Remember the 1980s when all the guys wanted to be cool and all the girls wanted to be hot? Remember the heavy metal and big hair bands of that era? Nothin’ But a Good Time captures the craziness and weirdness of that decade with over a hundred interviews with band members, agents, record executives, promoters, producers, engineers, publicists, stylists, costume designers, photographers, journalists, magazine publishers, video directors, club bookers, roadies, groupies, and assorted hangers-on.
Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock present the changing world of rock music at the beginning of the 1980s with groups like Twisted Sister, Motley Crue, Guns N’ Roses, and Van Halen. It was a time that excess led to success with huge arena concerts.
The effect of MTV on the industry was massive. Every group had to issue videos of their songs to get airplay. Touring increased. And as the decade ended, so did the popularity for this kind of music. Grunge Rock was on the horizon and many of these groups crashed and burned. Record companies wanted the next New Thing.
My favorite chapter in Nothin’ But a Good Time was Chapter 50: “Send the Check for the Nelsons–They’re Ready.” I knew Gunnar Nelson and Matthew Nelson were sons of Ricky Nelson, who died in 1985. But, I did NOT know how dire their predicament was: “Our father died when we were 18 years old. It was devastating. He was our best friend and our mom was a horrible excuse for a mother. She basically shot us out into the world. So when he died, it was literally like the rug was pulled out from under us, and we spent a year of our lives spending money we didn’t have, impressing people that didn’t matter, and just trying to medicate over our grief. We were sleeping on friends’ couches and living out of the trunk of a beat-up car.” (p. 357)
What music were you listening to in the 1980s? Were you a fan of heavy metal music? Did you have a favorite Eighties group? GRADE: A
Table of Contents:
Foreward by Corey Taylor — xi
Cast of Characters — xiii
Introduction — 1
PART I: EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!
CHAPTER 1: “The Pussy-Plucking-Posse Pocket of Hollywood” — 7
CHAPTER 2: “Dinosaur Music” — 15
CHAPTER 3: Interview: Michael Anthony of Van Halen — 20
CHAPTER 4: “Just Because Someone Says You Suck Doesn’t Mean You Don’t Suck” — 24
CHAPTER 5: “Rhymes with Rockin’ ” — 33
CHAPTER 6: “Blue-Black Hair and High Heels” — 42
CHAPTER 7: “Ratt ‘N’ Roll” — 52
CHAPTER 8: “Don’t Just Tackle the Quarterback—Break His Arms and Legs, Too” — 58
CHAPTER 9: “The Yellow and Black Attack” — 68
CHAPTER 10: “It’s Male Dominating. Macho-ism or Whatever” — 73
CHAPTER 11: “We Prayed in the Limo, Sure” — 83
CHAPTER 12: “We Know What We’re Doing, Fuck You!” — 88
CHAPTER 13: “Okay, Where’s the Knives?” — 91
PART II: FEEL THE NOIZE
CHAPTER 14: “Anthem Participatory Rock” — 98
CHAPTER 15: “This Is Gonna Go” — 105
CHAPTER 16: “Then I Got the Ozzy Gig…” — 113
CHAPTER 17: “When You’ve Got Nothin’, You’ve Got Nothin’ to Lose” — 117
CHAPTER 18: “I’m Not Running Any Fucking Circus!” — 124
CHAPTER 19: “You’ve Gotta Meet My Friend Axl” — 130
CHAPTER 20: “We Just Made It a Friggin’ Party” — 138
CHAPTER 21: “It’s Hard to Believe, But at that Time Jani Was Really Kind of Shy” — 144
CHAPTER 22: “Everybody Would Be Throwing Up, Passing Out, Hallucinating or Banging Outside” — 148
CHAPTER 23: “Pop Songs with Heavy Guitars” — 151
CHAPTER 24: “I Broke Nikki’s Nose. I Broke Tommy’s Nose. I Punched Poor Mick Just for the Heck of It” — 158
CHAPTER 25: “I Believe Our Bus Got Crabbed Out” — 164
CHAPTER 26: “George and Don Hated Each Other…Really Hated Each Other” — 169
CHAPTER 27: “Guns and Rose” — 177
CHAPTER 28: “For One Thing, We Never Wore Any Fucking Lipstick!” — 184
CHAPTER 29: “The Poison Thing ” — 192
PART III: KNOCK ’EM DEAD, KID
CHAPTER 30: “What? A Chick in Our Band?” — 203
CHAPTER 31: “The Girls Were Just, Like, Melting” — 208
CHAPTER 32: “People Didn’t Know Whether to Fuck Us or Fight Us” — 213
CHAPTER 33: “How Do I Get a Record Deal?” — 223
CHAPTER 34: “Our Hero is Gonna Fucking Split His Brains Open in Front of Us Right Now!” — 232
CHAPTER 35: Interview: Alan Niven, Guns N’ Roses and Great White Manager — 243
CHAPTER 36: “And We’ve Got the Pictures to Prove It” — 247
CHAPTER 37: “The Horniest Band in L.A.” — 255
CHAPTER 38: “Flyer Wars” — 263
CHAPTER 39: “If They Had Cameras Back Then That Whole Scene Would Be in Jail” — 271
CHAPTER 40: “It Felt Like Beatlemania” — 283
CHAPTER 41: “Garden State Music” — 287
CHAPTER 42: Interview – Dave “Snake” Sabo of Skid Row — 293
CHAPTER 43: “You Mean Slash Coulda Played the Chris Holmes Part?” — 297
CHAPTER 44: “We Never Even Knew We Had Money in Our Bank Accounts” — 309
PART IV: YOUTH GONE WILD
CHAPTER 45: “You Just Signed Kip Winger!” — 315
CHAPTER 46: “Michael Jackson Saw the Value in Poison” — 323
CHAPTER 47: “If You Put Tits on Him, He Could Run for Miss Texas” — 330
CHAPTER 48: “If You Look at the Clothing It’s All Pretty Outrageous, Innit?” –340
CHAPTER 49: “Saving Whales Doesn’t Sell Albums; Leather Pants Do” — 354
CHAPTER 50: “Send the Check for the Nelsons—They’re Ready” — 356
CHAPTER 51: Interview: Rick Krim, MTV Executive — 362
CHAPTER 52: “We Call Them, Uh, ‘Panty Wetters’ ” — 367
CHAPTER 53: “Fucked If I’m Gonna Do This Every Night.” –376
CHAPTER 54: “Tommy Lee Came to Our Room With a Plate. And He Had Shit on It.” — 379
CHAPTER 55: “Bon Jovi, Jr.” — 384
CHAPTER 56: “It Was Like Being on a Plane with 200 Gremlins” — 394
PART V: THE LAST MILE
CHAPTER 57: “Is It a Gun Problem or a Bat Problem?” — 405
CHAPTER 58: Interview: Steve Brown of Trixter — 411
CHAPTER 59: “The Scorpions Wanted Us Off the Tour After the First Night” — 415
CHAPTER 60: “Cherry Pie Guy” — 421
CHAPTER 61: Interview: Brian Baker of Junkyard — 427
CHAPTER 62: “What Comes Around Goes Around” — 431
CHAPTER 63: “It Was a Total Scene Out of Gunslinger or Something” — 441
CHAPTER 64: “The Girlfriends and Wives Didn’t Want Us There” — 452
CHAPTER 65: “The Party Cost a Quarter of a Million Dollars” — 457
CHAPTER 66: “It Was Like, ‘Fa-an-nu-no-nu-sh-abba-abba’ ” — 462
CHAPTER 67: “You’re Gonna Lose Half Your Audience” — 469
PART VI: SHUT UP, BEAVIS
CHAPTER 68: “38 Guns N’ Roses, 20 Ratts, 14 Warrants…” — 480
CHAPTER 69: “We Said, ‘Fuck It’ and Hung It Up” — 482
CHAPTER 70: “I Don’t Think Nirvana Ever Wanted to Kill Anyone’s Career” — 500
CHAPTER 71: “All of a Sudden You Were Radioactive” — 503
PART VII: EPILOGUE
CHAPTER 72: “This Is What We Do” — 512
Acknowledgements — 527
Notes — 529
Heavy metal spelled the end of listening to pop music for me. Never could get the attraction.
Patti, I attribute the popularity of Heavy Metal bands to MTV. The extravagance of the costumes, hair, and incessant beat proved to be a winning combination for a decade.
Heavy metal and hair bands never really appealed to me, although I’ll admit to a fondness for Guns ‘N’ Roses and Van Halen. A significant amount of my favorite 80s music came from U2 and REM. I don’t want to get too carried away here but I’d say REM might well be the most significant American band to emerge since the Sixties. And I certainly don’t want to take anything away from Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the other grunge bands that emerged in the early 90s. This looks like an interesting book.
Michael, I’m always curious about how different industries work. The music industry in the 1980s underwent a huge transformation as a result of MTV. Reading the insights of music industry insiders from that era gave me more of picture of the changes that were occurring.
No, no, no. I didn’t listen to it then, and have zero interest in reading about it now. In the ’80s I was listening mostly to oldies radio, WCBS-FM. I looked up what concerts we were going to in the ’80s. There was the big Simon & Garfunkel free concert in Central Park in September of 1981. There were doo wop concerts. Some others (from my old calendars): Crosby, Stills & Nash. The Beach Boys with Poco. Willie Nelson & Family. America & Three Dog Night (free), Four Seasons & Four Tops. Our first two Jimmy Buffett concerts. Marlboro Country Music Concert. Dion & Ronnie Spector. Roy Orbison (less than six months before he died) & Southside Johnny. Johnny Maestro & The Five Satins (free). Del Shannon (free). Carole King.
Jeff, I listened to all those performers and groups you mention, but I watch a lot of MTV in 1980s, too. Def Leppard was one of my favorite Heavy Metal groups.
Jeff, seems we have similar favourites!
I just looked up the Billboard 100 for 1980 and 1981 – and didn’t know most of the groups nor remember the song titles!
Wolf, I have the BILLBOARD CDs for HITS OF 1980 and 1981.
This was the dumbing down period of rock, especially in America. I hated this music. Especially Hair Metal. There were still good bands coming out of the 80’s such as Midnight Oil, U2, REM, Sonic Youth, The Pixies, New Order to name a few.
Certainly don’t want to read about it.
Steve, I listened to U2 and The Pixies, too.
Well, the more commercial side or rock was dumbed down well before the advent of hair metal.
Todd, just watching a batch of Tic-Toe videos can erode your IQ by a few points!
Not really a fan of head-banger music.
I do have a couple of Def Lepard albums but that’s the extent of it.
Beth, I have a number of DEF LEPPARD CDs and they boosted my energy durning the Pandemic!
The Stones had 4 albums released in the ‘80s, though perhaps not their best. I didn’t watch MTV except a handful of times to check it out. I recall seeing Van Halen, Guns & Roses, Whitesnake. I did like Black Sabbath’s first album, that had “Iron Man” on it. Probably my favorite 80s albums were Eliminator, Afterburner and Recycler, all by ZZ Top. I played the heck out of those.
Speaking of the Stones and the ’80s…Jackie bought a DVD (which we watched Saturday night) of what Wikipedia claims was the first pay-for-view concert ever, the Stones in Hampton, Virginia, December 13, 1981. You can see how Mick stays thin, running around the stage like a maniac, sweating like a pig. It wasn’t bad – I like a lot of their songs – but I have never been a big fan of theirs the way George is. My favorite Stones album remains LET IT BLEED.
Jeff, I’m a huge fan of EXILE ON Main Street! Surprisingly, I’m not much of a fan of the Stones’s live performances.
Since I am known as a world-class theologian, George, let me tell you my concept of Hell. You are place on a long, moving ramp that cannot go in reverse. On each side are fires and razor blades. The ramp take you down deeper and deeper into the darkness, until you come to the end of a long tunnel. There are two doors there. One says “gangster rap” and the other says “heavy metal.” You must choose one.
I’d say this piece is a pretty good example of how most of us live in cultural bubbles, even if we think out taste is expansive. I worked in a number of university town record stores in the eighties. Like all of my coworkers at the time, I listened to what was then referred to as “college rock.” That meant Kate Bush and early Peter Gabriel followed by Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Joe Jackson and XTC then LOTS of 4AD artists like The Cocteau Twins, Throwing Muses, Lush and early Pixies. By decades end it was Husker Du, The Replacements, The dB’s and R.E.M. (the first two albums). I also listened to a huge amount of classical, a big chunk of jazz and what was then called “international music” via those wonderful Nonesuch Explorer albums. By decades end I was getting into John Zorn and the whole Lower East Side avant-garde scene.
I didn’t have cable TV until the nineties (finally breaking down solely for Turner Classic Movies) so I was largely oblivious of what was on MTV and that wasn’t what we were selling to college students at work so I had only the vaguest notion of hair bands and certainly no idea how big they were out in the real world. The Detroit rock stations were (and remain to this day) entrenched in classic rock so they weren’t playing metal either. This scene could have been happening on the moon for all I knew. It wasn’t until well into the nineties when I began reading about nostalgia for this era that it dawned on me how popular it was.
While it’s not my cup of tea I’m glad you enjoyed this book as are, I’m sure, many other people who read it. I imagine it would make for an entertaining documentary. I really don’t get why other readers feel the need to spew venom about your post. I always appreciate a fresh view point and the last person on earth I want to read is someone with the same interests as I. On a side note, I’ve known a few metal heads over the years and have always found them to be among the gentlest, genuinely sweetest people I’ve met.
Rock on, George.
Byron, thank you for your kind words. Your musical experience exceeds my own! I like Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, and Joe Jackson, too. Don’t know much about “international music” but I do own a number of Nonesuch CDs. Heavy Metal was a musical phase and I’m glad I read NOTHIN’ BUT A GOOD TIME to learn more about it.
Hair metal was a musical fad…though it still has some fans. Heavy metal arguably began with the Kinks and has produced no little good music from the ’60s on through to today…along with no lack of bubblegum and worse (Sturgeon’s Informed Estimate applies). As much fun as it is to make fun of grindcore vocals.
Todd, you may be right about The Kinks beginning the Heavy Metal movement.
Bands such as the MC5, the Stooges. the Velvet Underground and the Jimi Hendrix Experience have also influenced metal (along with prog rock), even as Iron Butterfly, Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and AC/DC were establishing its “main” line of development–and punk also came (perhaps more directly) from those first four as well as the Kinks and the Who’s early work) and their cohort and garage rock…
Bo Diddley particularly had some input, too…
Todd, and the influence of DEEP PURPLE cannot be underestimated.
No interest or appreciation for this noise!
I was listening to nearly everything I could in the ’80s, mostly excluding hair metal, bland AOR of the Journey/Styx type, and a few others bores (Bonnie Tyler comes to mind, captive creature as she was of Meat Loaf’s Svengali). Heavy metal didn’t need to be hair metal or even the sluggish whining of Led Zeppelin…I believe I first heard Girlschool in that decade, and Van Halen were mostly doing something else (even as Metallica and others were turning away from haircut rock, which included the likes of Kajagoogoo and the Romantics as much as hair metal…). Most of my music listening was jazz, classical leaning into the baroque and early music and also 20th century music, blues, folk, bluegrass, country (particularly Johnny Cash and some of the others I’d learned to love in childhood), “world music” (getting into Miriam Makeba in a big way first) , a little gospel (mostly of the Staple Singers/Aretha Franklin variety), Gil Scott-Heron helped me toward the more interesting rap, a lot of ’60s rock and some old favorites as War as well as punk and what was emerging as college rock (REM’s first two albums out by 1984)…while Husker Du were always punk. (They and the Replacements being the biggest Minneapolis rock bands utterly unrelated to Prince and his allies, along with the Jets briefly.) By 1984 I was living in the DC area and picking up on the local punk scene particularly, among others (tiny nightclub d. c. space was mostly split between punk rock and free jazz), particularly after meeting my first serious ex Donna.
Girlschool: https://youtu.be/S6TOZep2nOU
Todd, I mostly listen to the radio when I was driving around in the 1980s so I heard a lot of music. Now, my kids listen to podcasts and build their own playlists. Everything musically has completely changed!
And here’s a post I put up for a Week of the 80s challenge some years back…having dug out the Girlschool track…
https://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2016/08/7-daily-songs-from-1980s-saturday-music.html
The dead link for Joan Armatrading was for “Kind Words (and a Real Good Heart)”
https://youtu.be/aRyfwZfLF9c
Todd, I’m big fan of Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection.”
Her work is always worthy of attention.
So I guess I was the only Z Z Top fan
I’ve liked them OK, but haven’t bought the albums.