Boyer, speaking via Zoom from his home in California, knows what he’s talking about. Forty years ago he was Punky Peru, drummer in Witch, a fixture of the LA glam metal scene that made Mötley Crüe, Wasp, Quiet Riot and Poison famous. The Witch probably should have joined them – they had the songs, the spandex and definitely the theatrics. But it never quite worked: the wrong record deals, too many line-up changes and the fact that, as Boyer puts it, “Me and Tommy Lee from Mötley were having too much fun.” Betsy Beach corrected sexism by dragging a man around the stage on a leash Now Witch’s career has been unearthed as part of Bound for Hell: On the Sunset Strip, a deluxe box set produced by reissue label Numero Group documenting the burgeoning glam metal scene. It’s a world populated by bands that Katherine Turman, journalist and co-author of the definitive metal history Louder Than Hell, calls “outsiders.” They shared a love of music that, in the early 80s, either wasn’t fashionable at all (Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy) or never made much of an impact in the US. Boyer recalls scouring “tiny record stores” in search of British glam rock by Sweet, Mott the Hoople and Slade in the early ’70s. Their confluence of influences is due to the visual flamboyance of glam metal and its sound – big on guitar solos and pop choruses. “Part of something really cool” … Witch’s Peter Wabitt, with Punky Peru on drums somewhere in the smoke. Photo: courtesy of the band The collection comes packed with names that are vaguely remembered. Not only Witch but Jaded Lady, Leather Angel, Knightmare II, Odin, Romeo and Bitch. The scene was big when it created a kind of adolescent male fantasy world in which, as one observer put it, “the women were there to pole-dance, bring drinks to the table and spray them with various liquids.” Bitch’s Betsy Bitch provided the necessary correction, dragging a man around the stage on a leash. “I don’t think I had [sexism] in the mind,” he says. “I just wanted to be an assertive, charismatic, theatrical performer. My mindset was, “I’m Betsy Beach and I’m not just going to hang from a microphone.” Bound for Hell is a departure for Numero Group, a label renowned for releasing award-winning collections of dark soul, funk, gospel and folk. “There was a growing interest in heavy metal, especially in the ’80s era when metal ruled the world,” says the label’s resident headbanger Adam Luksetich. “But that didn’t really factor into our decision to do the box set. There’s a rabid fan base for this sort of thing. But for Numero, it’s also about people who don’t know anything about it.” However, the existence of an annotated collection of dark glam metal from a non-specialist label seems to say something about a shift in perceptions about the sub-genre. As Luksetich points out, there was a time when glam metal appeared to rule the world. Buoyed by the success of their cover of Slade’s Cum on Feel the Noize, Quiet Riot’s Metal Health became, in November 1983, the first heavy metal album to reach No.1 in the US. Boosted by exposure on the fledgling MTV, one multi-platinum album followed another: Shout at the Devil and Mötley Crüe’s Theater of Pain. Ratt is out of the cellar and invading your privacy. Dokken’s Tooth and Nail and Under Lock and Key. By the time Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet and Def Leppard’s Hysteria each sold 12 million copies in the US alone, glam metal seemed to have become omnivorous. Aerosmith, Kiss and Alice Cooper revitalized their careers by adopting his sound. distinctly un-metal artists, including Heart and Cher, released huge singles bearing his influence. “I wanted to be an assertive, theatrical performer” … Betsy Beach leading Beach. Photo: Kevin Estrada And yet, in the decades since it usurped the public’s senses, ostensibly from grunge, its reputation has declined. Fans still go to concerts with its biggest stars, and many people enjoyed Mötley Crüe’s impressive memoir The Dirt, but does the wider world tend to look at the music the wrong way, as if it were a sad, overblown aberration? tacky, irredeemably sexist fun that was never meant to be taken seriously. In recent years, however, there have been not one but two books about glam metal – confusingly, both called Nothin’ But a Good Time. The first, by American writers Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock, bills itself as an “uncensored story”, big on the kind of debauchery described in The Dirt. The second, by British journalist and unrepentant glam metal fanatic Justin Quirk, is more serious and detailed and argues for the importance of glam metal. Quirk suggests that her success was a necessary corrective to other ’80s pop phenomena, including post-Live Aid seriousness and “surge divorce energy” – a rash of huge hits from ’60s survivors and 70s with themes like divorce, wistful nostalgia for youth and surviving middle age (think solo Phil Collins, Paul Simon’s Graceland, Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer, and even Touch of Gray by Grateful Dead). Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every season, every week Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our site and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. “Glam metal,” he says, “kind of drags back to where it’s supposed to be, which is the mental and hormonal concerns of 15-year-olds. I think it’s healthy when pop does that, whether it’s Billie Eilish or the Ramones. What runs through all glam metal at its best is that it is deeply youthful. You can say what you like about Wasp, but Blackie Lawless wasn’t going to start a conversation with you about his divorce, or how his life didn’t work out, or the sadness of his weekend visit. About her unspecific appeal to teenage rebellion, she laughs. “The only thing I can think of that they were rebelling against was their parents who didn’t want their sons going out wearing fishnets and donkeys.” Quirk also connects glam metal to three other things: WWF wrestling, which exploded in popularity at exactly the same time; the “simple, upbeat, big” films produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, including Top Gun; and the harmless “performative shock” of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. All of this, he says, was “aggressive, awfully loud, self-promoting, gleefully escapist and larger-than-life” entertainment that matched the “hypercompensatory boost” of an era in US history when, behind President Ronald Reagan’s famous announcement that “it’s morning again in America,” hid a stagnant economy, unemployment at 6.6%, the Iran-Contra scandal and the escalating AIDS crisis. “So much of America’s growth at that time was based on appearance,” says Quirk. “As if things were willing to be done. And I think glam metal is in line with that. Just when country is starting to take off, you have Mötley Crüe playing tiny clubs in Los Angeles, lighting everything up on stage to make their PA seem much bigger than it is. It’s a version of the American dream, where ugly people from Pennsylvania can reinvent themselves as LA rock gods.” “Glam metal was ridiculous, but it was serious about being ridiculous”… Romeo. Photo: Joann LeChance The popular theory is that glam metal was killed by the rise of grunge. As Mickey Rourke’s cult-metal-loving character Randy “the Ram” Robinson put it in the 2008 film The Wrestler: “That Cobain pussy had to come around and ruin it all… the ’90s were shit.” But Turman believes the scene was already dead even before Smells Like Teen Spirit caught the attention of mainstream America. It had become “over-saturated with smaller bands. The hair was growing and the talent was getting smaller and smaller.” She found her head turned by “street, dirty, tattooed blues based biker rock – Little Caesar, Rock City Angels, Four Horsemen, Junkyard”, before the arrival of Nirvana. Quirk has another theory: that Guns N’ Roses “were much more instrumental in killing glam metal than Nirvana.” They may have shared some visual and sonic similarities with their glam forebears, he says, but the bleakness and malevolence of the worldview depicted on Appetite for Destruction gave glam metal’s escape “a slow punch. In a sense, Guns N’ Roses had more in common ideologically with what the Geto Boys or NWA were doing – saying, “Look, this is what we live for and it’s horrible.” And what could Poison or Winger do to compete when Appetite had sold 30 million copies? As the ’90s wore on, glam metal’s leading lights found themselves in diminished circumstances, releasing albums that went silver or gold rather than seven times platinum, acrimoniously disbanding or losing members, succumbing to excess. I Don’t Sing About Divorce… Wasp’s Blackie Lawless. Photo: Brian Rasic/Getty Images Today, even in an age of rock and pop obsessed with the past, their sound has not been revived. Certain aspects of glam metal seem the product of a less enlightened era, although Turman points out that for all the aggressive sexism in its presentation, there were often women in…
