"You Give Love a Bad Name"
This is where it all began. My love for rock n' roll, that is.
I liked music before this, of course, but—as I've mentioned before—I grew up in a mostly music-free household, so it wasn't, like, a constant in my life. The only thing I remember being absolutely in love with before this was Michael Jackson's Thriller album, which at least initially had as much to do with the theatrical horror of the title track's music video as it did with the music itself.
And then this song happened to me. Wikipedia tells me it came out in July of 1986, so I was likely a newly minted nine-year-old when I first heard it. My cousin Rachel (who would have been 12 at the time) was over...she was doing something on the other side of the room when this video came on MTV, and I was mesmerized. I remember Rachel asking me who the band was, and I had missed the title info that always displayed at the beginning of the video, so I didn't know. Then I saw the person in the crowd holding up their personalized license plate (0:20), so I was like, "Bon Jvi?"
This song became my gateway drug into rock, and specifically the hair metal that dominated the scene for the rest of the 1980s and into the '90s. It seems crazy, looking back, that Nirvana sounded the death knell for this particular subgenre of rock a mere five years later when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Nevermind helped to usher grunge into the mainstream. But, while I liked grunge just fine and my musical taste continued to expand, I stuck it out with hair metal until bands started breaking up or replacing key members—I had little taste for Poison without C.C. DeVille, for instance, and none for Motley Crue without Vince Neil.
As for Bon Jovi, they were never my favorite once I started getting into other bands, and only two of their albums—Slippery When Wet and New Jersey—really did anything for me. But they're still around, playing arenas and putting out new music—rumor has it that there's an album on the way from them later this year—and you have to respect that. They've undergone some lineup changes of their own, and without Richie Sambora on guitar, it's just not for me; still, I'll never forget the hold this song had over me and the path of musical fandom it placed me on.
It's now 33+ years further along the timeline from when this "You Give Love a Bad Name" came out, and songs from hair metal's heyday are still a huge part of the daily rotation in my iTunes library (and yes, I still use iTunes, ripping and buying MP3 files so I can have full control over my own music library [although, full disclosure, I subscribe to Spotify as well, because it's somewhat more convenient for mobile listening now that the iPod is no longer a thing]). What can I say? I like loud music that's fun and not terribly complex. And I keep hearing that rock is dead, and hair metal really was dead long before that ostensibly happened anyway, and a number of the stars want to distance themselves from that genre/term, and all that. So I just thought it would be fun, for the month of "Rocktober," to shine a light back on some of the songs and bands I loved (and still love) from back then.
My intent is to do one of these each day throughout the month. I haven't planned it all out yet (I'm a pantser), but I do know off the top of my head a few I want to highlight for one reason or another. Hopefully I'll be able to find them all on YouTube or another similar, easily shareable site. Some will have stories or commentary that go along with them, and some may have no more than "I really like this." We'll see. It'll be fun and probably not terribly enlightening (like the music itself, hey-o!), but it'll be metal, dammit, and along the way maybe I can remind someone of a forgotten favorite or even just pass along a kickass earworm. So get out your lighter or throw up some horns, if you're so inclined, and let's all jump into the wayback machine and see where it takes us.
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