Favorite Hair Metal bands, albums, songs

I'm nearly finished reading Nothin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion. A fun read, not super poignant or thought-provoking but a fitting tribute to partying, chasing girls, and rocking out - just like the music that it chronicles.

It's got me going back and listening to a lot of the music from my teenage years, bands that I saw live and enjoyed. My very first concert was Def Leppard. My favorite hair metal band was probably Cinderella. Tom Kiefer's voice was just unbelievable to me, and I loved the bluesier direction they took on Long, Cold Winter. I saw them on that tour, the last show before they left for the historic Moscow Peace and Music Festival, and they opened with this song that absolutely kicks ass to this day. I'll never forget it.


Over the last few days I made a hair metal playlist on Spotify, and it's now over eight hours long and has some great stuff on it.

What's some music from that era and genre that you remember, love, hate, whatever?

SAVATAGE!

Progressive Hair Metal...?

80's music is great. 80's hair.......not so much

I would say the first two Motley Crue lp’s. I quit following after that, got soft imo. Wasp had a couple songs I liked. I liked stay hungry by twisted sister. Was a good easy to learn rock album. I used to play to that album all the time. It wasn’t long until Metallica came along and kicked all their asses at that time. For me at least. It was a good time growing up back then.

Rds said:

I would say the first two Motley Crue lp’s. I quit following after that, got soft imo. Wasp had a couple songs I liked. I liked stay hungry by twisted sister. Was a good easy to learn rock album. I used to play to that album all the time. It wasn’t long until Metallica came along and kicked all their asses at that time. For me at least. It was a good time growing up back then.

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Motley Crue showed us that when you take the sex and drugs out of rock and roll, you get Hootie and the Blowfish.

My favs from that era? Crue, Stryper, Dokken, Queenryche, Night Ranger.... really too many to name.
But my ultimate favorites from that era weren't truly "hair" bands... Priest, Scorpions, Schenker, UFO, Rainbow, Purple, Rush, Nugent... of course, Sabbath/Ozzy/Dio.

It's rare that I currently listen to any of the hair bands today, other than Crue. The others, "Eurometal"... are staples.
Although with Dio... WTF was "Magica"?

Related.

I’ll have to look back. There’s alot I’m forgetting. Headbangers ball got saturated there for awhile. I tended to like stuff like AC/DC, priest, nugent at that time but the hair bands were everywhere also. Bands like white snake, black and blue, keil, autograph, lita ford, great white.

Many people laugh at hair metal, but it had one great advantage. The girls were on board for the ride on that one.

Elmore said:

Many people laugh at hair metal, but it had one great advantage. The girls were on board for the ride on that one.

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Oh, 100%. That's what made it work so well. Even the musicians themselves admit hair metal was largely marketing: good looking guys in tight pants with teased hair crooning power ballads for the ladies, but also rocking out on electric guitars and singing about partying and getting laid, which appealed to the guys.

It's a specific genre that a lot of other bands get lumped into, but hair metal was its own thing. A lot of similar bands that had crossover popularity weren't really hair metal: Guns n Roses, Aerosmith, KISS, etc. It was a 10-year window of bands that were very similar to each other, that exploded onto the scene then seemed to disappear just as quickly. At its core it was really just pop music done in a specific style.

Hated hair metal, and did my best to avod it at all costs.I was into Exodus and Venom then. However, Lynch Mob slipped through.

Kingdom come

CB91710 said:

Motley Crue showed us that when you take the sex and drugs out of rock and roll, you get Hootie and the Blowfish.

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Still laughing

The unquestionably best hair metal band of the 80s**




**In a survey of me.