Where were you, when the Glam Plague came?

jstate wrote:

'83-'84 MTV was probably my introduction. By the late eighties I was a secret fan who hid my love of it. I have always loved the second and third tier bands that never made it far. A ton of hidden gems from that era.

I really need look into the current crop of glam/sleaze bands. I'm probably missing out on some great stuff.

you should. I didnt give glam the time of day until toho got me hooked...

being brewed within my father's genitals.

EvyMetal wrote:

being brewed within my father's genitals.

It was the best of times... it was the worst of times..

I was 15 in '83 and I remember Quiet Riot and Def Lep's Pyromania being huge. I was listening to those along with all the other usual suspects like Maiden and Priest. Glam really went huge in the 86-87 time frame and by 88 was eclipsing all other metal. By 1990 it had become a complete cliche and the market was completely saturated. That all being said, I liked it then and still do. I owned Megadeth and Britny Fox and thought that was nothing strange. I never understood the divide between thrash/glam/traditional etc...

Before the genre was named as 'glam' they were just heavy metal bands (to me glam still referred to some of the 70's acts). The bands that were the forerunners (for lack of a better term) of glam, ie Motley Crue, Quiet Riot, Ozzy (yes, Ozzy--his band influenced most of these bands in dress and musical style. Which can be followed back to Van Halen, really) were excellent bands with a real 'heaviness' about them. As if they truly about the music.

But with MTV getting popular, along came the wankers and pretenders (Winger, Bang Tango, Poison, Warrant, among the most popular) who truly just modeled themselves after Van Halen---dynamic singer (whom the ladies like) and an incredible guitar player). But the feeling/emotion/validity of the songs just wasn't there (for me).

It is sad that a lot of very good bands got mislabeled as 'glam'---Skid Row, Dokken, WASP, among others.

It was this time that fueled my love for the thrash, especially in the early days. But it was interesting era as well in metal as it truly split from just "heavy metal" into so many genres with, IMO, bands like: death (DM), exodus (thrash), Quiet Riot (pop-metal), Motley Crue (glam), Accept (power/speed/true), and helloween (power)..etc etc.

To me glam and thrash came along at the same time ('83-'84 more or less). Prior to both, everything was hard rock/heavy metal and I was into all of it. I was into alot of heavy metal but also future glam bands like The Crue, Ratt, Dokken, and Twisted Sister. "Glam" wasnt really a term used yet and all of these bands were hard rock.
But somewhere along the way most of the hard rock/heavy metal bands became infected by glam (including Judas Priest and Ozzy) and I did not like it at all. I was slowly heading into thrash territory and by 1986 I was completely away from glam and I became full on into all thrash metal.

I think the first time I heard Exodus was also the same week I saw the first Poison album cover and those two incidents were the clinchers for me.

Witchfinder wrote:

I was 15 in '83 and I remember Quiet Riot and Def Lep's Pyromania being huge. I was listening to those along with all the other usual suspects like Maiden and Priest. Glam really went huge in the 86-87 time frame and by 88 was eclipsing all other metal. By 1990 it had become a complete cliche and the market was completely saturated. That all being said, I liked it then and still do. I owned Megadeth and Britny Fox and thought that was nothing strange. I never understood the divide between thrash/glam/traditional etc...

I agree I liked both 'genres' and I did not find it strange either, plus at pop/hair/glam metal shows they were always tons of chics.

I was a kid jamming to Billy Joel and various country and oldies acts. It wasn't until I heard the music my sister was watching on MTV that I really started hearing these bands and once I heard my first metal song and started watching MTV on a regular basis and absorbed the hair bands (this was in the last years of it's popularity). I put the hair bands, pop metal bands, and melodic hard rock bands under the same banner. The past few years I've been building quite a collection of these artists. This leads me to believe that I would like all these bands Toho and Exact talk about in the glam/sleeze genre.

I wish I was a teenager when the glam scene started up.

allthingsmetal wrote:

Before the genre was named as 'glam' they were just heavy metal bands (to me glam still referred to some of the 70's acts). The bands that were the forerunners (for lack of a better term) of glam, ie Motley Crue, Quiet Riot, Ozzy (yes, Ozzy--his band influenced most of these bands in dress and musical style. Which can be followed back to Van Halen, really) were excellent bands with a real 'heaviness' about them. As if they truly about the music.

But with MTV getting popular, along came the wankers and pretenders (Winger, Bang Tango, Poison, Warrant, among the most popular) who truly just modeled themselves after Van Halen---dynamic singer (whom the ladies like) and an incredible guitar player). But the feeling/emotion/validity of the songs just wasn't there (for me).

It is sad that a lot of very good bands got mislabeled as 'glam'---Skid Row, Dokken, WASP, among others.

A great post! I nver considered Stryper, Twisted Sister, Dokken, Ratt etc. to be hair metal. That term didn't get valid until Europe and Bon Jovi got big, and the scene exploded with Poison, Warrant and their likes. Before that, it was all heavy metal to me.

I also agree that glam, to me, was bands like Slade, T-Rex and The Sweet.

When the glam metal was at its height, we did not call it glam or hair metal, we usually referred to it as pop metal something I had forgotten about til allthings metal dude said so.

Witchfinder wrote:

I never understood the divide between thrash/glam/traditional etc...

Ditto. To this day, I say if it's a good band, it's a good band. If they suck, they suck. I never cared what pigeonhole others try to fit them into.

manny wrote:

When the glam metal was at its height, we did not call it glam or hair metal, we usually referred to it as pop metal something I had forgotten about til allthings metal dude said so.

I would go with the pop metal reference too although in a lot of cases a lot of the bands were just referred to as heavy metal...

exact33 wrote:

manny wrote:

When the glam metal was at its height, we did not call it glam or hair metal, we usually referred to it as pop metal something I had forgotten about til allthings metal dude said so.

I would go with the pop metal reference too although in a lot of cases a lot of the bands were just referred to as heavy metal...

Yep, we called it Pop Metal too - Glam, Sleaze was not ever used back then. Hair Metal wasn't used until much later/

Glam Plague? I've never heard a more ridiculous term. It was a great era (in my opinion of course), yes there was some crap, but obviously that is the case with every genre.

My earliest memory of the glam era is Europe's Final Countdown. I was probably around 5 or 6 years old and it was around 1988 - 1989 so several years after the album and single were released.

From then on I got into stuff like GNR and Motley Crue but it was not long before I discovered the heavier bands that metal had to offer at the time. I'm not ashamed however of liking glam in fact I have quite a lot of glam bands in my collection both known and lesser known.

Metal is metal after all and it doesn't matter whether it's thrash, death, glam, black metal, power metal whatever you want to call it as long as it sounds good to your ears. So I don't consider glam to have been a plague, it was at worst an alternative to the heavier / thrash bands of the time but that is not in any shape a bad thing, far from it. I think it's great that there was such a cool sounding alternative rather than what the 'alternative' to heavy metal was in the 1990s.

Perhaps things look better with the benefit of hindsight, but I seriously don't understand why people hated glam or rather still hate glam nowadays. If you don't like no one is forcing you to listen to it - I'm not suggesting that anyone is feeling that way here about glam it's more of a general observation and one that I believe applies to just about any sub-genre of heavy music that happens to be popular and widely liked in the moment (i.e. nu-metal, metalcore and whatever else may come out in the future).

Jeff Kieth once said something and Sax quoted it in some other thread recently. It sums things up quite nicely.

Uh, I was probably about 12/13 when I really started to notice it, and that was mainly Dokken, Twisted Sister, Ratt, Crue and the like. By that time though, I was already deeply into Iron Maiden and some of the heavier stuff, so when the second and third tiers started popping up I lambasted it pretty good, but I still saw Winger for a piece of ass Now that I'm older I still like the inital waves, and some of the other bands but alot of what came at the end or later is still derivative crap, sleaze was really where the talent went.

I still despise Bon Jovi no matter what happens though

snooloui wrote:

Glam Plague? I've never heard a more ridiculous term.

It would be a great band name though.

"Thank you Cleveland! We are... GLAAAAAAAM PLAAAAAAAAGUE! Good night!"

Fat Freddy wrote:

snooloui wrote:

Glam Plague? I've never heard a more ridiculous term.

It would be a great band name though.

"Thank you Cleveland! We are... GLAAAAAAAM PLAAAAAAAAGUE! Good night!"

Guitarist to singer: "um...... Cleveland was last night - tonight is Columbus"

I feel kinda old here, when I was like 12-13 I got into the likes of Foreigner, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, and Blondie to name a few. I then discovered AC/DC, and my musical taste "amplified" quite a bit. So when all the main groups started pouring out like crazy, I couldn't help from really getting into them. Motley Crue, and Ratt were my favorites, not to mention Quiet Riot, and Twisted Sister were there too. I also can't forget Def Leppard. I never really cared about the hair and make-up deal, I always thought that was for the girls and MTV. I was into the music, that was all, you can't see Poison, when your jamming "Look What the Cat Dragged In" down HWY 441! The thing was, some of my friends got into heavier stuff, like Priest, Maiden, Metallica...etc..Not me, I don't care for them, I just can't get into the vocals, and all the fast beats. I always thought "bubble gum" rock was the music for me, great vocals, not too fast and amplified guitars. I have always considered it hard rock, and nothing else.

Let me give Nikki Sixx a happy birthday shout.....he turned 52 today.

My introduction was Twisted Sister's We're Not Gonna Take It from MTV. It was 1984. I was 2 months away from turning 7 years old. I wouldn't really start getting more into the music until 1987, when we finally got cable again, which meant MTV again. (Yes, if you had cable back then, you had MONEY!)

That was where I was introduced to Whitesnake, Crue, Cinderella, etc.

We made fun of that stuff ad nauseum back then. Of course I've mellowed and have become less dogmatic with age.

Sinistar wrote:

We made fun of that stuff ad nauseum back then. Of course I've mellowed and have become less dogmatic with age.

quit it....if you're gonna use such big words at least spell them correctly, sheesh

James B. wrote:

Sinistar wrote:

We made fun of that stuff ad nauseum back then. Of course I've mellowed and have become less dogmatic with age.

quit it....if you're gonna use such big words at least spell them correctly, sheesh

I tried too!!