shaped you
Roth, Rollins, LA, Rock and Roll
Master’s Thesis Barron Mosher
Department of Art, Religion, and Cultural Studies University of Amsterdam
As you acquire the special skills involved, the freeways become a special way of being alive…the extreme concentration required in Los Angeles seems to bring on a state of heightened
awareness that some locals find mystical.
[Phenomenologies] There are the epithets.
Christopher Isherwood calls California a “tragic country”: “like Palestine, like every promised land. Its short history is a fever chart of migrations—the land rush, the gold rush, the oil rush, the movie rush, the Okie fruit-picking rush, the wartime rush to the aircraft factories—followed, in each instance, by counter-migrations of the disappointed and unsuccessful, moving sorrowfully homeward.”1 That tragedy attended these migrants’ attempts against incremental progress and the fatalism Isherwood depicts should not suggest that California’s history is a defense in allegory of methodical sensibility nor a demonstration of nothing more high-minded than resilience.
Isherwood is right to read into California’s history the histories of its migrants, however that history seethes outside Isherwood’s binary, defined by the compulsions resident in the conceptual distance between opportunity and catastrophe, migration’s push and pull.
⁂
Annabel Chong spent much of January 22, 1995 at the center of a consensual gangbang in Hollywood. Chong (b. Grace Quek), in Los Angeles (LA) from Singapore via London, had dropped out of King’s College London’s law program and began working in the porn industry for income while enrolled in graduate studies at the University of Southern California. The event— filmed on a set designed, at Chong’s request, to resemble Ancient Rome—ended in 251 acts of intercourse and 28,100 sex acts with 70 men. Director John T. Bone (b. John Bowen) released the footage under the title World’s Biggest Gang Bang, now a franchise with three installments. Chong, who has not been paid the $10,000 she was promised for her work, says the gangbang was meant to challenge gender roles and herself. Annabel Chong no longer exists in the person of Grace Quek: “Annabel is dead and is now replaced full time by her Evil Doppelganger, who is incredibly bored with the entire concept of Annabel, and would prefer to do something different for a change…Now she is making a pretty decent living being a horrible geek and all that, proving that there are second chapters in American life, to hell with F Scott Fitzgerald [sic].”2 Quek has remarked, “the deepest most personal reason for coming to America is this weird notion that if Armageddon hits the world it’s going to start in LA.”3 The response to all of this is that this could have happened anywhere. The response to that is that it did not.
LA’s history is a permanent demonstration of the disparity possible inside a volatile impulse. Of LA, crime fiction author and LA native James Ellroy writes, “temperate, sunny, ideal for outdoor living. A wide range of options, until they narrow to live or die.”4 To LA’s migrants, the former may be their active avoidance of the latter. Henry Rollins, among the subjects of this writing, remembers seeing Black Flag live while still living in Washington DC: “a bunch of guys who were out there winging it and trying to do something with their lives. They had no fixed income and they lived like dogs but they were living life with more guts than I was by a long 1 Christopher Isherwood, The Grove Book of Hollywood (Horizon, 1947) quoted in D. Joseph Carducci, Enter
Naomi: SST, L.A. and All That… (Centennial: Redoubt Press, 2007): 5.
2 “Whatever Happened to Annabel Chong?” Internet Archive WayBack Machine (last accessed 17 August 2014), http://web.archive.org/web/20030523122918/http://www.annabelchong.com/
3 “Famous singaporean_ annabel chong” uploaded to YouTube 19 April 2010 by Perda Kim (last accessed 17 August 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxuEhx2PuQw
4 James Ellroy, “The Great Right Place: James Ellroy Comes Home” Los Angeles Times (30 July 2006) quoted in Carducci, Enter Naomi, 12.
shot.”5 To Rollins, Washington DC equated to obsolescence; joining Black Flag as the band’s vocalist meant “a chance to live.”6 The varying transformative aspects of that concession define LA’s music communities, populated by migrants such as Rollins and David Lee Roth, vocalist for Van Halen. The aesthetic lineages of both Black Flag and Van Halen extend from American blues performance though each band’s output and influence have led to the further attestation of the pop rock and rock and roll musical families. These bands, their aesthetic development, and the consequential aspects of their respective aesthetic approaches are the principal subjects of this writing, which argues that divergence from an historical referent and the generative compulsion in regeneration are intrinsic and essential to LA’s contemporary music history.
[Nature Misunderstood By Masterful Science]
I moved to Los Angeles in 1980. I had many different jobs. A bikini dancer, and a stripper. Held down actual office jobs at Cannon Films, LA Weekly, and two advertising agencies. I worked at Millie’s as a prep cook and food server, on speed in the daytime, and heroin at night for the cleaning part at the end… I’ve flyered cars in Pasadena on one of the hottest and smoggiest days of the year. I was the girl who answered the phone at a dating service. I did 6 years at United Independent Taxi off and on as an order-taker/backup dispatcher. I cocktail waitressed at the Troubadour, Cathay DeGrande, and did a multi-year stint at world famous Raji’s as a sometimes very inebriated waitress. During all of this madness I was lucky enough to live out a Rock & Roll dream. — Suzi Gardner, L7
LA commits its violence against its migrants as outsourced wish fulfillment. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in the city during World War II, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, there among “some of Central Europe’s most celebrated intellectuals,”7 became consumed by the paradise many of the same were quite pleased to leave. That conflict-in-paradox became the setting for their work: “enlightenment consummates and abolishes itself when the closest
practical objectives reveal themselves to be the most distant goal already attained”8 (cf., “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology”9); they conclude: “it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that any contemporary consciousness that has not appropriated the
American experience, even in opposition, has something reactionary about it.”10 The culmination of that American experience is, as it was then, LA. In Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life he addresses his isolation in the city: “[it] becomes worse through the formation of exclusive, politically controlled groups, suspicious of their members, hostile 5 Henry Rollins, Get in the Van: On the Road with Black Flag (Digital Edition) (Los Angeles: 2.13.61, 1995): 31. 6 Ibid, 43.
7 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Digital Edition) (New York: Verso, 2006): 341.
8 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947, publication in English, 1972) quoted in Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2007): 47.
9 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (translated from Volume 5 of Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften: Dialektik und Aufklärung und Schriften 1940–1950, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, 1987, S. Fishcher Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main) (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 218.
towards those branded as different…Relations among outcasts are even more poisonous than among the residents.”11 The stressors of LA’s urban sprawl are what city historian Mike Davis calls the city’s “fragmented, paranoid spatiality”12 feeding back from and into the city’s “ancient history of class and race warfare,”13 however Adorno’s complaint about compartmentalized desolation is, as he makes explicit in his introduction to it (“Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, damaged”14), the shared torment of the exiles, which he neither recognizes as nor mistakes for the dialectic of LA though the poisoned atmosphere among the city’s residents is not lost on him. Davis, writing in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles, suggests that, having been “segregated from native Angelenos, the exiles [Adorno and Horkheimer, et al.] composed a miniature society in a self-imposed ghetto, clinging to their old-world prejudices like cultural life-preservers.”15 Davis continues: “the exiles thought they were encountering America in its purest, most prefigurative moment [though] largely ignorant of, or indifferent to, the
peculiar historical dialectic that had shaped Southern California, they allowed their image of first sight to become its own myth.”16 In that myth, as Adorno and Horkheimer believed, there was necessarily the creation/destruction abstraction they understood Enlightenment to be. Inside LA and everything they had mistaken the city for (and for the city), both, as Davis describes it, “experienced all the more painfully the death agony of Enlightenment Europe.”17 Given the city’s complicity in a lurid history of physically involved reckonings, Davis’s rhetorical flourish is excusable if not advisable.
[Explicit Repressive Intention]
LA’s topography emerged from its people’s mutual, conditioned aversions. The city is, to writer Joe Carducci, the “fallen dream of generations of transplants”18: remembering the city’s state in the 1980s, Carducci writes, “the locals, now acclimated to its harsh scape didn’t see the point in taking care of it. It took care of itself. It just was.”19 The boundaries separating migrant ghettos offered law enforcement borders to police and catalyzed the city’s Downtown redevelopment project. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), a member of the project’s “largely
unaccountable” Community Redevelopment Agency, enforces a “policy of containment,”20 which Davis describes as a “programmed hardening of the urban surface.”21 Containment is not
exaggeration for effect but is rather an explicit and resonant statement of the operational directives the LAPD has chosen to associate with “redevelopment”. Ellroy writes in My Dark Places concerning the LAPD:
11 Davis, 343–344. 12 Ibid, 1389. 13 Ibid, 1348.
14 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951, English translation by E.F.N. Jephcott) (New York: Verso, 1978): 33.
15 Davis, 345. 16 Ibid, 350. 17 Ibid.
18 Carducci, Enter Naomi, 19. 19 Ibid.
20 Davis, 1384. 21 Ibid, 1319.
The LA Sheriff’s Office hailed from the Wild West days. It was a modern police agency suffused with 19th century nostalgia…. [Eugene W.] Biscailuz joined the Sheriff’s Office in 1907. He was half Anglo and half Spanish-Basque…. William Parker took over the LAPD in 1950. He was an organizational genius. His personal style was inimical to Gene Biscailuz’s. Parker abhorred monetary corruption and embraced violence as an essential part of police work. He was an alcoholic martinet on a mission to reinstate pre-20th-century morality.
Biscailuz and Parker ruled parallel kingdoms. Biscailuz’s myth implicitly stressed inclusion. Parker co-opted a TV honcho named Jack Webb. They cooked up a weekly saga called Dragnet—a crime-and-severe punishment myth that ordained the LAPD with a chaste image and godlike powers.22
In his piece “The Trouble I Cause”, Ellroy notes, beneath a photo of Jack Webb, that Webb was “so convincing in his role on Dragnet that the LAPD would receive constant calls asking for Sergeant Joe Friday’s help.”23 LA’s current redevelopment plan, enforced by the LAPD, aided by architect Frank Gehry24, and abetted by local businesses, landowners, and city commissions, is to “use eminent domain and public tax increments to clear the poor (increasingly refugees from Central America) from the streets of Hollywood and reap the huge windfalls from ‘upgrading’ the region into a glitzy theme-park for international tourism.”25 Criticism of the urban design that has accompanied this “rails against the oversights…without recognizing the dimensions of foresight…in [what is a] deliberate socio-spatial strategy.”26 The understanding that informs that strategy predates Parker at the LAPD though it was Parker—having migrated with his family from Deadwood, South Dakota to LA in the 1920s when the city was being envisioned as “a southwestern outpost of white supremacy”27—who militarized both and delimited the force’s theater of operations: there was the LA the LAPD had incentive to police and the city’s “fortress effect,”28 there at the Department’s insistence, demarcated the city’s frontier.
[Through the Circus of the LA Queens]
I was sexually abusive to the whole universe. I wouldn’t limit it to any one person. — Kim Fowley
Until the city’s incorporation in 1984, the LAPD’s writ did not extend into West Hollywood. Compulsions ran over ground:
Frequent parties took place in Hollywood at a small alleyway house on Melrose Place near La Cienega. Jazz and rock and Elvis were mixed on the reel-to-reel with Arabian 22 James Ellroy, My Dark Places (Knopf, 1996), quoted in Carducci, Enter Naomi, 6.
23 James Ellroy, “The Trouble I Cause” Destination: Morgue! (London: Century/Arrow Books Limited/The Random House Group Limited, 2004): 185.
24 See “Frank Gehry as Dirty Harry” in Davis, 1384–1405. 25 Davis, 1404.
26 Ibid, 1349.
27 Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Oakland: University of California Press, 2004): 20. See also, “White Spot” in John Buntin, L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the
Soul of America’s Most Seductive City (London: Hachette UK, 2009).
music or Bach or Hank Williams, and the sounds of water dripping or toilets flushing, and the banging of a hammer or drumsticks on a sheet of metal. Everyone was stoned and cheap wine flowed by the gallons. Jack Nicholson usually showed up early for the booze and grass, and the sex orgies just happened—no particular cue—blooming on the big old movie-prop couch or on the mattress in the narrow step-down bedroom where the plaster walls were painted with black sunrises and people hanged by the neck and women being skinned alive.29
Decades of licentiousness created a sanctuary for Hollywood—Gilmore remembers: “separately with [Marilyn Monroe and James Dean], I’d meet at a number of places on the Strip that no longer exist, including a dim-lit cafe near Doheny (that was torn down two years ago), a ‘secret’ place’”30—and touring musicians and bands. Rodney Bingenheimer—from Mountain View, near San Francisco, and in LA since age 16 after being abandoned by his mother outside the home of singer and actress Connie Francis—would become, in his words, “the designated driver between the famous and not-so-famous”31 and in actor Sal Mineo’s, the “Mayor of the Sunset Strip”32. In Mayor of the Sunset Strip, the documentary about Bingenheimer, Bingenheimer is shown standing with female groupies outside the Continental Hyatt House (referred to during the early 1970s as the Riot House) to confirm his prominence in the groupie scene that had formed around the bands—Led Zeppelin, et al.—who stayed at the hotel while on tour. Social and economic mobility inside the Strip’s scene meant befriending Bingenheimer and scene-maker Kim Fowley; musician and actress, Courtney Love: “OK, I’m going to run away to Los Angeles, I’m going to find Kim Fowley, I’m going to find Rodney Bingenheimer.”33 British musician Michael Des Barres, ex-husband of former groupie Pamela Des Barres (aka Miss Pamela), says about Bingenheimer:
It’s almost like a drug dealer except Rodney was dealing girls. Not in the sense of a pimp or anything. But that…the power that a dealer has. Everybody is your friend because you’re holding the coke. It was the same with Rodney. He just had access to these beautiful, beautiful little nubile girls with stars on their faces. Coupled with his
enthusiasm for the acts’, you know, genuine musical ability and style and glamour and so on, he also had access to this extraordinary posse of pussy.34
David Bowie, who Bingenheimer remembers encouraging him to open a club on the Strip to feature glam rock (in the documentary, Bingenheimer mentions T.Rex, Slade, Mott the Hoople, and Sweet), which Bingenheimer was turned onto during a brief exile in London, says of LA: “It was far more hedonistic then. I only remember the sex. I don’t remember anything else about
29 John Gilmore, Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip (Digital Edition) (Los Angeles: Amok Books, 2003): 627.
30 Quote taken from email correspondence (dated 7 January 2014) with Gilmore.
31 Remark made by Rodney Bingenheimer in Mayor of the Sunset Strip (2003), directed by George Hickenlooper. 32 Rodney Bingenheimer, “Mayor of the Sunset Strip” LandmarkTheatres.com (2004) (last accessed 17 August 2014), http://www.landmarktheatres.com/mn/mayorsunset.html
33 Mayor of the Sunset Strip (2003) 34 Ibid.
LA.”35 In Bowie’s admittedly impaired recollection, he came to know36 Bingenheimer in LA between 1972 and 1975 when Bingenheimer had the nightclub Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco37 (located at 7561 Sunset Boulevard; the Hyatt House, at 8401 Sunset Boulevard, and the alleyway house at Melrose Place near La Cienega are each about two kilometers away). The club closed either because of its owners’ disagreements over business or because Bingenheimer did not like that the club had developed, following Donna Summer’s success, a nominal association38 with disco music. Bingenheimer got on air work at radio station KROQ starting in 1976.
[Some Dreamers of the Sequin Dream]
LA Times pop music editor Robert Hilburn’s review of Black Flag’s show on June 19th 1981 with the Adolescents, Minutemen, and DOA at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, presented by KROQ, includes the following quote from a 15 year-old girl: “‘My friends and I told our moms we were going to see Van Halen tonight [the girl’s story is, at least, consistent: from June 19th to the 21st, Van Halen was playing at the Forum in Inglewood on the Fair Warning Tour—BM], but I’m tired of them. They’re like watching ‘Quincy’ on TV—nothing ever really happens.’”39 That dismissal of Van Halen’s live show also served to dismiss a nascent aesthetic strain in popular music tended to by Bingenheimer and KROQ. In an interview conducted in 2010, Carducci discussed the effect of Bingenheimer’s KROQ’s programming:
KROQ was great until about ’82…and so when the first Black Flag album came out, Damaged, and the first X album came out, KROQ was kind of formatless. They had been like a hip, R&B rock and roll oldies station when they got their hands on the license. And so this is like ’76, ’77, ’78, and then they went with punk rock and they had Rodney Bingenheimer doing the real local show and the musician show…the Blondie guys and Debbie Harry and the Ramones and different people would call in when they were doing stuff and he would say ‘oh, wow, cool, wow.’ He was like an Ed Sullivan, no real skills as an interviewer but it was a great show and it was accessible. That was the main thing. People heard that. Naomi [Petersen, photographer for SST Records, subject of Carducci’s Enter Naomi: SST, LA. And All That], as a teenager in Simi Valley, heard stuff, heard the Damned, heard the Sex Pistols, heard X, Black Flag, Television…this is all before… regular media’s blockading it, but in blockading it they retarded the actual flow of American music, and so now when you listen to rock, you no longer hear any blues component, or any R&B, or any rockabilly, or any kind of…any of that American…the whole train of twentieth century music got neutered by that blockade. And so what they allowed to let come in tended to be British New Wave stuff, which of course has none of that—the Cure and the Smiths, there’s just no blues, no American component.40
35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid.
38 Mayor of the Sunset Strip (2003)
39 D. Joseph Carducci, Rock and The Pop Narcotic: Testament for the Electric Church (Revised Edition) (Los Angeles: 2.13.61, 1994): 172.
40 “WHAT-TV: In Contact With” uploaded to YouTube 26 August 2010 by jackroll multimedia (last accessed 17 August 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aEi9ZCVZT4
The British New Wave that Carducci mentions emerged from glam rock (sometimes referred to as glitter rock or glitter), another British form that was imported then synthesized decades later into glam metal. That specific cultural exchange between British and American bands and artists had been a fixture of rock and roll since the mid-1960s: Paul Revere and the Raiders, in LA (1964 from Boise, Idaho [1959] via Portland, Oregon [1962]), were an American garage band who responded to the commercial metrics created by the British Invasion by performing in matching outfits modeled on American Revolutionary military dress and tailored to Mod standards (e.g., slim fitting Nehru jackets) and, in one instance, adopting British diction. On “Him or Me—What’s It Gonna Be?” (1967), lead singer Mark Lindsay, from 0:43 to 1:00, speaks directly to his girlfriend who he suspects has been unfaithful: “I can still recall/When you told me I was all/Everything you look for in a man/But I know that it’s not true/I’ve seen the way he looks at you/And I think you’re gonna hang me up again.” Throughout the aside, Lindsay’s spoken diction sounds quite unlike his vocal phrasing; in placing special emphasis on the t in “but I,” Lindsay causes the sound to remain a voiceless alveolar stop (e.g., the t in stop) though
conventional American English diction would, in this instance, cause the t’s sound to become a voiced alveolar stop (e.g., the d in debt). Lindsay’s over-pronunciation would have indicated Britishness inside the band’s American version of an American form and, in that suggests a deliberate (and ultimately successful) attempt at increasing the band’s market share. In the confines created by American cultural protectionism, the Raiders and their producer Terry Melcher, acting on behalf of Columbia Records, understood the commercial value of
counterfeiting style points to obscure the strict distinction between foreign and domestic. The English Disco’s closing was, for Bingenheimer, the catastrophe that followed glam’s collapse in the United States and though his work for KROQ lacked the social splendor he had enjoyed it would afford him a place of prominence in American music. Despite his initial interest in local bands and what had become, through that music, a rock and roll revival in Southern California, Bingenheimer had taken the music format from his nightclub and made its updated form the on air format for his radio show: Bowie says that Bingenheimer knew English bands better than he did41; Joan Jett, commenting on Bingenheimer’s influence, says “[he introduced] not just me but really, I think, America [to new music]”42; Courtney Love, “he likes things with hooks. He likes things that are catchy. He likes things that are buzzy. He likes good-looking English boys. He gets the joke about almost every good band…he just has an aesthetic.”43 That aesthetic is and was glam balladry and schmaltz backed by rock and roll instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums), divorced from the blues tradition and situated inside pop arrangements, themselves subsumed into the high-pretense and theatricality of its performers; it is music that appears to be rock and roll. Indeed, the visual construct associated with rock and roll was birthed by glam (e.g., T.Rex’s Electric Warrior is emblematic) not actual rock and roll (here, Iggy Pop is a notable anomaly); Carducci: “Glitter and related styles played perversely with rock symbolism and rock music itself. As a European conceit, glitter was rooted in a symbolic castration of an all too potent American form. Glitter was then a path by which foreigners contemptuous of the grubby American form and America itself could ‘steal’ the music. The music itself was only important to the glitter ‘rockers’ for the license allowed the stars of the form [sic].”44 To glam artists, rock and roll’s presumably masculine energy resides in the guitar, not the rhythm section, with the
41 Mayor of the Sunset Strip (2003) 42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
corollary being an absence of a rhythmic sensibility and physicality, but also the guitar’s prominence, in the music (N.B.: David Bowie’s imitation/simulation of oral sex on Mark Ronson’s guitar). Whether this was because glam artists understood rock and roll and could therefore subvert it musically is an open question though the quote from drummer Bill Bruford (ex-King Crimson, ex-Yes), published in the Wall Street Journal in 1987, about Britain being “one of the world’s most determinedly unrhythmic nations”45 suggests that glam’s appropriation of rock and roll largely served the form’s overarching theatrical considerations. Carducci
emphasizes that in Britain “glitter was full scale pop music…as it appeared just after the most important musical contribution the British made (systematizing the modern hard rock/heavy band: Cream, [Black] Sabbath, Zeppelin…), and just prior to the virtual collapse of rock in England, it’s easy to picture Glitter [sic] as the surrender to a coming aesthetic decadence.”46 In 1981, the Cure’s Robert Smith made clear: “we’re not a rock and roll group. We are in a sense because we’re at the moment in the syndrome of playing bass, drums, and keyboards and guitar and we go on tour…but I mean we’ve got actually nothing to do with a general idea of rock and roll [emphasis added].”47 Smith has been the Cure’s only permanent member since the band’s formation in the late 1970s and his status, taken together with the Cure’s longevity, recalls Warner Brothers’ A&R manager Joe Smith’s comment that “you can take three people out of Uriah Heep and put three others in, and it won’t make a hell of a lot of difference.”48
Interchangeability, in this respect, differentiates forms such rock and pop rock from rock and roll, the distinction being each form’s investment in the generative potential of the band format, specifically that format’s function in each form’s creative process.
[Der Tummeler49]
Van Halen supplied California to Reagan America. That product, like Ronald Reagan, formed a pure sign50: to writer and semiotician Marshall Blonsky, Reagan was a “pleasure president in a consumer pleasureland. He is in the White House but he acts as if he were not. He lives a short workday and has a long fun day. He is the man of the moment, standing for American
resurgence.”51 Similarly, Van Halen’s appetites informed the band’s approach, and Roth’s ongoing commentary—“a lot of people think that a VH tour is just one long orgy with a few stops on stage in between. Well, let me tell you—they're right”—presented, for the band, a short workday and a long fun day (the band’s 1979 tour, in support of Van Halen II, was called the World Vacation Tour). Van Halen, at the time, was composed of exiles—Roth being from Indiana, bassist Michael Anthony (b. Michael Anthony Sobolewski), Chicago, Edward
(commonly, Eddie) and Alexander (Alex), the Netherlands (Eddie was born in Nijmegen, Alex, Amsterdam)—whose individual biographies were subsumed into the musical product they 45 Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, 351.
46 Ibid, 333.
47 Fast Forward cassette magazine (008–009, 1981) quoted in Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, 351.
48 Joe Smith, quoted in Steve Chapple and Reebee Garofalo, Rock ‘n’ Roll is Here to Pay: The History and Politics
of the Music Industry (1978) quoted in Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, 97.
49 “Tummeler” is derived from the Standard German verb “tummeln” (to romp around, to hurry up) and is Yiddish for an entertainer who, often as a supporting or opening act, increases audience excitement and involvement in the overall performance.
50 Umberto Eco (Vanity Fair, June 1984) quoted in Marshall Blonsky “The Agony of Semiotics: Reassessing the Discipline” Marshall Blonsky (ed.), On Signs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985): XL.
created. Since that product’s theme of leisurely pleasure aligned closely—or close enough—with perceptions of California as something of a Utopia, Van Halen’s actual and assumed identities were fully Californian.
In City of Quartz, Davis mentions that Adorno and the other European exiles were “tormented by their own incestuous choice [emphasis added]”52 to preface his discussion of how effortless isolation was in LA. Van Halen’s early history demonstrates, again, the city’s inevitabilities: factionalized, its social communities became incestuous as an assurance toward proper societal functioning:
But the fastest moving of the unsigned bands appears to be Van Halen, a heavy metal quartet from Pasadena. The group, which was added to Sparks’ New Years Eve show at the Santa Monica Civic after doing well at the Whisky, is built around Jimmy Page-ish guitarist Edward Van Halen and Robert Plant-Jim Dandyish lead singer David Roth. Rodney Bingenheimer, a veteran of the local rock scene and currently a big booster of punk-rock on his Sunday evening KROQ radio show, first saw Van Halen last summer at Gazzarri's on the Sunset Strip. ‘They were just doing Top 40 stuff, but I was impressed and asked them if they had any original material,’ Bingenheimer said as he sat in a rear booth at the Whisky on Saturday. ‘They told me I should drop by and see their show at the Pasadena Civic. When I got there, they had something like 2000 kids in the place. They had put the show together themselves. Amazing.’ ‘I took Gene Simmons of Kiss to see them and he liked them so much he flew them to New York and cut a demo album on [sic] them. I wouldn't be surprised to see them signed and on a big tour soon. They should be playing the Forum as a support act by the end of the year.’53
Van Halen released their first record, Van Halen (the photographs that constitute the record’s cover art were shot at the Whisky a Go Go; note the placement of both Eddie Van Halen’s guitar and Roth’s microphone), 10 February 1978 and toured as the opening act for Ted Nugent and for Black Sabbath throughout the year. Simmons’s official involvement ended before the band signed with Warner Bros., on the advice of Kiss manager Bill Aucoin54 and Casablanca Records. Ted Templeman, who had produced Van Halen’s first record and would remain the band’s producer on the records with Roth, produce Roth’s early solo work, and continue working with the band until the early 1990s and who was known prior to 1978 for producing records by the Doobie Brothers and Montrose, had, according to Aucoin, suggested the band replace Roth with Hagar because Hagar was a better singer. Aucoin mentions this as being among the reasons why he did not sign Van Halen. Despite the advice, Roth remained in the band, and between 1978 and 1984, Van Halen released six records and played live nearly 700 times.
Until Roth’s departure a year later, Van Halen’s music remained in stasis, presumably because the relevant musical trends that would have compelled its aesthetic evolution were those it had started. The band aggregated and leavened late period psychedelia (ca. 1970–1975) by further disconnecting the music from its blues tradition. In that, Van Halen made the guitar the band’s lead voice inside song arrangements, which meant negating the rhythm section’s autonomy and potential for aggression and narrowing the breadth of the guitar’s musicality inside the band 52 Davis, 343.
53 Robert Hilburn, “Homegrown Punk”, LA Times, 4 January 1977.
54 “Bill Aucoin on why he didn’t sign Van Halen” uploaded to YouTube 17 August 2012 by Metalfavs (last accessed 17 August 2014), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-pOx0G5wgg
format. Eddie Van Halen mentions guitarist Eric Clapton’s work with Cream as being especially influential:
What guitar players were you most influenced by?
Van Halen: That's a toughie, really. But I'd say the main one, believe it or not, was Eric Clapton. I mean, I know I don't sound like him?
You’re more like Hendrix or [Richie] Blackmore [ex-Deep Purple, ex-Rainbow]. Van Halen: Yeah, I know. I don't know why, because Hendrix I like, but I was never into him like I was Clapton. And Clapton, man, I know every solo he ever played, note-for-note, still to this day.
You memorized them?
Van Halen: Oh, yeah! I used to sit down and learn that stuff note-for-note off the record. The live stuff, like ‘Spoonful’, ‘I'm So Glad’ live…all that stuff. But Hendrix too.55 The questions and answers are from a discussion, later published by Guitar.com, that Van Halen considers his “first major interview”. Preceding the exchange quoted above, Van Halen said this about his approach:
What’s your strategy for playing guitar within the band?
Van Halen: I do whatever I want. I don't really think about it too much. I’d say that's the beauty of being in this band, that everyone pretty much does what [text missing—BM] Do you leave yourself room for onstage experimentation?
Van Halen: Oh, yeah, definitely. Half the time I forget the solos I played on the record. Everything is pretty spontaneous, you know. It’s not so set. We used to have a keyboard player, and I hated it, because you have to play everything exactly the same all the time with the guy. You couldn't noodle, like in between vocal lines, because he’d be doing something to fill it up. And I didn't dig it, because I played too much. Sometimes I guess too much. But I like to play my guitar. I don't want someone else filling where I want to fill it. I’ve always liked to play three-piece, because I just play too much, I guess.56 The concessions made inside the band to accommodate Eddie Van Halen’s virtuosity are extant in the music’s construction, prominently, the elimination of backbeat and the fertile space and tension or “undertow”57 it opens and forms inside blues-based song arrangements (as former lead singer Cherone mentioned in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, “I have no reference point as to how close anybody was during the Sammy era or during the Dave era. But during my 55 “A Legend is Born: Eddie Van Halen’s First Interview” Guitar.com (last accessed 17 August 2014),
http://www.guitar.com/articles/legend-born-eddie-van-halens-first-interview 56 Ibid.
period, I think the cue was Eddie. If Eddie is happy, then the camp is happy. Alex is happy.”58). Led Zeppelin’s and the Allman Brothers Band’s music extended out from the blues tradition and features keyboard instruments. These players’ effectiveness in rock and roll live performance suggests an internalizing of the performance considerations and sensibilities they and rock and roll had inherited from rock and roll’s constituent forms (e.g., blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, hillbilly, country and western, et al.). It is unclear why Van Halen, given his skills, could not improvise onstage around the keyboardist’s static arrangement; it is likely that the keyboardist was removed from the band because the instrument, at the time, was unnecessary to the band’s presentation and music whereas a rhythm section was required to connect the band materially to rock and roll’s band format. In musical terms, Van Halen’s rhythm section served the guitarist’s hyperactivity (from Cherone: “Everybody has their idiosyncrasies. How I explain it is, if [Eddie] puts on his guitar, he can fluently talk to you. When he takes off the guitar, he can be a little ADD”59) and the music that emerged is the band’s attempt to accompany what Van Halen had composed in abstentia (e.g., “Eruption”). Guitarist Jimi Hendrix said that guitarists have “got to know much more than just the technicalities of notes, [they’ve] got to know sounds and what goes between the notes.”60 Hendrix, according to biographer David Henderson in ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky, “tried to get across the message that the funk, the feel and the boogie of the blues came from a subtle rhythmic combination of which the guitar played an essential role but never got the credit.”61 It is this approach that is the difference between Hendrix and what Carducci calls the “virtuoso-oriented” approach of Clapton and, later, Van Halen. Clapton and Hendrix are both virtuosic players but their approaches amplified minimalism toward
transcendence via the music’s physicality or heaviness; Van Halen’s unrestrained approach maximized the maximal, the space between notes filled with more notes, consonant with the music’s cultural setting in which, to quote Liberace quoting Mae West, too much of a good thing was wonderful. On record, the music’s components resonated and reverberated familiarly: the guitarist had tuned down half a step from concert pitch, a technique popular among contemporary blues guitarists to make string bending easier but probably done in Van Halen to make it easier for Roth to sing in key. Detuning also created a moderately denser guitar sound, which, combined with amplification and effects hardware, became what Van Halen later described as his “brown sound” (i.e., warm, midrange). The band’s commitment to using condensed pop arrangements to serve the exigencies of late-period psychedelic’s melodrama was productive efficiency: Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven” (1971) build’s to its climax over about six minutes, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” (1973), five minutes, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (1975), four minutes, and the Eagles’ “Hotel California” (1977), four and a half minutes. It is worth noting that the climactic moments in the aforementioned take place because of guitar solos. Van Halen’s song formatting, then, delivered what the others did but condensed it all inside four minutes: songs’ introductions, bridges, crescendos to choruses, solos, and finales could be used to express a similar energy more often. Whether it was fully the tension and release Led Zeppelin had achieved seemed to matter only to those invested in rock and roll’s musical traditions,
specifically the blues, which, by the late-1970s, likely signified the opposite of progress. The 58 Andy Greene, “Gary Cherone Reflects on his Three-Year Stint in Van Halen” RollingStone.com (10 February 2012) (last accessed 17 August 2014), http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/gary-cherone-reflects-on-his-three-year-stint-in-van-halen-20120210
59 Greene, “Gary Cherone Reflects on his Three-Year Stint in Van Halen”
60 Jimi Hendrix quoted in Hit Parader (January 1970) quoted in Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, 158. 61 David Henderson, ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: The Life of Jimi Hendrix (1983) quoted in Carducci, Rock and
“bluesmen never ‘turned on’”62 a decade previous, and their legacy inside psychedelia associated with barbiturates, not stimulants. New music needed only to suggest rock and roll’s traditions, which could be done via the assembly that accompanied the music (i.e., the band format) but from which the music was largely disconnected. Kiss’s first few records are filled with songs the band had written and performed as Wicked Lester; absent the elaborate production Kiss had attached to it, the music sounds like so much else that was being played on album-oriented rock or AOR stations at the time. The band’s influence on music made since 1975 is, however, profound and with the success of the records made with the original line-up (1974–1980), in particular two live records (1975, 1977), there was incentive to assimilate that spectacle. Van Halen’s dependability in this is remarkable: something happens in the music about every ten to 15 seconds and except for drum solos and occasional spoken improvisation by Roth (notably on “Ice Cream Man” and “Everybody Wants Some!!” from a 1982 show in Largo, Maryland), live arrangements do not deviate from those on record, ensuring a constancy between the band’s recorded and live output.
The band’s dissolution in 1985 and the fallout from it led to a more coherent understanding about how Van Halen’s principals understood the band’s creative process. To the Van Halens, Roth’s hyperactivity served the interests of the music they made with him but as an untrained vocalist he was a restraint on the band’s creativity (from Cherone: “Eddie became a different songwriter during the Hagar years. He became more of a craftsman”63). To Roth, Van Halen was a contemporary big band orchestra that offered him a setting to demonstrate his skills as an entertainer (in autumn 1995, Roth debuted his Non Stop Blues Bustin’ Mambo Slammers adult lounge act in Las Vegas, whose set list included three Van Halen songs). In interviews conducted to 1985, Roth does not offer substantive commentary about Van Halen’s creative process and his autobiography Crazy From The Heat (1987) deals in variations on:
I was there with these two girls once; they were strippers. They said ‘Dave, we’d like you to go upstairs, the two of us, with you.’ So I said, ‘Okay’. It…was hot and sweaty and humid…one of the girls had $1500 in singles and fives and tens, her end-of-the-week tips and pay and everything in her G-string. Nobody noticed, you know, when the G-string came undone—well, I noticed—nobody noticed the money, like, floating around. I woke up at some point around dawn, the two of them were asleep, and all three of us were covered with money, every square inch of skin had a dollar bill pasted to it—there was nothing but. The whole bed was covered with bills. Our bodies were covered with bills. There was [sic] bills in my underwear. Take a little picture of that.64
In the quotes (“DLR Rothisms”65) assembled by the Diamond David Lee Roth Army (“In Roth We Trust” at RothArmy.com), there is:
62 Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, 323.
63 Greene, “Gary Cherone Reflects on his Three-Year Stint in Van Halen”.
64 David Lee Roth, Crazy from the Heat (New York: Hyperion Books, 1997) quoted in “Crazy from the Heat” Google Books (last accessed 17 August 2014), http://books.google.nl/books?id=sIypAAAACAAJ&dq=inauthor: %22David+Lee+Roth%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=64fwU_isJqrQ0QXD6YHICA&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAw 65 “Rothisms: The World According to Diamond David Lee Roth”, RothArmy.com (1 November 2012) (last accessed 17 August 2014), http://rotharmy.com/forums/content.php?45
“After you take out the managers’ percentage, the agents’ percentage, the money for the roadies, the lighting, the trucks, the buses, the sound and everything, the most I'll probably see as far as money goes after it’s all said and done, is...an island.”
“When asked to describe himself in six words or less: ‘Sugar, starch, fat, grease and alcohol!’…‘Grease’ he rubbed his fingers in the ‘money’ sign.”
“I used to have a drug problem, now I make enough money.”
“Whatever guy said that money don't buy you pleasure didn’t know where to go shopping.”
“Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.”
“When I put on a show, you’re gonna get your bang for the buck. The only responsibility I feel toward the audience is to maximize my inspirations and imaginations 100 percent. Well, I got imagination the size of Texas. And that costs a lot of money. It starts right with the band. I’m not gonna bring you some ill-rehearsed horseshit, with sub-par musicians because I could pay them less. I’m gonna bring you one hundred slammin’ days rehearsal where most people are gonna give you ten. You know how much that costs? In terms of the staging, the lights and the whatever? Wow! So once that 33 percent is gone, all the rest I used up for the show. Yeah, I could have cut back. I could also have another name and be a different artist, too. I don't cut back. I'd rather die than be the last guy up the hill. Period. Peri-fuckin’-id.”
Roth, alarmingly low on self-awareness, mentioned in an interview with DJ Jim Ladd: “there’s a tremendous amount of businessmen on stage these days.”66 It is unlikely Roth will offer much insight into the music’s assembly since he was not so much a part of it. Hilburn’s suggestion that Roth resembled Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin and Jim Dandy (b. James Mangrum) from Black Oak Arkansas misunderstands Plant’s work in Led Zeppelin and the extent of Roth’s resemblance to Mangrum. Concerning the former, like the other members of Led Zeppelin, Plant was deeply versed in blues music67 and contributed heavily to the band’s aesthetic and musical approaches; as for the latter, physically, Roth looked and dressed like Mangrum but while Mangrum was raised Southern Baptist in rural Arkansas (population 286 in the 2000 US census), his success, also in LA, signified fatalist defiance against a creeping reckoning (Mangrum mentioned in an interview from 2011 that the recording industry has “stolen” about $4 million from him68). Roth 66 “David Lee Roth *Full Interview* with Jim Ladd 1982” uploaded to YouTube 5 May 2013 by 1984rockcity (last accessed 17 August 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJaaVBF40RY
67 Carducci: “Led Zeppelin had succeeded in incorporating elements of their folk tradition in their music, but this was well after grounding themselves in American blues and rock and roll. The depth of this grounding was quite impressive among the Brit bands of this era…In the late eighties in Chicago Robert Plant noticed that his chauffeur’s name was Hayden Thompson and after confirming that it was the Hayden Thompson who recorded at Sun [formally, Sun Studio] in the fifties began to serenade him with, ‘Fairlane Rock,’ his one barely issued Sun 45—and Plant was just the damned singer!” Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, 351.
68 Adam Sheets, “Jim Dandy to the rescue: an interview with a Southern rock icon” NoDepression.com (14 March 2011) (last accessed 17 August 2014), http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/jim-dandy-to-the-rescue-an
was raised Jewish and wealthy69 and with close contact to the music industry through his uncle, club owner Manny Roth70. In “[transcending] the neurotic outsider artistic voice”71 expressed by Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce, Roth signified success as determined by profit-taking and sexual conquest and interpreted his success as anti-Semitism’s defeat:
Every step I took on that stage was smashing some Jew-hating, lousy punk ever deeper into the deck. Every step. I jumped higher ’cause I knew there was going to be more impact when I hit those boards. And if you were even vaguely anti-Semitic, you were under my wheels, motherfucker. That’s where the lyrics came from, that’s where the body language came from, that’s where the humor came from, and where the fuck you came from.72
Roth was the male audience’s surrogate and as an untrained vocalist performing over Eddie Van Halen’s virtuosity he conveyed not solely possibility but also fulfillment. Inside the band’s corporate culture, it was necessary that the songs’ lyrics rely on sexual suggestion since anything explicit on record would have compromised radio play. Roth’s narcissism aside, the frequent references to the contents of his sex life (during the early 1980s, Roth had his sperm insured for $1,000,000) served both the band’s and the musical products’ interests. It is rather significant, given what it suggests about the party atmosphere inside the band, about the depth of Van Halen’s awareness concerning his abilities and, more abstractly, about Van Halen’s break with the blues tradition that Eddie Van Halen smiled onstage while performing.
Van Halen’s success to 1985 clarified (perhaps flattened) then exaggerated glam rock’s themes inside its residual musical conventions. Glam rock died a public death in LA in 197473 and in the four years between that and Van Halen’s first record, glam rock, now updated by the music that would become known as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, became glam metal. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal is a generic and journalistic convention though the bands
associated with it, specifically Judas Priest and later Iron Maiden, shared glam rock’s interest in theatricality74 and its fixation on the guitar but understood the guitar’s capacity inside their respective productions, as fully, not ornamentally, musical. Like glam rock, glam metal emerged outside most of rock and roll’s aesthetic and musical traditions: Judas Priest’s rhythm section changed frequently75 between 1974 and 1992 though the band’s detachment from an early interest in blues-based music performance negated the aesthetic and musical damage that upheaval can cause. Judas Priest’s sound was formed by guitarists KK Downing and Glenn Tipton and lead vocalist Rob Halford, and their approach indicated that twinned aggressive, virtuosic, and ornate 69 Roth’s father Nathan, a surgeon and actor, was featured on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. “Dr. Nathan Roth (father of David Lee Roth)” uploaded to YouTube 1 July 2012 by MrHunkalicious (last accessed 17 August 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcOC26RWOww
70 Manny Roth founded (1959), owned, and operated (until 1968) Café Wha? in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. 71 Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, 159.
72 Crazy from the Heat quoted in GM Admin, “Days Between Stations: Rants in their Pants (01/98)”
GreilMarcus.net (28 July 2014) (last accessed 17 August 2014), http://greilmarcus.net/2014/07/28/days-between-stations-rants-in-their-pants-0198/.
73 In October 1974 the Hollywood Palladium held a “Death of Glitter” concert featuring the New York Dolls and Iggy Pop. See Lance Loud, “Los Angeles 1972–1974: Glam rock loses its virginity” Details (July 1992).
74 See the cover art for Judas Priest’s Unleashed in the East (1979) and Iron Maiden’s use of the character/icon “Eddie” (also referred to as “Eddie the Head”) in the band’s live performances, cover art, and promotional material. 75 Between Halford joining in 1973 and the band’s pause in 1992, Judas Priest had six different drummers.
guitar performance, a wide vocal range (Halford is a low tenor76, registering at 4 octaves, C2-C#6), and lyrical themes derived from dualistic cosmology, presented inside pop arrangements would situate in the music the theatricality glam rock had required of its staging. Van Halen and Judas Priest played at the 1983 US Festival’s “Heavy Metal Day” (May 29th), which Van Halen headlined77. Before this and before Judas Priest reached market saturation (ca. 1976 and the Sad Wings of Destiny record, the band’s first record to be certified Gold in the United States), the similarity of Van Halen’s approach and, though not entirely, resultant sound to Judas Priest’s could be attributed to convergent evolution driven by a progressive/reconstructive approach to rock and roll composition that necessarily excluded rock and roll’s aesthetic base. That
reconstruction may have begun with the British approach to the American blues, which, in the examples offered by Cream’s and Ten Years After’s covers of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Spoonful” (written by Willie Dixon and released in 1960; Dixon released a version in 1970), demonstrate the musicians’ technical skill and for Cream, more so than Ten Years After, a feel for blues performance but also, in both instances, what American blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa, in discussing his preference for “the English interpretation of the blues,”78 refers to as “a certain sophistication.”79 The reader is encouraged to listen to versions by Americans Etta James and Canned Heat along with those by Cream and Ten Years After.
The continuity of Van Halen’s music relative to glam rock attracted Bingenheimer’s and, by extension, American radio’s interest. In the documentary about Bingenheimer, on an unidentified audio clip, Roth is heard saying, “I wanna thank Rodney Bingenheimer. Where—I see his hair right from here. Rodney’s the man who brought us here on the first track. So, he’s gonna be a good man on KROQ. And we’re gonna show our love for you. We love you Rodney,”80 which, given the detail about Bingenheimer’s work at KROQ (“he’s gonna be a good man on KROQ [emphasis added]”), confirms Bingenheimer’s early interest in the band and Van Halen’s
involvement in Bingenheimer’s resuscitation of glam: Carducci writes, “Van Halen debunked the idea that all metal was Heavy and therefore doomed to glower from the lower end of the charts at the trail of pretty boys lined up in front of radio’s broadcasting couch. In doing so they unleashed an avalanche of show-metal bands that on average weigh in somewheres [sic] between the Turtles, and the 1910 Fruitgum Company.”81 Glam metal’s “pretty boys” were mid-West/Rustbelt exiles—Bret Michaels (b. Bret Michael Sychak) from Poison is from Pennsylvania, Jani Lane (b. John Kennedy Oswald) from Warrant, Ohio—and the terrain of the avalanche Carducci mentions was the Sunset Strip. Van Halen dissolved in 1985 after David Lee Roth’s success as a solo artist became intolerable to Eddie and Alex Van Halen. Unlike them, Roth, at least publicly, did not appear to take any other band member’s success, or much of anything, personally—Eddie and Alex Van Halen have had ruinous fallings-out with bassist Anthony over his line of hot sauces and with Hagar over his successful nightclub/restaurant chain and tequila brand, Cabo Wabo, and for his lyrics to the band’s song “Amsterdam” though these may have served as credible
backdrops for impending personnel changes, specifically the replacement of Anthony in 2006 76 “Rob Halford(Judas Priest) [sic] vocal range” Musical-Elegy.tumblr.com (last accessed 17 August 2014), http://musical-elegy.tumblr.com/post/64527421821/rob-halford-judas-priest-vocal-range
77 Van Halen’s contract with US Festival specified both that the band would be paid 1 million (USD) and that no other performer at the Festival would be paid more.
78 Ivan Chopik, “Joe Bonamassa Interview” Guitar Player Magazine (10 November 2007), reprinted at
http://archive.today/IQKzK (last accessed 17 August 2014). 79 Ibid.
80 Mayor of the Sunset Strip (2003)
(officially, 2007) with Eddie Van Halen’s son Wolfgang as the band’s bassist—and the infighting between his initial departure and the band’s reformation in 2007 portrayed him as the more reasonable among the hostile parties. Van Halen continued using synthesizers, played by Eddie Van Halen, after the success of the band’s songs “Jump” and “I’ll Wait” from 1984 while Roth used session musicians, notably guitarist Steve Vai, to assemble a band modeled on Van Halen. Between 1985 and 1989, Roth’s output appeared to eclipse the reconstituted Van Halen’s, which suggested that among Van Halen’s musical voices, Eddie Van Halen’s was interchangeable (Vai was voted Best Rock Guitarist of 1986 in Guitar Player magazine) and Roth’s was the more entertaining. Roth also made especially good use of music videos: while he overestimates their aesthetic accomplishment and effect—“California Girls and Just a Gigolo are the Wizard Of Oz of pop video. And a dozen years later, they’re still very, very popular. There are hardly any videos by other artists that you can name; made, say, from ten years ago, that are still popular today. Go ahead, try to name some. You can’t”82—they indicated at the time of their release Roth’s ability to see the artistic and commercial potential in a medium that was still in its infancy, MTV having begun broadcasting in 1981 and music videos featuring filmmaking being about two years old (the world premiere, on MTV, of Michael Jackson’s Thriller was 2 December 1983). In the intervening years, the record industry had created separate growth industries inside glam metal from glam metal’s components. Dee Snider (Twisted Sister, ex-Widowmaker) discusses the record industry’s event and supply chains:
So they start—cookie cutter. They stamp ‘em out. And then they figure, the more they can formulate it, the better it is for the record company. So then they find, ‘hey, if we get this band, we get this costume designer, we get this video director, this producer, this
songwriter, and there are names: Desmond Child, Bruce Fairbairn, Marty Callner, Flow (b. Fleur Thiemeyer), who was married to Michael Tramp (ex-White Lion) for a while, you get these people, you dress them up, you produce them, you write their songs, you put ‘em out, then you release a credibility track, that’s the rock track, which only goes to rock radio, but then you release the power ballad and they sell a million records. This is the record company’s idea.83
The hit compilations that began to be released a decade later indicate the disparity among each division’s musical considerations and the extents to which each had debased rock and roll’s aesthetic approach (q.v., Monsters of Rock). The glam metal scene’s extended collapse hit surface zero following the success of bands from the American Northwest (more commonly but
problematically “grunge” or the Seattle scene). Those in the bands that were part of, or that had become associated with, glam metal suggest the scene’s collapse was attributable to the record industry and MTV, though problematically with the latter:
MTV helped and it hurt. It helped in that here was a new medium that was looking for visual acts, and heavy metal bands always were into the visual side of things…they found that the heavy metal bands were ready to go. They were camera ready.84
82 Nathan Rabin, “David Lee Roth’s Crazy from the Heat”, AVClub.com (18 January 2010) (last accessed 17 August 2014), http://www.avclub.com/article/david-lee-roths-icrazy-from-the-heati-37187
83 “Dee Snider about the decline of heavy metal (NRK Lydverket)” uploaded to YouTube 11 December 2008 by Reisverket (last accessed 17 August 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2BOJ-94IMg
84 “Who killed metal??? (NRK Lydverket)” uploaded to YouTube 13 October 2008 by Reisverket (last accessed 17 August 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3QE21khBHI
– Dee Snider
MTV helped Judas Priest, particularly in America. We were one of the first bands to go live on air with MTV. It was no doubt that the videos we made were played on MTV.85 – Rob Halford, Judas Priest
MTV saved me five years of hard touring around the world…made my business ten times bigger than it was, and I embraced that fantastic. MTV killed heavy metal.86
– David Coverdale, Whitesnake
The record industry is not the moving target MTV is:
If one’s good, a hundred’s better. And you went—ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. And you had the ‘W bands’—the White Lions, the Whitesnakes, the Wingers, Warrant. And it got so processed and so refined that it became Pablum. Fucking idiots. And then it got even worse, because then it was, ‘hey, I got an idea, let’s unplug.’ Thanks Tesla [Tesla covered the Five Man Electrical Band’s song “Signs” on their live record, Five Man Acoustical Jam, which was released in 1990 and peaked at number 8 on Billboard’s Pop Chart— B.M.]. What’s metal about that? So now all the metal bands are playing acoustic songs. Extreme. Mr. Big. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. And they had this whole unspoken thing on MTV, like, ‘if you can’t unplug, you’re not really a musician.’ You know what, go see Tracy Chapman or Paul Simon plug in to two Marshall stacks, and ride the lightning.87
– Dee Snider
You suddenly had the hair bands coming out, it was only about what they looked like, how many parties they could have, how many 14-year old girls they could pull after the show, and the music was rubbish, and they destroyed what the rest of us created, ‘cause everyone got lumped in together with them. There should be an emblem somewhere: ‘Poison killed everything’. Honestly, those kind of bands did do that…these things that come out, wear make-up, what’s all that about, that’s not metal, sorry, it’s just not…It just got too diluted, you know, it became more of a Bon Jovi world than it became the
Zeppelin world, and suddenly no one knows what it is anymore. When I began, and when I did the things that I did, luckily with the people I did it with, it was one form of music, it was hard rock. Suddenly you’re not what you were.88
– Ronnie James Dio, Black Sabbath, Rainbow, Dio
Dio’s and Snider’s ideas about what constitutes “metal” conflict at band presentation (Dio) and musical performance (Snider) and to the exclusion of both Dio’s and Snider’s bands, given Snider’s use of make-up and Dio’s acoustic work. The analysis of rock and roll’s development is imperiled by genre distinctions situated in staging and semantics rather than musical
85 Ibid.
86 “Who killed metal??? (NRK Lydverket)”
87 “Dee Snider on the Fall of Metal Music” uploaded to YouTube 28 May 2010 by cappper1 (last accessed 17 August 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOi3HcvKvbQ
considerations. Van Halen appears to have determined that the band’s performance effect was underserved by a blues tradition that in musical terms equated to forced restraint. The simulacra that emerged from the success of that decision, the “show-metal bands”, were attempts to replicate effect. In an interview with Metal-Rules.com, guitar virtuoso Richie Kotzen (in LA from Reading, Pennsylvania), who replaced CC DeVille in Poison, discusses his work with the band and the band’s sensibilities:
Despite the controversy, do you think being in Poison helped you grow as a musician or not?
Being in Poison helped me grow my bank account for a year, but grow as a musician? Are you serious? Being in Poison helped me forget I was a musician.
Do you think you fit, musically, in Poison, or not?
Well when I was in Poison I was the only one making any music so yes I fit musically. I’m not really sure if those guys even played on their own records before I got there, I know CC did. I know I played the bass on a few songs on Native Tongue. When I went on tour with them did I fit musically? Fuck no. I think if Rikki [Rockett, drummer] could have counted to four without getting confused89 it would have been easier to fit in. It was nothing personal. I think my mind was starting to rot away...G, C, D, over and fucking over—AHHHHHHH.90
Kotzen recorded and toured with supergroup Vertú before forming a band with Billy Sheehan, who had been a bassist for both Mr. Big and Roth’s early solo band and whose work experience further affirms Davis’s suggestion in City of Quartz about the ease of incestuous isolation inside LA’s communities. Poison’s Native Tongue was released in 1993 and was followed in 1996 by Poison’s Greatest Hits: 1986–1996, likely a stalking horse for the original band’s reunion and tour (since 1996, the band has released five hits compilations) inside what, at the time, appeared to be a hostile marketplace. In Mayor of Sunset Strip, KROQ’s mid-1990s embrace of bands in the nü-metal or rap-rock scene—Limp Bizkit and Korn being among the most notable—is presented as a glaring affront to Bingenheimer despite that scene being a large-scale affirmation of Bingenheimer’s own aesthetic sensibilities. Nü-metal constituted glam’s third wave as informed by the heavier strain of rock and roll that ran over ground from the early 1990s on, prominently in the Pacific Northwest (Nirvana, Soundgarden, the Melvins, et al.) and around the Gulf Coast (Eyehategod, Pantera, et al.). That strain of rock and roll developed via the influence of Black Flag and bands referred to problematically as American Hardcore, less problematically as those bands (e.g., Bad Brains, DOA, Minor Threat, the Circle Jerks, SSD, Saint Vitus, Flipper, et al.) whose audiences formed the bands that the nü-metal bands would eventually parody. 89 In Running with the Devil (1993): Robert Walser writes: “when I attended a Poison concert I discovered that their drummer, Rikki Rockett, was actually an excellent musician, whose featured solo was marked by sophisticated polyrhythms and rhetorical intelligence. I was surprised by this because his playing on Poison’s recordings had always been extremely simple, however accurate and appropriate. But Poison’s simplicity is constructed, like that of much American popular music throughout its history.” Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and
Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993): 128.
90 Keith McDonald, “Heart of Steel: Interviews” Metal-Rules.com, September 2004 (last accessed 17 August 2014), http://www.metal-rules.com/interviews/RichieKotzen-Sept2004.htm
[Solid State Technologies]
In the audience at Van Halen’s concert in Baltimore, Maryland in 197891, where the band was opening for Ted Nugent, was Henry Rollins (b. Henry Garfield). Rollins, writing at Van Halen fan website “Van Halen News Desk” (or VHND.com) in 2011, remembers:
I made my annual trip to the arena to see Ted Nugent. It was the best show you saw that year, every year. His band was lethal, and Nugent had amazing tone with that hollow body Gibson. What a show, what songs, what a man. On the third voyage to the Nuge there was a great change. There was an opening band that actually stayed in the memory. Usually the opener was a blur but this time it was a band called Van Halen. I remember they hit the stage and went into ‘Runnin’ With The Devil’ after Diamond Dave [David Lee Roth—B.M.] made his drum riser leap. He acted like his band was the headliner and there was no other band on that night.
I remember very well when Eddie performed ‘Eruption’ and the whole place was in disbelief. At the end of it, he looked down at his hands and shook his head like he didn’t know what came over him. It was amazing. The set was a monster.
Nugent came on a while later and a few songs in, people were chanting ‘Van-Ha-Len!’ over and over and waving newly bought VH t-shirts until the Nuge came to the front of the stage and yelled, ‘Fuck Van Halen!!!’ He then retreated to his cabinets and played the rest of the show looking down at his wedge monitors. Move over Ted!92
Three years later, Rollins moved from Arlington, Virginia to LA to become the lead singer for Black Flag, and, as Carducci remembers, “jumped right in and got to be a great vocalist—always riveting and sometimes…out there—a new archetype.”93 Rollins was with the band until its dissolution sometime in August 1986, and with him, Black Flag “fully resurrect[ed] the dormant greaser-garage band model, now hard rock-informed”94 and made “decent rock bands…once again a dime a dozen local phenomenon.”95 In a series of appendices in Rock and the Pop Narcotic, Carducci reproduces a defaced advertisement for Black Flag, which was published, originally, in No Mag in 1981 and features photos of Rollins and Black Flag’s guitarist Greg Ginn and bassist Chuck Dukowski (b. Gary McDaniel) and the graffito “UNitE AGAiNST SOCiETY!!”), “made for a nice pan-rock style statement in very sectarian times.”96 The histories concerning the emergence of the music referred to, not without problems, as punk and hardcore97 91 The concert was held 9 September 1978 at the Baltimore Civic Center.
92 Henry Rollins, “Henry Rollins on classic Van Halen” VHND.com (2 March 2011) (last accessed 17 August 2014), http://www.vhnd.com/2011/03/02/henry-rollins-on-classic-van-halen/
93 Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, 321. 94 Ibid.
95 Ibid. 96 Ibid, 475.
97 I presented a working draft of this paper at the University of Helsinki’s 15th Biennial Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference on North American Studies, held in May of this year. During questions, an audience member asked why I refer to Black Flag as rock and roll as opposed to punk. In response, I returned to the argument I had made earlier in the presentation concerning rock and roll’s aesthetic and phenomenological development and, with respect to Black Flag, paraphrased the following from Carducci: “We [i.e., SST Records] didn’t consider our bands punk. SST would get calls from casting agents looking for punk extras and Greg [Ginn] would laugh and tell them we didn’t know any punk rockers…We saw a lot of great bands, but what the world considered punk or hardcore we paid little
