Slipknot and Stone Sour mastermind Corey Taylor loves him some ’80s hard rock.
“The songs were so fucking good,” he writes in the foreword of “Nothin’ But A Good Time: The Uncensored History of the ’80s Hard Rock Explosion.” “I watch those videos and listen to those albums now and I’m transported to a time when you could be a force of nature, a freak in a denim jacket, and it was okay. It was my time. It was our time. It was a time where music made you feel alive, where it was more than a number on a streaming list … It was the rush in your pulse.”
Authors Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock agree wholeheartedly, and after mulling the idea for the better part of a decade, the pair recently released perhaps the most definitive oral history of the ’80s hard rock era. Featuring more than 200 interviews with members of Van Halen, Motley Crue, Poison, Guns ’N’ Roses, Skid Row, Bon Jovi, Ratt, Twisted Sister, Ozzy Osbourne, Warrant, and more, it is an immensely in-depth look at one of music’s most explosive decades.
Recently, I chatted with Beaujour and Bienstock about all things ’80s rock via Zoom. “Nothin’ But A Good Time” is available now via St. Martin’s Press.
What are the origins of “Nothin’ But A Good Time”?
Rich: The origins in one respect go back 40 years to us just loving this music as kids, and we’ve never stopped loving it. But Tom and I worked at Guitar World magazine for decades. We used to talk about doing something like this a decade ago when we were in the office together. We were always bringing it up but never really pulling the trigger on it. When we actually decided to do it, it was a conversation about four years ago where we said, “Let’s jump in and give it a go.”
What were the biggest challenges of the book? You guys did a tremendous amount of interviews.
Tom: The sheer volume of interviews. I don’t see how you would do a book like this without two people. It’s just so many interviews to prepare for, and you’ve gotta be prepared. If you get on the phone with an artist, and they can tell you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re gonna lose them really fast.
Also, because of the format of this book where it’s all quotes, it’s in this oral history format, and the biggest challenge is really that any story you want to tell, you need several voices to talk about it.
So a random example, when Cinderella were gonna get signed to Mercury Records, the head of Mercury Records says to Tom Keifer, “I like you, and I like the bass player, but you’ve got to get rid of the guitar player and the drummer.” You want to tell that story, right? So you need Tom Keifer. You need the drummer and the bass player. We got the label guy. We got the manager. And you need that many people just to be able to say something simple like, “They were gonna get signed, but he had to fire two people.” You need six people to talk about it. That means you’re always hunting for these connective interviews to illustrate a scene. That’s really challenging because if you don’t get that, you’re dead in the water for whatever story you’re trying to tell.
We would have moments of panic about that. “Oh my God, we need to get ‘blank’ to tell this story.” That is a really tricky, tricky thing.
Then, of course, getting famous people to talk to you is not easy. Some people, it took a while to get — like years.
Is the book almost all-new interviews?
Rich: It’s mostly new. I would say like 85% new. A lot of these guys Tom and I have talked to over the years in Guitar World and other magazines, so we just have a backlog of material, so we pulled some of that if it helped to flesh out a story. And then there’s the couple guys you don’t get, so you have to pull from other interviews they’ve done in the past to get the voice in there. One thing we didn’t do, in the case of not being able to get somebody because they’re no longer here — Kevin DuBrow, Jane Lane — I’ve seen other instances where people use stuff, and they acknowledge the person is no longer living, but we felt if the person wasn’t here, we didn’t want to inject their voice into the story. So those people did not appear in the book.
What were some of the most surprising things you uncovered during your research and in your interviews?
Tom: I didn’t understand until we went into this book that people sort of have a sense of this music being a big corporate affair. At the beginning of this era, in the very early ’80s, I was watching MTV. When Quiet Riot and Twisted Sister came on, I didn’t know that these bands had been struggling for almost a decade. We really discovered doing these interviews how out of fashion hard rock was in the early ’80s. The labels really only wanted to sign new wave bands. They wanted the next Elvis Costello, the next Go-Gos, or the next Knack. These bands could not get arrested. They could not get record deals. They were doing everything on their own and funding their own recordings, all their own stage stuff. It was just a very DIY, organic thing that we as kids watching the media feeding us this stuff, hadn’t understood how much of a struggle and how many years these guys put in before suddenly they’re on MTV, and Quiet Riot has the No. 1 record in the world.
Rich: I think I would even expand, and say there’s two pieces to that. One being this idea that they were all dinosaur acts in a way, which is what Rudy Sarzo said. That, in part, fuels their DIY, creative drive, like Tom was saying. Another piece of that is it seemed at least at the time, there was Van Halen, and then all the doors open with Quiet Riot and Motley Crue and Twisted Sister. But what we learned in doing the book, there was Van Halen and some other bands, but Van Halen gets signed, and then there’s nothing. For four years, labels want new wave and punk, and all these bands can’t get anyone to even look at them. Some of them expressed a kind of shock about that. You figure, Van Halen gets signed off the strip, then the labels would want 20 more Van Halens. But they didn’t want it at all. None of these guys could get the time of day from the labels. So you have 3, 4, 5 years in there where they’re just totally doing it on their own, self-financing records, creating these stage shows out of nothing. They’re figuring out their own way to get over and get somebody to pay attention to them.
Do you recall when grunge took over and what that time was like?
Rich: Absolutely. I was like 15 when grunge came in, but I had been listening to this ’80s stuff for most of my life at that point. But yeah, at first it didn’t seem that much different. It felt a little different, but the 80s bands were already starting to change their look a little bit even before grunge came in. Poison in 1990 didn’t look like Poison in 1986, and that’s before Nirvana. Bands would tour together a little bit, and you’d see Nirvana on “Headbangers Ball,” even though they were kind of mocking (the show) while they were there. But it was all just heavy rock ’n’ roll. Clearly, it had a different mindset around it, but I think one of the things you see in the book, to the bands it didn’t seem necessarily that different, either. I think on both sides they thought they would co-exist at first, and that quickly turned out to not be the case and not to be possible.
Tom: Yeah, I was buying Pearl Jam “Ten” and Alice in Chains “Dirt” and Bad Motorfinger, and I thought, “These bands are really good.” It didn’t seem mutually exclusive. I will say that I started at Guitar World in February of 1994, and by then, which is like two years later, it was as if the glam metal stuff had never happened. All these guys that had been on the cover of Guitar World — Nuno Bettencourt, Reb Beach, George Lynch — suddenly it was Soundgarden, Presidents of the United States, and Pearl Jam. No one talked about the ’80s. It was a really bizarre thing. These guys were really swept under the rug. They were canceled in a weird way. I lived through that as a musician, too. I grew up learning how to play all this stuff, and at a certain point in like 1992, it was like, “I have to change a little bit how I play guitar if I want to get gigs.” It was a big shift. But like Rich said, initially I don’t think the bands from the ’80s thought it was gonna take them out. Guns ’N’ Roses asked Nirvana to go on tour. Skid Row asked Nirvana to go on tour. They loved Nirvana, but they didn’t anticipate it would become an either-or situation.
In the early 2000s, started to see ’80s hard rock make a comeback of sorts. What helped bring it back? Was it the nostalgia factor? Or was it that enough time had passed where people could view it a little differently and not in such a negative light?
Tom: Time was a really big thing. And also, after you’ve had like Limp Bizkit and stuff, any of the histrionics of the glam metal era, I think music had already shifted, and I think people were ready for it. And the people who had been fans of the music, by 2000, they’re already like 30-35, and they’re living their work-a-day lives, and they probably got a couple of kids and a lot of debt, and they want to relive their youth. “You know what? I really want to go to a Poison show. That would make me feel a lot better.” And I think that was what happened. Poison did this tour in 2000, and it was huge. People want to go see these bands and feel like they’re 18 again. I think the bands are very happy that it turned around.
Rich: One of the things that we learned about this book, too, and this would also bleed over into how these careers have gone, is that there’s sort of the natural nostalgia loop that happens every 20 years. And I think they needed that time and space away from it in order to be able to embrace their past. The bands and the fans. In the ’90s, you had all these bands, they were still trying to be current. A lot of them were wearing flannel and wearing combat boots and going for more of a raw, grungy direction and trying to step away and disassociate from their ’80s period. By the time you get to 2000, you have some space, and they were OK with going back there. And the fact that the fans wanted it, then everyone was all in. That was something with the book, too, we had said in discussions with each other, that I don’t know that we could have done this book in the early 2000s or especially in the ’90s, because most of these bands wouldn’t have been able to talk about their history with the perspective they have now and see it for what it was. Which for the most part was an incredible thing, and something that 99.9% of artists will never have. They can appreciate it in a different way with the distance.
Tom: I think Scotti Hill from Skid Row, he’s talking in our book, “Dude, the ’90s, we’re back in a van, we’re at the worst hotels.” After having been on top of the world, it was a tough place to be, being back at ground zero. It’s great that these bands now don’t have to tour all the time, they all do fly dates. So they can actually have kind of normal lives, and they go play Thursday, Friday, Saturday. They fly there with a guitar. They come back. They all say now, “I might be taking home more money now than when I had a platinum record.” So it’s a really good time for them.
What bands from that era deserved more credit or should’ve gotten more accolades than they got?
Rich: I think we both have our personal fanboy preferences. For me, one band is Faster Pussycat, who had some level of success, but I always felt their first record is a great album that sort of has everything you would want from that period. It really just captures that mid-’80s Sunset Strip debauchery in a way. It’s loose, and it’s raw, and it’s sloppy, and it’s funny. It does all these things, but it’s also not surprising to me that it didn’t sell 5 million copies. It’s a little too on the edge in terms of the humor and the language and sort of the outlook on the world. It’s not Poison. They did have some success, but for me, when I talk to people about this music, and they only know stuff like Bon Jovi and Poison and the big stuff, that’s always a record I suggest they check out.
Tom: I’m gonna answer your question by sort of not answering your question and answering sideways. I feel like Warrant, although they were very famous, are grossly underrated. The songwriting of Jani Lane is one of the great overlooked things of this era. He was 100% as good a songwriter as anyone. The songs had a melancholy, they have really interesting chord changes and key changes, and I think he was a genuine talent who did not get his due as a serious craftsman. Ultimately that probably killed him that he didn’t get his due. But he knew how to write a song in a very, very evolved way that maybe not all of the bands of this era did, and I don’t think anyone looks at Warrant that way, and it’s too bad.
What interviews were the most fun?
Tom: For me the most fun was Vito Bratta from White Lion, because I was having so much fun doing it. I didn’t think we were gonna get him for the book, because he’s only done two interviews in the last 20 years. He’s just this really funny dude from Staten Island, and he’s very dry. I was having a full fan geek-out while doing it. So that, combined with the fact that he was super cool and self-deprecating with a lot of good one-liners, that to me was total fun.
Rich: For me, I talked to Sharon and Ozzy. They’re both just great people to talk to, and Sharon in particular, I thought was really important to the book because it’s such a unique perspective. It’s always great to have a manager’s perspective, and we have a bunch of them in the book, but especially for her because she sort of preceded this whole period. She’s also a woman in this really powerful role at the time, and she’s also married to Ozzy, who is Ozzy. So she gave a really great interview and was super insightful about everything. The thing that was neat about that, while we were talking, I could hear Ozzy in the room with her. We hadn’t interviewed Ozzy yet, nor had we even approached him for an interview. He kept sort of shouting at her during the interview because he would hear what she was talking about, and I think it’s not a period of Ozzy’s life that he gets interviewed about that much. He certainly talks about the Sabbath years a lot. He talks about the “No More Tears” and “Blizzard of Ozz” eras. But ’84 to ’90, that’s not really what he’s talking about. So I think it was triggering a lot of memories for him. So you would hear Sharon say something, and Ozzy would be shouting in the background. Then she would sort of quiet him down so she could answer the question. Then finally, at the end of the interview, I asked, “Hey, can we get Ozzy on the phone?” And we did a few days later. It was really sort of a neat way to have that come about.
What are your favorite records from that era?
Rich: One I always go back to is that first Faster Pussycat record, But also, “Too Fast For Love” (Motley Crue) is a record that never gets old. It’s not the most representative record of that era. It actually doesn’t sound like a lot of the music that came after that it influenced, but it’s still great. I love the records that are a little bit underproduced and a little bit raw, and you can hear that the guys are super young and super wide-eyed about the whole thing. “Too Fast For Love” you definitely get that vibe. With Faster Pussycat, you get that vibe. And another one I’ll throw in is the first Skid Row record.
Tom: For me, it’s Poison. Rich is very courteous, because he knows I want to say “Look What The Cat Dragged In,” so he doesn’t say it. But I love that record top to bottom. In my office is a giant poster of Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick looming over everything. So I’ve loved Cheap Trick since I was 10. And to me, Poison is like this extension of Cheap Trick. I think it’s a great power pop record. The songs are great. The energy is great. I listen to that record a lot even still, to put me in a good mood. I shouldn’t still be able to listen to that record. I love White Lion “Pride” because I think the guitar playing is just great. Kix did two records in a row — “Midnight Dynamite” and “Blow My Fuse,” and those are really great records. I think Kix are highly underrated and one of the best live bands still. You go see Kix if you want to be in a good mood. Going back to who was the most fun to interview, and we used him to fill in gaps from time to time because he’s so helpful, was Brian Forsythe from Kix. He is one of the best dudes to interview in the whole world. He’s funny and friendly and open and honest. He’s a delight to interview, and I love Kix.
- Chris Jericho Debuts New Entrance Music On Dynamite - April 25, 2024
- Details Revealed On New Chris Jericho Horror Film - April 25, 2024
- Sebastian Bach Reveals What’s Standing In Way Of Skid Row Reunion - April 23, 2024
