3 Forgotten Hair Metal Songs From 1986

By 1986, Mötley Crüe had established a new blueprint for power ballads. The success of “Home Sweet Home” in 1985 expanded the audience for glam metal. Meanwhile, Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet and its weary-band-on-tour video, “Wanted Dead Or Alive”, dominated MTV and FM radio with one of the biggest albums of the year.

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Both Def Leppard and Guns N’ Roses were still one year away from glam metal masterpieces. But 1986 was a crucial year for making hair metal something impossible to escape.

So here are three songs you might have forgotten. The first two launched careers, and the last one comes from a band that helped make hair metal mainstream.  

“Nobody’s Fool” by Cinderella

Hair metal is most associated with Sunset Strip bands like Mötley Crüe, Poison, and Ratt. But one of the best glam albums of the era comes from the opposite coast. Cinderella was led by Tom Keifer, who wrote blues rock songs and sang them in a broken-glass howl similar to AC/DC’s Brian Johnson. And Keifer played a Gibson Les Paul instead of the pointy guitars popular at the time. Cinderella jams—“Gypsy Road”, “Nobody’s Fool”, and “Somebody Save Me”—have aged better than others from this glitzy time.

“Cry Tough” by Poison

It’s up in the air whether Poison’s “Nothin’ But A Good Time” or Mötley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” distills hair metal in one song. But there’s no doubt that the album cover to Poison’s Look What The Cat Dragged In remains hair metal’s avatar. These bands always sounded best in their rawest form. Here, the low-budget recording helps Poison on an album that’s utterly ridiculous by any measure. C.C. Deville burns unhinged Chuck Berry licks, and singer Bret Michaels powers through the earworms while his band barely holds it all together.

“Dance” by Ratt

Ratt helped the Los Angeles rock scene blossom into what became colloquially called hair metal. The band’s 1984 hit “Round And Round” and its music video starring Milton Berle sent major record labels scrambling to find more bands like this. Following “Round And Round”, Ratt never achieved the same commercial success but did continue releasing albums on Atlantic Records until 1990. Dancing Undercover is Ratt’s third album and opens with “Dance”, featuring Stephen Pearcy’s gravelly wail and the dueling guitars of Warren DeMartini and Robbin Crosby.

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