3 Guilty-Pleasure Hair Metal Songs You Won’t Be Embarrassed To Crank

Comedian Bill Burr told Seth Meyers how he confronted Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder at Saturday Night Live’s 50^th Anniversary Special. Burr said it took him a long time to appreciate Pearl Jam because the Seattle bands had made the music he loved—hair metal—uncool.

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Though grunge did away with hair metal’s cultural ubiquity, you can easily spot the hair metal roots (accidental pun) in bands like Pearl Jam and its precursor, Mother Love Bone. Stone Gossard said he’s a Mötley Crüe fan, and Mother Love Bone’s singer Andrew Wood wasn’t visually far removed from Vince Neil, Bret Michaels, or David Lee Roth.

So if you’re feeling squeamish about hair metal, these tunes might be ones you aren’t embarrassed to crank.  

“Monkey Business” by Skid Row

Skid Row’s ballad “18 And Life” felt grittier than what Poison (“Every Rose Has Its Thorn”) and Warrant (“Heaven”) were pushing to MTV. Though they were friends with Bon Jovi, Skid Row offered a rougher version of hair metal. But when Skid Row followed its debut album with Slave To The Grind, things got even heavier.

The album opens with “Monkey Business”, and if you can find footage of the band performing it on Saturday Night Live, you’ll see why they’ve never been the same after Sebastian Bach left the group. “Monkey Business” begins with Dave Sabo’s guitar riff and Bach singing lyrics like “Stack heels kicking rhythm of social circumcision / Can’t close the closet on a shoebox full of bones.” Then there’s a cowbell, and Bach’s epic scream to compel you to crank this metal banger.

“Live Wire” by Mötley Crüe

Nikki Sixx, Tommy Lee, Mick Mars, and Vince Neil didn’t need a huge budget to create a visual with everything one could ever want from a Mötley Crüe video. Sixx lights himself on fire, Lee’s in chains, Mars bleeds from his mouth, and Neil points a flaming sword at the camera. It’s pure camp, but none of that would have mattered if “Live Wire” wasn’t so great.

The band existed closer to its punk roots on the 1981 debut album, Too Fast For Love. They helped pioneer glam metal (or hair metal), but “Live Wire” and its video document Mötley Crüe in raw form. Mötley’s glossy power ballad “Home Sweet Home” wouldn’t arrive until 1985. It spawned many copycats, but “Live Wire” shows why most of the copycats faded and how Mötley Crüe became bigger than the scene they helped create.

“Gypsy Road” by Cinderella

Apart from the snare drum’s massive reverb, you might not categorize “Gypsy Road” as hair metal. Tom Kiefer’s bluesy guitar riff and the sound of his voice are more akin to AC/DC than Poison. While many guitarists of the era played pointy instruments, Kiefer often used a Gibson Les Paul, which gave Cinderella’s albums a timeless quality outside of MTV’s Headbangers Ball.

Or perhaps it’s just the difference between East Coast and West Coast glam metal bands. Check out the band photo on the album cover of Night Songs. They look like they could have emerged from the Sunset Strip circuit. But Cinderella sounded darker, heavier, bluesier. And “Gypsy Road” is a classic jam. Now, to bring this all back to Pearl Jam, listen to “Gypsy Road” then listen to “Alive”. Again, the thread connecting hair metal to grunge isn’t entirely invisible.

Photo: Mark Weiss/Motley.com