Quote:
Originally Posted by Urban Hat€monger ?
I know a lot of people consider the US Festival in 1983 was considered the death of punk & new wave and hard rock & metal took over.
You had The Clash headlining the friday night who had virtually fallen apart and given up at this point. In fact even at the end of the gig there was a fist fight between Strummer and security. Mick Jones left the band straight after and never came back.
And then Van Halen played the next night and blew them offstage with Quiet Riot, Motley Crue, Ozzy, Priest & The Scorpions backing them and basically replaced The Clash as the biggest band in the U.S. overnight.
That's pretty much when rock music became mainstream, all those bands had platinum albums after playing that show.
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I remember reading about that show in Motley Crue's autobiography, and they pretty much said the same thing (sans the stuff about the Clash), that that's when metal really took over.
Shout at the Devil went platinum -- which is pretty crazy when you consider that out of all those other bands, Motley probably had the most radio unfriendly album, without any obvious singles. Before that they were just some skuzzy band living in a roach-infested apartment, who nobody outside of the Sunset Strip had even heard of.
As far as I'm concerned, the early rise of glam metal is as unlikely a success story as grunge. There wasn't really a decade of a single genre dominating the airwaves in desperate need of dying to create such a backlash, so the about face was actually pretty random considering that it had only been a few years since solos and straight-up rock had become a sin.
On another note, Motley Crue were actually my first show back in the mid-late 00s, and they blew Aerosmith off the stage. Granted, Aerosmith were doing that self-indulgent thing where they played boring blues jams, and Steven Tyler kept playing that ****ing harmonica rather than actually singing, but Motley Crue still killed. Even though I was waiting in line for beer at the time, "Live Wire" was still epic as **** from halfway across the venue.