Reviews of underground and indie music and films, 60s/70s pop and soul music and cult movies. And the occasional wacky tale about life in the Hollywood flatlands.
If you’ve read Motley Crue’s The Dirt or seen the
Penelope Spheeris documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II:
The Metal Years, you probably have a good idea what it was like to be in a hair
metal band in L.A. in the late ‘80s.
But you didn’t learn about the day to day drudgery,
desperation, and infighting that the struggle for a record contract entailed.
Billy McCarthy’s Beat Me Til I’m Famous follows the
career of a third-tier (or fourth-tier, depending on your criteria) hair metal
band called D’Molls. McCarthy was the band’s drummer, and he went by the name
Billy Dior. The book offers a blow-by-blow description of what it was like to
be in a hometown band (or bands), and finagle your way out of the Midwest
to make in big in mid/late 1980s L.A.
McCarthy joined the D’Molls in the mid-'80s in Chicago,
and they soon moved to L.A. to vie
for a recording contract with hundreds of other bands. By the time they signed to Atlantic Records, the public’s appetite for guys with big hair and makeup
who sang about sluts was fading. And, of course, there were the usual management and record company screw-ups that added to the band's bad fortune.
The side characters in Beat Me Til I’m Famous are
often as interesting as the main players. There’s Rodney’ Dangerfield’s
songwriter son, Brian, various shady record company people, managers, groupies,
professional rock star girlfriends, sneaky, cutthroat band members, drug
dealers, and pushy hangers-on. In fame-hungry Hollywood,
there was always someone willing to give a band money and a place to crash, and hope to get a piece of the action if the band made it.
Beat Me Til I’m Famous captures the sleazy minutiae of the hair metal era with an
intelligence and self-awareness you wouldn’t expect to find from someone in that scene.
In 2011, McCarthy sued Poison over authorship of "Talk Dirty to Me" and some other songs. The D’Molls Wiki entry says the lawsuit was settled with McCarthy
receiving an “undeclared sum”, but this is the only mention I’ve found online
about any settlement. (McCarthy played in a band called Screamin’ Mimis with
C.C. Deville in 1984.)
After remaining in official release limbo for decades, The
Decline of Western Civilization: Part II: The Metal Years is now available as
part of a 4 DVD (or Blu Ray) set of all
three Decline movies directed by Penelope Spheeris – the original documentary about L.A.’s late ‘70s punk
scene, the third installment, released in 1998, about gutterpunks in Hollywood and Decline II, about 80s Sunset Strip metal (aka hair metal).
The set has a fourth DVD featuring additional footage from the documentaries.
The first and third documentaries dealt with Hollywood
punk rockers, homeless or otherwise, and Decline
II, the trio’s red-headed stepchild, looks at the style over substance days
of Sunset Strip hair metal. The documentary features stars and wanna-bes of the Sunset Strip scene, fans, DJs, club owners, and several hard rock stars from the 1970s/early 1980s.
Spheeris interviews hard rock/metal
icons the younger musicians hope to emulate. A chatty,
level-headed Ozzy fixes breakfast and warns fledgling bands, “Be nice to
everyone on the way up, cause you’ll see them on the way down.” The L.A.
skyline gleams in the background as Lemmy talks about going for your dreams.
Paul Stanley lies on a bed draped with groupies. Gene Simmons is surrounded by
girls in lingerie buying lingerie. Alice Cooper notes, "Punk (rock) was getting to be techno.. metal saved rock 'n' roll for the '80s." and Steve Tyler and Joe Perry talk about the millions
they made and blew on cocaine.
Ozzy in the kitchen
In her June 17, 1988
review, the New York Times’ Janet Maslin wrote,
“In Miss Spheeris's earlier hell-in-a-handbasket documentary, the
original ''Decline of Western Civilization'' about punk rockers, the brainpower
quotient was somewhat higher than it is among heavy-metal fans. That's one
reason that the new film is both so funny and so sad. For all the amusingly
fatuous remarks heard here -and Miss Spheeris has a great ear for these - the
overriding dimness of most of the fans and musicians is frightening.”
Giving the metal kids the benefit of the doubt, a filmmaker
can spin the subject anyway he or she wants with leading questions and selective
editing. Maybe there were smart kids who didn’t make the final cut or weren’t
interested in being interviewed. If there were any honor students prowling the
Strip circa 1987, they kept their IQs well under wraps. One of the featured
bands, Seduce, seemed pretty pragmatic about the whole scene, including
groupies. This earthiness didn’t translate into success or infamy. They released two albums on small labels, and are now
nowhere to be found. Spheeris savesthe only thrash band (and the smartest of the film's new bands) -Megadeth - for the end of the film. Dave Mustaine may be many things, but he's no dummy. (Check out the extended interview with him in the bonus DVD.)
The newer bands have the gift of gab, but their subject matter
is somewhat limited. There’s Nadir
D'Priest and the band London,
“the training school for rock stars” (Izzy Stradlin and Nikki Sixx, among
others, went on to fame after leaving the group). They’re party monsters, but
they come with a warning, as one bandmember exclaims “We are not role models
for your life.” Odin, whose singer is touted as the next David Lee Roth, cavort
in a hot tub with groupies, contemplating what will become of them if they don’t
hit it big. Poison, whose first album was a platinum success, seem likeable and
well-grounded in this early stage of their career. (The years, as we know, have
not been kind.)
"Actressing"
As for Decline II’s girls of the Sunset Strip, the female musicians
(Vixen, Jaded Lady) are just as ambitious but not quite as dim as some of their
male counterparts. The female fans are another story. The girls
participating in the Gazarri Dance Contest seem happy to strip, I mean, gyrate, for the ogling hair
metal judges. The reigning “Miss Gazarri” says she hopes to continue with her modeling
and “actressing” after she passes on her crown. (Christina Applegate allegedly based her Married with Children character Kelly Bundy on this aspiring thespian.)
The onstage segments with London,
Lizzy Borden, Odin and Faster Pussycat make the viewer ponder “So is this is what
an NC-17 Spinal Tap would look like.” London’s
singer finally lights a Soviet flag on fire after a few miscues, and the band’s
political anthem, “Russian Winter” won’t put Bob
Dylan or Neil Young out of business. The extra interview footage has several X-rated revelations. (Now where was that chain hidden again?)
Decline II’s most infamous
interview, with W.A.S.P. guitarist Chris Holmes, shows the dark underbelly to
all the leather and studs bravado. Soused to the gills, Holmes sits in a raft
in his swimming pool chugging from a bottle of vodka while his Mom looks on
pool side. He jokes about groupies, being an alcoholic, and proclaims, “I’m a
piece of crap.” Spheeris asks, “Think you might drink because you’re covering up
pain?” “Yeah,” Chris answers, then dunks under the water, evading any self-analysis. (Watch the unedited interview on the bonus disc til the bitter end to
feel really uncomfortable.) Update: Chris
relocated to France
and is still touring, recording, and making music videos. His latest album has
the delightful title Shittin' Bricks.
It’s easy to dismiss metal bands of the ‘80s Sunset Strip
based on their looks and image. Most of these bands had musical skills and could
entertain an audience. Unfortunately, 90% of them didn’t do anything but blindly
follow the Aqua-netted path Motley Crue had paved (and not as well). Money
talks – that’s one of the differences between the metal rockers in “Decline II”
and the punk rockers in “Decline I”. In the original Decline, the kids made
music their way and embraced rebellion against the norm. In Decline II, it was
all about fame and money.
The fans and groupies who lived the scene look back at the
time fondly. To the causal observer, it was a gold mine for derision and
acerbic, play by play music video commentary. After awhile, even disparaging the
bands got monotonous. There wasn’t a lot of deviation from the fluffy-haired
sex and partying formula, and hair metal succumbed to overexposure (and grunge)
around 1991.
Highly recommended as a reminder of the “What were they
thinking?” 1980s, Decline IIis all sex
and drugs, alcohol and ambition, with none of the cerebral or societal discourse
of Decline Ior III. But sometimes, as another
‘80s icon sang, girls (and boys) just wanna have fun .
..without surfing the Net for info. I first played this fun trivia game with one of the sales reps at a mag I worked for when the SD was out of town. I just plucked the number “30” out of thin air, considering how prevalent the spandex and twiddly guitar sound was circa 1989. We thought we’d have to struggle to get to 30…but at 33 we were still going!! Yes, big record companies did shell out bucks for the likes of Kik Tracee , Sleeze Beez, and Babylon A.D. Shockingly, many of the bands were damn good-- and entertaining. By 1991, however, the genre was oversaturated with screechy vocals and singers with leopard print pants. Then those pesky Nirvana guys showed up and stuck a fork in it. Every few years, my friends and I play this game from scratch. No cheating! Even if you DETEST this form of music, the names are somewhere in the back of your mind, admit it. It’s okay to include hard rock/metal/glam-punk bands who rocked the sound but not the look, or vice-versa.
My List
1. Phantom Blue
2. Salty Dog
3. Circus of Power
4. Life, Sex & Death
5. Star, Star
6. Kik Tracee
7. Electric Boys
8. Electric Love Hogs
9. Junkyard
10. Jetboy
11. White Sister
12. Precious Metal
13. Smashed Gladys
14. Spread Eagle
15. Dad’s Porno Mag
16. Every Mother’s Nightmare
17. Slik Toxik
18. Little Caesar
19. Princess Pang
20. Rough Cutt
21. Sound Barrier
22. Dangerous Toys
23. Love/Hate
24. Loudness
25. Pretty Boy Floyd
26. Bang Tango
27. Danger, Danger
28. Hericane Alice
29. Vixen
30. Alice in Chainz
(Yes, they started out as a hair metal band. I used to have a great pic of them all Aqua-netted out, but lost it. Backstory here)
