They Rocked!

80’s Hard Rock is often used as a punchline. To hear the words “Hair Band” brings a different response, depending on the age of the ears hearing it. It’s Mom and Dad’s music to the kids today. Some kids embrace it to be different as kids in the 80’s who cried the praise of The Doors led you to believe you were missing out or just were not cool enough to understand. For adults it brings back memories, good or bad. Even those that were not into it at the time inadvertently found themselves sucked in with the exposure on radio and MTV. If anyone between the ages of 30 and 40 tells you that they never sang along to ‘Wanted Dead of Alive” they are likely lying.

I dove into the 80’s Hard Rock head first…literally. In 8th grade I started letting my hair grow. I’ll be honest, the intentions were for a rat tail. Remember those? One strip of long hair hanging off the back as the rest was short? Yes, the rat tail was going to be my first rebellion tool against my mother. Then I realized it could be so much more. It was 1984.

My earliest exposure to hard rock came from a source that it did for many. Siblings. I was the youngest of five in the house and the closest one in age to me was six-years older. In the 70’s we lived in the L.A. area. Often you could find Led Zepplin, Black Sabbath, or Ted Nugent blaring somewhere in the house. My earliest memory comes from a party they had. I was lying on the couch and I remember “Stairway to Heaven” playing. Scared the shit out of me as before me was the stairs heading up. I was about 6-7 at the time. Then came a song from a new local band. “Running with the Devil” by Van Halen did not help my shivering on the couch cause. I just remember hearing the chorus over and over. No good can come from a 6-7 year-old hearing devil over and over.

In 1978 my mother transplanted me to small town Iowa. I had escaped the devil that was running up the stairway to heaven. In a few short years that hard rocking music, as Huey Lewis would put it, would return…and with a vengeance. It would become my mission to embrace it and force feed it to this community pf about 5000 surrounded by cornfields.

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