Pop metal: New book traces history of the music that ruled the '80s

Most people probably wouldn’t suspect I’m a fan of what’s called “hair metal.” For one thing, I don’t have a whole lot of hair anymore.

But mostly it’s because people think of pop metal as shallow, mindless escapism, and I’m usually accused of being the opposite: stuck in my own head, analyzing everything, and trying to make sense of the world. 

I look at it this way, though: I DO like pop metal, so why not analyze IT?

And write about it.

When I find something interesting, that’s what I tend to do, even if the subject is a bit off the beaten path. Old highways. Department stores. Forgotten sports leagues. And now the kind of metal music that has a beat AND a melody.

The result was my latest book, Pop Goes the Metal, which includes stories of the bands and music that made the 1980s so distinctive: bands like Poison, Def Leppard, Ratt, Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister, Bon Jovi, and Dokken.

I didn’t want to just celebrate the music, though. I wanted to trace its back to its roots; follow its history; explore why it got as popular as it did — and why it suddenly became very unpopular.

I went back to the British Invasion, which spawned two very different styles of music, heavy metal and power pop, that nonetheless converged in pop metal. Then I explored how 1970s bands set the stage for the look and sound of the ’80s, from the comic-book superheroes of Kiss and the “Nightmare”-ish Alice Cooper, to the androgyny of Sweet and Angel, and hard rock of Van Halen and Aerosmith.

Pop Goes the Metal travels from the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood to Sheffield, England to examine the geographic origins of ’80s pop metal. It explores the role of MTV, album-rock radio, and the decade’s cultural shifts that led to the music’s rise and fall.

At more than 330 pages, it also includes a series of lists that chronicle No. 1 pop-metal songs, top-selling albums, hit anthems and power ballads, and much more. The book is available on Amazon in print or Kindle ebook form, and on Kindle Unlimited.

Here’s a bit of the introduction to set the scene with a little of my personal history:

When I young, my parents used to drive me down to the local record store set me loose to browse through the racks. The Wherehouse was out on Ventura Boulevard, which would later be Tom Petty’s hangout of choice for “all the vampires living in the Valley.”

The San Fernando Valley, that is: the same one mentioned in Frank and Moon Zappa’s “Valley Girl.”

That’s where I grew up, at least for six years during the heart of the ’70s, from Richard Nixon’s re-election through his resignation and the end of Vietnam. Then on through the birth of disco and Saturday Night Fever; The Rocky Horror Picture Show (which melded the glam-horror vibe of Alice Cooper with the gender-bending of Bowie) and Star Wars.

I hated disco, by the way. All of it. The Bee Gees’ falsetto. John Travolta’s stupid white jacket. (No, I didn’t see the movie; the poster outside the local theater was bad enough.) Mostly, I bemoaned the lack of a guitar — preferably electric — which was like a ticket to nirvana to anyone with real musical taste.

I lived next door to the L.A. Dodgers’ left fielder on one side and The Tonight Show’s music director on the other, but when I wasn’t at school, I spent most of my time in my room, listening to music and sorting baseball cards. Hanging out at the mall wasn’t my thing: too many people. But I did like going to the record store, where I could check out the latest releases and agonize over how to spend my saved-up allowance.

I could’ve gone to another record store, Licorice Pizza out on Topanga Canyon, but The Wherehouse was closer, so we usually went there.

I remember one trip in particular. It was 1976, and my limited record collection included The Beatles’ Rubber Soul (a Christmas gift from my aunt), Elton John’s Greatest Hits, and Their Greatest Hits by the Eagles, released earlier that year. I was still a fan of Elton, and I thought I’d probably end up getting Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. But I wanted to look around first.

I walked up and down the aisles, and as I did, a couple of other albums drew my attention. My reaction to the first one was, “Huh? Really? You’ve got to be kidding me?” I picked it up for a closer look: The four band members on the cover wore dress suits, but their faces looked like they belonged to clowns who’d escaped from a circus in some alternate dimension to audition for The Godfather.

The album was called Dressed to Kill, and the band’s name was Kiss. They had a cool logo, where the S’s in their name looked like lightning bolts. But the band members themselves looked ridiculous. I flipped the album over, looked back at the front again, and quickly decided it was the most idiotic thing I’d ever seen. I’d never heard of these guys, and I had absolutely zero interest in their album.

I put it back and moved on to the racks against the back wall, where I came across an LP called Desolation Boulevard by Sweet. This one really tempted me, because I’d gotten hooked on the band’s latest single, “Fox on the Run,” which was playing a lot on the radio.

I used to sit in my room with a cassette recorder and wait for it to come on the radio so I could record it. This took a lot of patience, and even more luck, because I had to hope that 1) no one would slam a door in the background while the song was playing and 2) the DJ wouldn’t talk over the end of the song and ruin it.

The second thing almost always happened. I hated DJs for it. I didn’t listen to the radio to hear them talk, anyway. The only time I wanted to hear a DJ say anything was after the song was finished. What was the song called? What was the name of the band? Most of the time, though, they didn’t say. More often, they launched into some B.S. product pitch or weather report, or announced the station’s call letters — which I already knew because I’d been listening all day waiting for “Fox on the Run.”

And because they talked over the end of it, I’d have to wait a few more hours for the rotation to come around again.

I liked “Fox on the Run,” and Desolation Boulevard was just about the coolest name for an album I’d ever heard. When I picked up the album to check it out at The Wherehouse, I thought the cover looked like someplace in L.A., but I didn’t know it was Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, which was just over the hills from where I lived and, it turns out, was the capital of the rock ’n’ roll world before it moved to Seattle with the birth of grunge. It was barely 20 miles away.

I looked at the long-haired band members in the foreground of the cover shot and wondered whether the two in the middle were guys or girls. I thought they were guys. Not that I cared; it just bugged me that I couldn’t be certain. I’d seen a poster of Bowie in the mall and wondered the same thing.

I didn’t end up buying Desolation Boulevard — not because of the gender thing, but because I had just enough cash for one record, and I didn’t know enough of the other songs to risk plunking down $5.99. “Fox on the Run” might have been the only good song on the disc, and then I’d have to start saving my money all over again. It wasn’t worth chancing it.

I went back to that rack couple of times and picked up the album as I debated buying it, but I finally put it back and decided to go with the album I’d come to buy: Captain Fantastic.