“We are not role models for your life.” -Lizzie Grey (guitarist for London)
Hey everybody, it's Mike here from The Art of Guitar. I got the idea for this video while I was filming lesson videos because in the background, I like to play old VHS tapes. It's just something that kind of gives me like this nostalgic comfort. And I found myself playing this one quite a bit, it’s the Decline of Western Civilization Part II, the Metal Years. And the reason why it's kind of weird that I use this as my comfort movie in the background is because when I first saw it, I think I was around age 12, it terrified me in a way. It intrigued me, but it also scared me. That almost scared me off of the idea of wanting to be in a band altogether. If you've seen this before, you know what I'm talking about. But if not, just follow along and I think you'll probably agree.
It opens with somebody doing a pick slide in the background. So it's a perfect intro, but they show this dark stage with somebody walking around pumping stage fog all around it. It was so weird to see someone doing it by hand because nowadays we have, you know, more high-tech machines to do that. So this documentary really covers about a six month span starting in August of 87. And that was such a huge time for glam rock or hair metal. People usually hate it when I say hair metal. That genre was huge. I mean, Guns N' Roses had just come out with Appetite for Destruction a few months before that.
And who better to start off this whole documentary but Gene Simmons. He basically said, you know, it's not just us, it's not just the music, but half the equation is the fans. So we salute you. And then the camera pans down this line. I think it's people waiting to get into one of the clubs. And you see all these metalheads excited, just standing there waiting to get into the show. And they're all wearing these old t-shirts I remember seeing back in the day. And nobody's on a cell phone, of course, back then, they just look alive. Of course, you had a couple of people mooning the camera because back then that was a big thing for some reason. It was never like a pretty lady. It was always just like these dudes being goofy, you know. But I guess the girls were known for flashing other things.
We had a dubbed copy of this, by the way. So I didn't even have the cover to see Megadeth in the front. And I couldn't read the back to see all the bands that were going to be on it. So as soon as I saw the title section, I was really amazed that there weren't just these B-level bands in this documentary. We're talking top A-listers too. And then yes, you had the lower tier bands like London and Seduce. I thought that really rounded off this documentary because if you just had the bigwigs, that's fine. But it's really cool to also hear about the scene from the people that didn't quite make it big. Hearing from those bands were actually some of my favorite moments to tell you the truth. You don't want to dismiss these groups just because they never made it huge. I mean, a lot of people that did make it big came from or through those bands.
The first thing my 12-year-old eyes noticed was all the huge hair. Now I was kind of used to it at the time because my sister had big hair and all her friends. But as far as my circle of friends, we didn't have any of that going on. So to see it right from the heart of LA, like right in the center of it all was pretty mind-blowing. I mean, even the little kids had the crazy hair too.
They also cut to this probation officer, I think she was, named Darlene. She was kind of the antithesis to everybody else in this documentary. She was kind of the buzzkill, if you will. And it's great that she was in this documentary because it really showed the contrast of what was going on at the time. So you had the crazy musicians and the fans, and then you have this probation officer talking about the dangers of Satanism and symbolism. So not only did this Darlene lady add some contrast to the rest of the documentary, but she also gave it sort of a Spinal Tap vibe.
Now, because this documentary is working with musicians, you have a lot of creative types. So it was really cool to see that everyone they interviewed had sort of a different situation going on, a different setting. Lemmy was out on top of a hill somewhere. Alice Cooper was on stage with all these mannequin parts around him and a noose, it was pretty wild. And then you have Paul Stanley, of course, he's in bed with groupies. Oh, I almost forgot, Gene Simmons is in a lingerie store.
There's a lot of great Lemmy quotes in this doc, and one of them was when he was standing on top of that hill smoking and he said, “Which has always been the mark of good rock and roll. If your parents don't like it, it's good.”
The next scene, they go back to Paul, but this time they pan out, showing that he's not just with one groupie in bed.He's laying with three. This really planted a seed in my young brain at the time. And I just equated being a rock star with doing THAT. So it's crazy how this film draws you in and then it terrifies you later.
They had Steven Tyler and Joe Perry being interviewed and they just look like they're at some restaurant or something and they seemed real chill, but this is right after they decided to get sober. On the opposite end of that, you have Ozzy who's in his kitchen. You know, it's the blonde tipped, crazy spiked haired Ozzy, in his kitchen in a robe cooking breakfast while they're interviewing him.
So there's a lot of cock talk in this doc. I had to put that in there. Now I'm wondering, is it Penelope or Phoebe? Hold on. I guess I can just look at the box. Penelope, Penelope Spheeris, sorry. And she was talking to Bret Michaels and Bobby Dahl and she goes, okay, I know all the ladies watching wanna know this, and Bret Michaels right away goes, “16 inches. No, no, no. Combination all four, we're four a piece.” And then they cut to Dave Mustaine saying, “It's not the size of your pencil, it's how you write your name.”
Penelope would ask a blanket question and they would show the answers from all the different artists. I thought that was a really great idea. So one time she asked, what is a headbanger? Because back in the day, that was a huge term for the fringe people. When I was in school and I was just becoming like a freak, if you will, they called us all headbangers. The first guy just starts banging his head. The next guy who might not have been the smartest guy in the world from some of his answers, but he's like, “It's like a guy who goes in front of the stage and head bangs his head.” Another guy was more serious. He's like, “It's someone who will die for their music. A true rivet head.” I've never heard rivet head before. So that was new. Probably some California lingo or something. And of course, Gene said, headbanging, we're more into gangbanging. I love how Lemmy took credit for it too. And he's probably right. He's like, “I think we started that.”
So there were a lot of the bands in the documentary that were actually playing that night. So they had all the singers from each band read this disclaimer before they played, and it was kind of uncomfortable watching them try to be serious. “Attention everybody! Attention you creatures from another planet.” They would stumble on their words. “Face that, you might be advised that I'm f***ing up.”
The first band that plays is a band called Lizzy Borden and I did hear about them growing up. So they had some success because people do know their name, but they were playing a cover of Born to be Wild. ♪ We are born to be wild.♪ And that blew me away at the time that I saw it because I didn't realize bands had to play cover songs so much. I mean, to fill a whole night, sometimes you had to do that. You had to play a lot of covers cause he didn't have enough originals. So for that to be the very first song in the documentary, as far as being performed on stage, I thought that was pretty wild…Born to be Wild.
I had this nostalgic rush of old school gear, just watching them play on stage. Everything from the red cymbals, which you don't really see very much anymore, to the guitars that they had. You'll notice that if you saw my collection, I have a lot of guitars like that. I think it's the influence of this movie and that whole time period. It was really great to see the stage lighting because back then it was all real. It was bulbs, no LEDs going on. So everything felt real organic to me.
I kind of shuddered a little bit when the singer for Lizzy Borden started throwing popcorn all around the stage because I thought, man, the club is going to hate them for that. I thought back to when we used to play with a band called The Regime. Sometimes they would have a concert and we would play the next night and they wouldn't clean up till the next day. So we'd get there and there was smells of vomit and bad cologne and beer. And the monitors would be covered with plastic because they were anticipating just a crazy night with these guys. And that's all understandable and rock and roll, but I mean, popcorn, come on.
After their set, the band goes backstage and they're dumping beer on each other, just like they won the World Series or something. I didn't know if they were really doing that for the camera or if that's what they actually do after the show. I don't think they would waste beer like that though. They were asked, what would happen if you guys never make it? And I liked their answer because they said, “You know what, even if we don't make it, we had a great time trying.” If you think about it, that's more than a lot of people can say. So even though they didn't make it to the highest realms of music, they still have those memories and they can always say they lived through that.
Now, speaking of high-level bands, they interviewed Poison and Bret Michaels in particular was real, like on a different level, I would say. He seemed serious, but he also joked around, but he really seemed like he was business-minded, like he was more professional, if you will, than a lot of the other people they interviewed. And then on the flip side of that, they would cut to C.C. and Ricki and they were just laughing the whole time pretty much. But even though they were joking quite a bit, there was still this air of professionalism with those guys. And if you really pay attention through the whole documentary, you see a lot of people that you've never heard their names before, and they're talking about partying all the time and being crazy and wanting to be huge rock stars. You gotta wonder if just those mindsets are what held them back at times.
They cut to a scene where this band is passing out flyers. And that was such a big thing. I don't know if it's still a thing anymore with the internet, you don't really have to flyer as much, but we used to go to Kinko's and we would make flyers and we couldn't afford color copies, so we would always get black and white. But if we were feeling really crazy, we would splurge for the color paper. And I remember there was like flyer wars, just like they show in the documentary where they talk about people putting their band over the top of your flyer, or you'd hand somebody a flyer and they'd walk a few feet and just crumple it up and throw it away. That stuff happened all the time. Lots of littering back then. But the guy made a great point when he said, you know, when you walk up to a girl with a flyer, she looks at you and acts different towards you versus if you just go up and say, “Hey, what's up?”
They asked everybody what their day jobs were and this was really intriguing to hear because one of the guys said, Mrs. Fields cookies. A lot of them said that they just didn't wanna work so they didn't have a day job. That's a typical musician answer. One lady said a legal secretary, which could come in very handy in the music business. And then the lady in the documentary that I had the biggest crush on said that she worked for the LA school district. You know what's sad? I never learned her name either or what band she was with. So if anybody out there can help me out, I'd appreciate it. Not that I'm gonna stalk her or anything.
Now we finally get to one of the most iconic parts of the documentary, and that is Chris Holmes of W.A.S.P floating in the pool drunk with his mom sitting next to him. They only tease us at first, but later on they go pretty in depth with him.
When asked about wearing makeup the drummer from Vixen said, “It's a turn off for me to kiss a guy that's got redder lipstick than I do.” Bret Michaels replied, “The older we get and the uglier we get, the more makeup we gotta put on. You know what I'm saying? It gets worse. It doesn't get any better.”
Of course there was the opposite of the glam look and a lot of people in this documentary rebelled against it. One of them was Dave Mustaine who said, “Yeah, we never really got into the makeup thing.” I'm just trying to picture him wearing makeup actually. And then of course Steven Tyler, you know, sings dude looks like a lady.
Then they cut to a stage where a band is being introduced and they're actually being introduced by Ricky Rackman, if you remember him from MTV. But he was announcing Faster Pussycat. Now this is huge because this is a couple of years before they break huge. I mean, my very first concert was Kiss Hot in the Shade Tour and Faster Pussycat played second. First it was Slaughter, then Faster Pussycat, then Kiss. And when I saw them, they had already released House of Pain, I believe. So they had a huge hit on their hands. But in this documentary, it's a few years before that. So they're kind of down and out, even though they're a big deal in LA, but they're talking about how poor they are.So they paid their dues till they finally got their hits. So it's kind of cool to see all that pay off.
On here I wrote, uh-oh, first nudity at 25:51. And that was a big deal for me back then when I was 12 years old watching this, you know, coming of age, seeing this and being like, hmm, maybe I will get into music. Remember, we had no internet back then. So we took what we could get.
Watching Steve and Joe is like watching an old married couple talk, just the way they go back and forth, it's hilarious. But they're asking about their influence and how they felt about other bands kind of copying them. And they made a good point. They're like, a lot of people copy your attitude, but nobody really sounds like Aerosmith except us. Do you get mad if a band copies your style? Lemmy: “No, good luck to them. Maybe they'll do something we can copy later.” Paul Stanley said that it was a sincerest form of flattery, which I like. Ozzy admitted that they're all thieves. Nobody is original. And then Alice Cooper seemed a little bit jaded about it. He was just like, yeah, we have people that pretty much imitate what we do. And I don't want to mention them, but I'll say their initials. And I'm wondering, is it MC or W-A-S-P possibly?
They really focused in on this band called Seduce. Now this is one of those bands that never quite broke big, but they had a lot of great characters in this band. For some reason, they're all driving these classic cars, which I thought was funny because later they talk about the struggle of not having money, but they open with all of them driving some really insane classic car. You could tell that they were all a little bit jaded, like they've been doing it a while and they've just never quite caught wind in their sails. There's a lot of black Les Pauls in this documentary. The guitar player for Seduce has a really cool looking one. I just love the way it looked. I think three different guitar players in the documentary had a black Les Paul with gold hardware. Hold on, I'll grab mine real quick. So guitar player from Seduce, thank you for planting that seed in my head.
Then of course, the topic of groupies came up. Lemmy actually admitted that he started playing music for girls. Ozzy talked about the time he toured with KISS and that there'd be girls lined up in the hallways for KISS only. AHe was wondering, you know, “What's wrong with me? I'm trying to pull the stragglers, you know.” But I got a huge kick out of when they asked Paul Stanley a question and it completely left him speechless, which you rarely see. Penelope, I believe she was the interviewer the whole time, was like, “Would you ever fall in love with one of your groupies?”
One of the best edits of the movie is they float in this clip of the guy from Seduce saying, “Yeah, one time Paul Stanley gave me some advice. He said, if you want your band to succeed, you have to like leave the girls at home” or something like that, or “kick out all the women,” and then they cut back to Paul Stanley in bed with three ladies. Now in Paul's defense, I'm sure on their way up, you know, the early struggling days, they had less time for the ladies.
It was great hearing from the female rockers as well because I never thought of it, but one of them said, “Yeah, I mean, we have our groupies too.” She's like, “Yeah, guys take advantage of us, but we can also take advantage of the guys.” I'm like, oh yeah, that's true. Some of the guys talked about how their groupies actually supported them financially because you're broke, you're in a band that's barely making it. And just to have somebody walk in with groceries or a place to crash was such a huge deal and really sustained a lot of bands back then.
Of course, this is 1987, so the topic of AIDS came up and it was really weird to see everyone talking about it and dancing around it a little bit. Like they knew in the back of their head that they were worried about it, but they didn't really let the fear of that show too much. It's like it got in the way of their fun time so they didn't even want to really address it.
Okay, the next band that they really focused in on was a band called London. I didn't know this, but a lot of famous musicians came from that band or originated the band. I guess Izzy, Axl, and Steven Adler from Guns N' Roses were in the band. Nicky Sixx was a founding member, I guess and then he was replaced by Blackie Lawless in London as well. And I believe Fred Courey from Cinderella was also a band member at one time. So this is one of those bands that, you know, it's like a farm for future rock stars. They even joked about it. “It's like we get somebody in the band and as soon as they leave, they become rock stars.”
You would think the band would be really, really jaded, but they all had this real bubbly sense of humor, especially the guitar player. He's probably my favorite musician in this whole documentary. They showed the band on stage playing and these guys couldn't catch a break. You know, they have a song called Russian Winter and before they kicked into it, the singer held up flag and he tried to burn it with a lighter and it wouldn't start on fire for a long time. When it finally did, he like threw it at the drummer and this concussion bomb goes off. They were talking about how before the concert, they were making it and they wanted to just be insane for the documentary, I guess. So they made it really powerful.And I had this really bad feeling like, man, I wonder if anybody knew what they were doing because you have four musicians building this concussion bomb basically. And when it goes off, it's pretty insane. It's like a Keith Moon type who incident. They just didn't have the regulations back then. But then after their set, they all jump into this truck camper and I felt really claustrophobic thinking of five guys just jumping into this vehicle and touring the country. It had to have been pretty hairy at times.
Okay, now they start talking to Ozzy a little bit more. And like I said, he's in his kitchen making breakfast, cooking eggs, bacon, spilling the orange juice.And it was kind of a preview in a way to their future reality show, The Osbournes, just to see Ozzy in his home doing his thing, normal people things.
Now they flash back to that Darlene lady, the parole officer. She's overly serious when talking about this thing called de-metaling the teenagers, where I guess they all had to go to a camp. I think it was like a Scared Straight-type thing where these metalheads would go and get de-metalized. It's kind of a hilarious thing to imagine. So they're patting down these guys, looking for weapons, taking off their jewelry. They always had the spiked bracelets and necklaces and everything. And then they show Darlene in her office or whatever talking about the bracelets and being like, yeah, the spiked bracelet is dangerous because of this and that. And I had to laugh because now that I'm older and I'm watching it, I'm like, you know what? Out of all the crazy people in this documentary, I bet you she is the wildest one behind the scenes, if you know what I mean. I'm like, what do you do with all those spiked bracelets and necklaces that you confiscate?
I'll kind of just skim through the Bill Guzzari modeling contest or whatever this is. But what's funny is I guess the guy was helping out the band Odin. Maybe he was financing them or something, but he was really into them. He thought they were going to be huge. And the band thought that as well. So they come out and their singer's kind of like this pretty boy. You know, he's got the fake hair metal voice going on. ♪ “I can't stop the burning smoke that I see.” ♪ He sounds good, but you can just tell it's being forced a little bit. And he's wearing these assless chaps, which is funny because he didn't really have an ass. Now I'm not ripping on him. I mean, this is coming from a fellow ass-less chap, if you will. But it gave me hope that maybe I could wear those someday.
They were actually a really great sounding band, but afterwards they interviewed them in a hot tub. And, you know, the singer was talking about being depressed and almost like, you know, offing himself at one time. But the singer kept talking about, you know, I want to be like the next Jim Morrison or Robert Plant. He just had these huge dreams for himself. And the lady would be like, “What if you don't make it?” And he's like, “It's going to happen.” It kind of tore up my heart a little bit watching it recently, because I know that he never did make it big, even though he really aspired to, which is sad because he did seem like a genuinely decent guy. And having stars in your eyes and all that stuff is what's needed to propel you, obviously. You could tell from the people that did succeed, but this guy seemed a little more delusional in a way. I wonder if it's because a lot of people were feeding the dream into him, like reinforcing his delusion.
Anyway, it reminded me that you have to have some delusion in your dreams, because if we were all really rational, I don't think anybody would try for anything. Everything would just seem too out of reach. So you need that delusion to help fuel you. But I think a lot of the bands had too much of that. So instead of having one foot in reality and one foot in dreamland, they had both feet in a hot tub in dreamland, if you will.
Now we go back to Chris Holmes floating in his pool with bottles of vodka. At the time I believe the scene because he had this bottle of vodka and he was pouring it over his head. I had never had vodka when I was 12. So I was just like, whoa, this guy's hardcore. But as I got older, people were speculating, was that real? Because if you pour vodka into your eyes like he did, you would be screaming. You'd fall off your floatable into the water, chlorinated water, just to wash the vodka out of your eyes. And he's just pouring it over himself.So I don't know if that was real, but it's Chris Holmes so it very much could have been real. I don't know.
But it was really sad though to see his mom sitting, you know, on a lawn chair next to him. And she had this look in her eyes. She had these sad eyes, if you will. But she tried to keep smiling through them. And just the stuff that was coming out of Chris's mouth, you know, he really did seem drunk, but he just had some classic lines. “I'm 29. I'm what they call an old f**k.”
Penelope started asking him pointed questions like a psychologist. Eventually he just kind of mumbled out, “I just don't like who I am,” and then he like tried to avoid the rest of the questions and fell into the water. “Being who I am is like, you're what?”
And then the lady just asked, you know, do you have any advice for up and comers? To, you know, all the musicians. And Lemmy said, “Go for it, man.I did. Just run it up a flagpole and see who salutes it.” Another great line. But when they asked Dave what his advice would be to anyone trying to get into the music business, he said this, “Don't!”
I got so excited during this part of the documentary early on because In My Darkest Hour is my favorite Megadeth song. They show him recording In My Darkest Hour, but he's like smoking at the same time. So I'm not sure if that was legit. Maybe. Of course, Dave Ellefson was there, but they also had Jeff Young at the time and Chuck Behler, I think that's how you say his last name. But as we all know, Jeff and Chuck would soon be fired from the band and they would get Marty Friedman and Nick Menza for the whole Rust in Peace-era.
The end is wild because it's supposed to be live or whatever but it looks very staged, and I don't know if they were really playing the song and then they pasted the real track over the top of it, or if they were like playing along to the track while they're on stage. People are stage diving. It's just chaos. Some of the most iconic shots are in this part. They show Dave from below headbanging and wearing his RIP shirt. By the way, that was a magazine, RIP magazine. It was kind of a big deal at the time, but strangely, it also could be the acronym for Rust in Peace, kind of a foreshadowing of what was to come. I know it wasn't that, but that's just where my brain went.
At the very end, when they were rolling the credits, they were doing some B-roll, I guess they call it, of the interviews. And they showed the singer from Odin, the guy who wanted to be Jim Morrison or whatever. And the lady asked, it's been a while, have you guys made it big yet? And he said something like, it's getting close, very close. That's kind of the delusional swan song of a lot of musicians, when they know that they're nearing the end but they still have that little bit of hope that it's right around the corner.
Anyhow, after seeing all that and being 12 years old and just getting started with guitar, it both freaked me out and almost kept me from wanting to be in a band because of everything I saw, but it also pulled me in to all the benefits and all the awesome things that can happen if you do join a band. Okay, everyone, let me know if you've seen this documentary and your thoughts on it. There are other ones too. They have like the original ones, I think a punk documentary, and I might check those out sometime too. But this is the one that stands out. This is the one that shaped my life the most. And I'm sure a lot of other musicians out there too. Okay, thanks everyone. We'll catch you at the next video.