there was almost no-one inspiring a new generation to make its own racket.

Except for KISS. Dismissed by the tastemakers as music for children, they inspired a devoted army that grew up to start bands that emphasized big hooks, stomping choruses and flamboyant stage wear. Once Van Halen arrived on the scene in the late ’70s, a new generation had its own Beatles and Stones. KISS understood the importance of feel over technique. Their music was closer to New York Dolls and The Stooges than to the Steely Dan or Boston records beloved by critics and radio programmers. Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons may have dumbed things down a bit, but they’re also the band that brought things up a level.

At the same time, David Bowie and the U.K.’s glam movement planted the seeds for punk rock, inspiring the kids in L.A. who partied at Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco nightclub. The club may have shut down in 1975, but it directly inspired bands like The Runaways, and its decadent vibe was echoed in the Sunset Strip scene that followed in the ’80s. Rock was maturing, and the kids were bored. City kids with a little sophistication and no musical experience were drawn to punk rock, but the suburban kids just wanted a party, and could usually find at least one guy who played guitar really well to anchor their garage band.

Mötley Crüe blazed the trail. They got songwriting ideas from The Sweet, their look from Bowie and New York Dolls, and a sense of theater from The Sex Pistols. They were selling out L.A. clubs and couldn’t get a record deal, so they released Too Fast For Love on the tiny Leathür Records in 1981. A young Elektra Records staffer name Tom Zutaut convinced the bosses to let him sign the band, and staff producer Roy Thomas Baker gave the indie LP a remix to shine it up for radio, but things didn’t really start to happen until the band’s set at the May 1983 US Festival was broadcast live on MTV.

But American rock radio wanted nothing to do with these misfit kids. Mötley Crüe’s music was too direct, the band was too flash, the makeup and leather scared straight middle American parents and programmers. But MTV recognized what was happening, and added videos from glam metal bands to their playlists. The records started selling, and radio finally gave in - thousands of bands followed in the wake of Mötley Crüe. If you had the looks, a couple of tunes and a hot guitar player, there were producers in L.A. and New York who could help you craft a hit record. There were plenty of ’60s classics where the band pictured on the cover was assisted in the studio by musicians like The Wrecking Crew, and no one hesitated to bring back those techniques in pursuit of hit records.

Consequently, the ’80s was an amazing decade for rock in America. The college rock post-punk underground was planting seeds that would flower in the ’90s, but mainstream rock belonged to suburban kids who prized volume over technique and big fat hooks over sophisticated arrangements. The glam metal scene could contain multitudes. We’ve got bands here that feature former members of Minor Threat and The Big Boys, another with a guy from The Dictators, yet another with two future members of Pearl Jam. One of the genre’s breakthrough videos featured an icon of 1950s television, as directed by the future co-founder of Big Audio Dynamite, while another was helmed by the notorious nudie director Russ Meyer. Another band’s guitarist would grow up to be the guy hired to bring the rock as producer on records by Pink and Taylor Swift.

Many of these songs weren’t hits, but all of them sound like they should have been. As the decade went on, glam metal became the standard look and sound of American rock radio. There were hundreds of records that weren’t as good as these, and the market started to get a little overloaded with groups who were nearly indistinguishable from each other. Once exhaustion began to set in, the stage was set for another rock revolution, which would kick off with Nevermind in September 1991. But those future changes shouldn’t detract from the fact that these songs are the true Nuggets of a decade otherwise dominated by Prince, Madonna, and Bruce Springsteen…

8-track of the day