The Vinnie Vincent Invasion, most notably in the person of Vinnie Vincent himself—zealous maestro, harebrained virtuoso, turbulent shredder—is the sine qua non of any study of over-glammed, jigsaw-assembled heavy metal music. The band crashed the bus of Hollywood campiness right into the bedrooms of American teenagers from Oregon to the tip of Long Island. In her seminal 1964 essay, “Notes on ‘Camp”, Susan Sontag identified campiness as frivolity, “artifice and exaggeration,” “naïve” pretentiousness, and “shocking” excess. She should have seen the Vinnie Vincent Invasion.
Vincent, born Vincent John Cusano in 1952, was an anonymous session player boosted to overnight rock stardom when, in 1982, he was brought in to replace KISS guitarist Ace Frehley, himself a casualty of 1970s celebrity excess. Though Frehley would continue to appear in the band’s music videos, Vincent’s uncredited studio work on the 1982 “Creatures of the Night” album set the stage for him to join the band when a drug-addled Frehley proved unable or unwilling to move off the couch to accompany the band on tour.

Although Cusano sought to retain his birth name as a member of KISS, Gene Simmons, presiding entrepreneurial spirit of the band, invented the stage name Vinnie Vincent (Vincent would keep the name). Paul Stanley, artistic soul of the band, proposed an Egyptian warrior persona for Vincent. This required him to don face paint in the shape of an Ankh spread across the forehead, brow, and bridge of the nose. Vincent’s “Ankh Warrior” character has since been honored with an action figure.

KISS, “Lick it Up” (from the 1983 album “Lick it Up”)

Vincent appeared on the following KISS album, “Lick it Up” (the first without trademark makeup). To the naked eye, he seemed a full-fledged member of the band. He recorded in the studio, strutted in the videos, performed on tour, and posed for publicity shots; but his relationship with KISS was tumultuous and never more than tenuous from the start. Band members soon grew weary of his guitar-god ambitions. He was booted from the band at the end of the tour.

In the video for “Lick it Up,” one of two he filmed with the band, we see a scrawny, raffish Vincent, thirty-one years old, who never appears entirely at ease with the rest of the band. He is like an awkward younger brother tagging along while an assertive Paul and beefy Gene ham it up for the camera.

On the album “Lick it Up,” one can already sense Promethean sparks flashing out on Vincent’s solos (though not in the song “Lick it Up” itself, which has remarkably restrained guitar work). One imagines a skeptical Gene eying Vincent askance.

Gene has gone on record saying that Vincent was “fired for unethical behavior, not because of lack of talent. The guy was very talented. He was unethical. He was fired.” Who knows what this means in the universe of KISS, but it may have been the greatest gift KISS could give. They hauled him up from the shadows, a little known axe-man for hire, staff songwriter for “Happy Days” and “Joanie Loves Chachi.” They loaned him some stardom, and it was time for Vinnie Vincent to shine, to burn fitfully but magnificently, to throw off a dazzling, bald glare from the center of the 1980s glam rock revival, what the nostalgia industry has since termed “Hair Metal.”

Vinnie Vincent Invasion, “Boyz Are Gonna Rock” (from the 1986 album “Vinnie Vincent Invasion”)

Talk about flash. Vinnie’s got it. And then some. He doesn’t know what to do with it all. He is like a crate of fireworks ignited in a wind tunnel. Still stinging from his estrangement from KISS, he quickly assembled an all-pro crew of LA musicians to record his first solo album, the eponymous “Vinnie Vincent Invasion” (1986).

Although Robert Fleischman, who served for a short time as the lead singer of Journey, recorded the vocals on the album, it was the Bon-Jovi-esque Mark Slaughter who appears in the outrageous video, lip-syncing Fleischman’s words to the lead single, “Boyz Are Gonna Rock.”

For teenaged boys/boyz stewed to their eyeballs with boiling loads of testosterone, Vinnie’s screeching staccato performance was breathtaking. He was wild, literally; he looks feral, for Christ’s sake, and he’s completely out of control. No wonder the record company tried to drop him a few years later. This is a plectrum apocalypse. He wields his guitar like a flamethrower. He spurts out thousands of notes, like burning sparks, sometimes hammering the strings with a microphone while on his knees. He peaks and then peaks some more.

The video begins with the slender, almost delicately feminine Vincent, posed spread-legged, thrown into relief before a colossal neon logo, his personal double “V” (note his custom double-V guitar as well), as attendants in jumpsuits bounce into action like a Bond villain’s nameless cohorts. Vincent pumps his guitar overhead like a sacrificial offering to some unseen, unknowable guitar god. For a few moments, he has our undivided attention. It is, after all, his band. His song. His video. His initials (or the ones Gene gave him) are in abundance. But watch. He wants to remain the center of the camera’s attention, though he must yield some of the spotlight to the lead singer, traditionally the focal point of a video, and the other primped members of the band.

Still, he wants you to look at him. He jabs his guitar into the camera. He seems to do everything with the instrument but play it. If you listen, there are three guitar lines being played simultaneously in the introduction to the song, yet he devotes little time or energy to mimicking any of it in the video. He needs his hands free to cajole us, to pump the smoky air. Half the time, his beloved guitar has been reduced to a prop, an elaborate bauble, when not brandished as a potential weapon.

The standard repertoire of visual ploys is fully in evidence, but it gets better. Watch on, watch on. The glamour is almost too much to bear. The buff drummer, aptly named Bobby Rock, wears silver sequined braces over his otherwise bare torso. The bassist, Dana Strum, and singer, Mark Slaughter, look as though they were doused in pancake syrup and pushed through the clearance aisle at Frederick’s of Hollywood. It’s too much. It’s all too much. The song is shrill and insistent. This is unadulterated, oversexed braggadocio, Sunset Strip-style.

The song begins subtly enough: “I’m a sex-shooter / Hot teaser / Love pleaser. / Got a lust that kills.” Watch out, ladies. Then we’re told to “hail the rock brigade / The street boys on a rampage / Got a fire burnin’ in my veins / The wilds howlin’ out my name.”

To be fair, the whole rock world turned out for video shoots similarly attired in those years. Just look at Vincent’s former employers, KISS (a judge ruled, to his endless chagrin, that he was never a member of the band, only a paid musician). Believe it or not, this was the style of the era. The decade hit some people harder than others. It dropped like a load of bricks on Vinnie.

KISS, “Tears are Falling” (from the 1985 album “Asylum”)

But to return to Vinnie’s “The Boyz are Gonna Rock”: Not content with glitter and jewels, gavotting and air-humping, the band really slips into overdrive around minute mark 3:55, when Vincent hurls his guitar to the stage, mounts it, and begins to lick it (it’s really out of the bounds of this essay, but it’s hard not to wonder how much cocaine was snorted during the making of this video). From here, things genuinely start to go haywire. Soon after Vincent’s impassioned tonguing of the fret board, Bobby Rock’s cymbals mysteriously transform into clay. They shatter like dinner plates when he strikes them. Vincent then grimaces once more and thrusts his guitar like a lance into the Marshall stack, which explodes (from behind, for some reason).

But this is not the final coup de grâce (“blow of mercy”). Oh, no. At 4:10 we are treated to a grown man fully aflame atop a tower, leaping down onto the stage behind the oblivious lead singer, flailing desperately about for several seconds. Was this intentional? He leaps out of the frame and Vincent proceeds to tenderly kiss his guitar (shades of Hendrix) before summarily smashing it (perhaps this is the true blow of mercy).

Dana Strum, half-heartedly joining the fray, rather anticlimactically topples his bass stack, as Bobby Rock, bass drum now (extraordinarily) also aflame, begins to distribute his kit from the riser onto the littered stage, which is beginning to resemble a field of medieval battle (who cleans up after these bands?). Vincent emerges from plumes of steam triumphant. Evidently, he has conquered his own song, along with all manner of logic and good taste.

Vinnie Vincent Invasion, “Love Kills” (from the 1988 album “All Systems Go”)

His victory would be short-lived. Although the band would release one more album, 1988’s “All Systems Go,” and even land a soundtrack single for “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master,” they were not long for this world. On the tour to support the second album, the moribund band broke apart under pressure from the record company, which insisted that Vincent had become megalomaniacal. No one seems to have disagreed.

Slaughter, “Fly to the Angels” (from the 1990 album “Stick it to Ya”)

Adding insult to injury, Mark Slaughter and Dana Strum proceeded to enjoy great success in the radio-friendly, and remarkably photogenic band Slaughter. Drummer Bobby Rock briefly joined his former bandmates before going on to play with Nitro (see the controversial installment #3 in the series) and pop-metal novelty act Nelson. Vincent would go on to muddle in obscurity, releasing a little-heralded solo album, “Euphoria,” in the 1990s.

Whatever else may be said about Vincent, he achieved a certain notoriety, and he certainly had fans (though both albums fell a bit short of “gold” status, which required sales of a half-million records, sales were nonetheless impressive by any standards; they did make their mark). Most importantly, though, he serves as an exemplar of campy heavy metal.

Merriam Webster defines campiness as “something so outrageously artificial, affected, inappropriate, or out-of-date as to be considered amusing.” It would be hard to improve on that as a definition of the Vinnie Vincent Invasion. They could be cross-referenced with the very word.

Many bands in that era combined exceedingly feminine appurtenances—eye shadow, lipstick, blush, teased hair, lace girdles and petticoats, pouting, posing, languid twirls and splits—with equally incredible macho postures: lots of “putting your love into” someone, hip-thrusting, hard-drinking, bar brawling, inane swagger, boastful trashiness and adolescent sexual innuendo. Combined, the strangeness of these two seemingly contrary elements results in a frisson, a surge of excitement and bewilderment that is not altogether unpleasing.

Vincent sums the era’s hopes, desires, illusions, and failures amply, in fact perfectly, and we would do well to thank him and his short-lived band of glam brothers, The Vinnie Vincent Invasion, for telling us so much about the era that created them.

- Ernest Hilbert

How many times can we reasonably be urged to “set the night on fire”? Or to “break the chains,” for that matter? It seems we’re just going through the motions now. And what’s with all the Z’s in the album title, “Leather Boyz with Electric Toyz?”

Oh, right, the 1980s are beginning to peter out. All hands have been played. The first rays of dawn creep through drawn blinds. The party is ending. What was once the hottest ground zero for new rock music, Los Angeles, has been torched down to dying embers kicked back and forth by out-of-work axe-men, cooling to ash in the Pacific breeze.

You can feel the chill in the air as distraction and fear begin to leak into the humid air of once-crowded clubs, as the race for success on the Sunset Strip takes on a truly fraught quality, as chances grow scarcer. It’s scary.

Pretty Boy Floyd, “Rock n’ Roll (is Gonna Set the Night on Fire)” (from the 1989 album, “Leather Boyz with Electric Toyz“)

Artistic resources, thin on the ground at the beginning of the decade—a few chops, moves, and outfits handed down from the 1970s—are nearly depleted. If you look closely, in just the right light, you can see the wild look in the eye, almost taste the flecks of coke-caked spit building up and boiling in the throat, suffer the gut-sick panic that slithers up from long-abused bowels.

Something is wrong, but no one can figure out what it is. No one will slow down to take a sounding, and the whole creaking ship of fools, laden with a thousand frenzied, sequined, vodka-sick captains, is about to run aground on a harsh, unforgiving spit of land called the 1990s. The hangover alone will kill the weaker among them.

Penelope Spheeris, “Decline of Western Civilization Pt II: Metal Years” (1989)

You cannot bargain with the specter that has begun to loom over the Sunset Strip, scythe lowered in a dreadful slow-motion arc. A new and darker dimension of hopelessness has set in, but the curtain has not dropped entirely yet. There is still time, it seems. There is still a chance, dreadfully slender though it may be, that the roulette ball will skitter onto your number and deposit the last of the era’s fortune and plunder into your lap.

Even Motley Crüe is on the verge of utter collapse from spiritual exhaustion and artistic degeneracy. Poison has met their high water mark, their Gettysburg, and now the soul-dragging retreat down into obsolescence has begun. Flags are furled in the dust. Guns ‘n Roses has swept the board, taken the pot, shedding the glam and returning to an earlier style of rock stardom, but even they will not last to the middle of the coming decade. The situation is dire, and everyone, from David Geffen to acne-spotted farm kids in North Dakota, knows it. Except Pretty Boy Floyd.

In Pretty Boy Floyd we behold the perfect paint-by-numbers hair band: squeaky leather, suitably androgynous singer (Steve “Sex” Summers), vaguely provocative stage names (see last), choreographed antics, flaming guitars (summarily smashed), flash pots, layers of makeup, tremendous corollas of teased hair, a sound stage far roomier than any they would have reason to mount in real life, batteries of hot UFO lights, cliché-ridden and wholly unremarkable lyrics, customary jigsaw-puzzle riffs, and . . . we’re pretty much there.

But where is there? As Gertrude Stein once remarked about Oakland, California, “there’s no there there.” This band is not only not greater than the sum of its parts, it bizarrely seems to amount to far less in toto than its interchangeable members could offer individually.

Already hampered by an unwieldy title (ten words, counting “n’”), their first single, “Rock n’ Roll (is Gonna Set the Night on Fire),” is weighed down by its lack of imagination. Every standard rock cliché is tossed into the pot, but no gumbo.

In the dregs of the decade, 1989, when Pretty Boy Floyd’s first album debuted, competition was incredibly concentrated, and bands had long since become indistinguishable in their efforts to mimic those who had gone before. Thousands of bands descended on Los Angeles looking for a record deal just as the rest of the nation’s adolescent zeal for Hollywood style hard rock was waning.

So much depends on timing, and Pretty Boy Floyd was just too late and never more than competent. They are impressive in their way, of course, quite professional, with turn-on-a-dime execution (no easy feat), but when all is said and done they are pure textbook.

Pretty Boy Floyd, “I Wanna be With You” (1989)

They followed up their first single with a ballad (standard hair-metal scheduling) called “I Wanna Be With You,” which features the lines:

“What’s your name? Where are you from?
Our conversation’s just begun
Maybe we can talk more after school.”

School? Graduate school? These guys look like they are at least in the mid-twenties. Just as in the first video, every move feels staged. Every note blandly premeditated. Each pout faked.

Not much else to say about them, sadly, except to report that they continue to exist in some strange shape today. One shudders to think of how many opportunities they’ve missed over the last quarter century.

How much regret can one band sustain before dissolving into thin air?

- Ernest Hilbert

Next time: What does it take to catch the jaded eyes of late 1980s youth? Do we have to light a guy on fire during the video? OK, then. Let’s do it.

Nitro, “Freight Train,” (from the 1989 album “O.F.R.” [“Out-Fucking-Rageous”])

How did we get from Roy Acuff’s “Wreck of the Old 97” to Aerosmith’s “Train Kept a Rollin’” to Nitro’s “Freight Train”?

Trains used to chug along, conductors “high on cocaine,” but still choo-chooing on their mazy way, until Nitro. Nitro confronts us with something altogether different. It’s as though we drifted off on yesterday’s rock rhythms only to bolt awake on the tracks blinded by the lights of an oncoming express. All senses are overwhelmed, and then, before you know it, you’re gone. Whatever else this is, it is no longer rock music.

Nitro is a band (not a rollercoaster or wrestler) almost entirely defined by, and remembered for, gimmicks. The band boasted at least two musicians with super-powers: The lead singer Jim Gillette (Lita Ford’s husband) claimed the ability to break glasses with his voice like an opera soprano of old, and guitarist Michael Angelo Batio was allegedly the “fastest” guitarist in the world (the bass player’s powers seem to consist of his ability to swing his bass in a circle like a Weight-Throw contestant in the Highland Games; the drummer may be merely human).

While musical speed and range, displayed as sublime virtuosity, can have a pleasing, even dizzying effect when it issues from the piano of an Art Tatum or the strings of a Paganini, musical quality is not generally measured in notes-per-second. Certainly scale and intensity lend themselves to what we think of as “greatness,” but they do not work alone and they cannot work without context. There must be something to rise up from. You can’t begin on eleven.

In Nitro the listener is met with a warlike barrage of genuinely irritating sonic gymnastics. For all his alleged range (six octaves claimed, but four octaves according to critics), Gillette makes one wish he came equipped with a mute button. (One may also feel the distinct urge to pull his wig off.)

Batio’s playing is shrill, antagonistic, and ultimately unnecessary. In fact, it is not merely unnecessary, or unnecessarily busy; it is, in fact, insanely busy, existing for the very sake of busyness. If an obsessive-compulsive sewing machine could play music, this is what it would sound like. Batio never once smiles or seems to enjoy himself. Gillette seems to plead anxiously the entire time, on the verge of some sort of calamitous breakdown. Do we not understand? He is like a freight train coming. Get it?

This is art as competition. Art as exaggeration. Every convention of rock music is overstated or embroidered to cartoonish degrees. This goes for their equipment as well. We all remember the classic double-necked guitar (twelve and six strings) employed to great effect by Jimmy Page in his performance of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” from the concert film “The Song Remains the Same.”

Then we had the grinning trickster Rick Nielsen, guitarist for arena-pleasers Cheap Trick, who pushed this innovation to an absurd end with his five-necked Hamer custom guitar. What good are five identical six-string necks? Who cares? That’s Nielsen’s point.

Rick Nielsen performs on his five-necked custom guitar

Then we get the straight-faced Batio’s famous “quad guitar,” which provides him with the implausible and perfectly pointless ability to play four different six-stringed necks at different times, two in mirror opposition to his normal configuration (named second “coolest guitar in rock” by online music magazine Gigwise; Rick Nielsen’s penta-guitar came in fifth, Page’s first).

Acrobatic? Yes. Impressive? Kinda. Pleasing to the ear? Never.

Nitro, “Freight Train” guitar solo highlight

Nothing can mask the fact that “Freight Train” is not a good song. The video’s director generously interlards footage of the band bopping and pouting around a sound stage with stock footage of a train. Yes, that’s right, an actual train, steam and all.

The director for Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train” saved a goofy song from becoming goofier by showing photographs of missing children in the MTV video. This tactic made an otherwise forgettable song heartbreaking. But neither Nitro nor the director they retained for the video shoot are remotely concerned with subtlety. Even seasoned metal listeners will wince at least once during Batio’s front-loaded, claws-out guitar solo.

We must remember that “Freight Train” was released during the apocalyptic apex of “shred” guitar, when more and more guitarists battled for an ever shrinking share of the music entertainment market. Competition was severe.

Indeed, Batio was named “No. 1 Shredder of All Time” by Guitar One Magazine (how many of these magazine are there?) as late as 2003 (not best guitarist). Tricks of all kinds were in, like never before, or since. You could play the guitar upside-down, backwards, while spinning it around your spandexed torso; shoot rockets from it, blow it up, ignite the pickups, shoot lasers from the pegboard, anything, everything! Speed, more speed! If it’s too late to be the loudest band in the world, never fear: There is still time to be the fastest.

Guitarists became daredevils, pushing themselves and their gear to limits never heard before (and which no one wants to hear again!). Paul Gilbert, guitar prodigy, became known for actually playing solos using a modified drill bit with three picks attached, like blades of a propeller, to pluck the notes at baffling speed. He was that fast.

Guitar prodigy Paul Gilbert, plays a guitar with a drill

Much of the blame for this trend in rock music—the trend that reached its illogical conclusion with Nitro—may be laid at the doorstep of one David Lee Roth. As front man for the biggest rock show on earth, Van Halen, he was compelled to stage an even bigger show upon his departure for a solo career.

Vaudevillian David Lee Roth hams it up on “Just a Gigolo” (from the 1985 EP “Crazy from the Heat“)

He was always the most vaudevillian of rock stars, and in his cosmopolitan, silver-tongued way he resembles stars like Bob Hope or Dean Martin more than primordial, mystical rockers like Jimi Hendrix or Robert Plant (he announced this at the start of his solo career by the decision to release this Frank Sinatra-esque version of an old Irving Caesar standard). He was a showman par excellence. Roth’s was a theatrical, wise-assed, variety-style of entertainment, far from the booming sludge of Black Sabbath, the druggy ease of The Eagles, or the psychedelic escapism of Pink Floyd. The man believed in ballyhoo.

“Diamond” Dave presents the biggest rock show on earth (from the 1986 LP “Eat ‘em and Smile“)

In his bid to outdo all comers, Roth hired the two most impressive (because excessive) performers of their kind: Steve Vai (guitar) and Billy Sheehan (bass). This lineup, and the incredibly lucrative tour that ensued, inspired an orgiastic enthusiasm for speed and flair on the part of hard rock musicians everywhere, who entered into a mutually-destructive arms race that peaked at the end of the decade, when such peacock performances would be made obsolete by morose, shoe-gazing rock produced by ironic and depressive Grunge artists.

After the hair-sprayed minstrelsy, musical burlesque, and outright freak shows of heavy metal, both kids and critics felt that Seattle represented a refreshing, refining return to the “authenticity” that had been bled out of rock music over the previous ten years by Los Angeles.

But let us return to Nitro, shall we?

It is instructive to note that both lead members offered lessons—“Vocal Power” and “Speed Kills”—by mail through a system called “Metal Method,” advertised in rock magazines like Circus and Hit Parader. What they did was, at root, aspirational (Batio pauses in his instructional video to promise “I’m going to give you the keys to the Lamborghini”):

Michael Angelo Batio in his “Speed Kills” course for “Metal Method.”

Who wouldn’t want to get better, especially if they could be the best . . . ever, in history! Nitro’s exploits resembled athletic performances (or professional wrestling moves) more than musical expression. No “slow hand” for these LA rockers.

Watch Batio: a guitar lick easily played with a small movement of a single finger is instead frantically performed with a great lashing about. Showmanship, not musicianship.

They may have thought they embodied the future, but they really were just the latest in a lemming dash over the cliff of rock history. In fact, if you listen, you realize they shed the chrysalis of blues music from which rock had been born altogether, though in their desperate reach for some kind of Baroque post-rock transcendence they instead fell like Evel Knievel right down into the yawning canyon of their own vaunting ambition.

Before the 80s are done, heavy metal gets even crazier, and lazier.

- Ernest Hilbert

Quiet Riot introduced what we call “heavy metal” to mainstream America with their mega-selling 1983 debut album “Metal Health” and their chart-topping single “Cum on Feel the Noize,” a classic glam rock song penned and originally recorded in 1973 by British glam rock band Slade.

Quiet Riot, “Cum on Feel the Noize” (from the 1983 album, “Metal Health“)

Although Quiet Riot helped to push the term “metal” further into the light with this early success (it was the first heavy metal song in the Billboard top five), they were really more of a hard rock act, and as such they did not present a particularly outrageous look, aside from the bog-standard spandex and kerchiefs.

Their initial success proved easy to achieve but difficult to sustain. After a disappointing second album (also featuring a first single originally recorded by Slade), they made one last grasp for commercial relevance (they had no artistic relevance to squander) with “Quiet Riot III” in 1986 (note, “Quiet Riot I” and “Quiet Riot II” were released only in Japan before their US debut, but just to confuse the matter the band also released an album in the US in 1988 called “Quiet Riot,” featuring a new lead vocalist).

It is saddening to watch a band struggle for its very existence after a brief flash of success. What little imagination the band may have relied upon to write the songs on their first major album was sapped by the time they began work on “Quiet Riot III,” but they slogged ahead with help of producer Spencer Proffer, who enjoys songwriting credit on most of the album’s tepid tracks.

When the smoke cleared, the pick of the litter turned out to be “The Wild and the Young,” released as the lead single from the album and made into an MTV video that failed to impress rock fans—who were already turning toward more “authentic” heavy metal bands like Metallica—and was soon dropped from rotation.

“The Wild and the Young” is a simple paean to youthful energy and optimism, but the video is an overambitious fiasco (note the futuristic, twelve-wheeled troop transport, called the “Land Master,” on loan from a studio back lot, originally used in the 1977 sci-fi flop “Damnation Alley“) with an interminable and trite montage introduction, taking us to yet another “Orwellian” future in which rock music is banned. (They couldn’t picture a near future in which kids simply stopped listening to rock, but that’s another story.) This, along with the tedious epilogue tacked on to the video, made it abundantly clear, if evidence were needed, that the video was intended as a commentary on the PMRC’s (Parent Music Resource Center) recommendation that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) voluntarily introduce “guidelines and/or a rating system” similar to the MPAA film rating system. Before too long, heavy metal bands began to peddle a brand of slippery-slope political rhetoric. They asked: If authorities begin rating our albums, how long will it be before they ban them altogether?

Quiet Riot, “Wild and the Young” (from the 1986 album QR III or Quiet Riot III)

For the video, the band’s drummer, Frankie Banali, donned a quasi-military outfit that would embarrass Colonel Mohammar Quadaffi. The widely-disliked, loud-mouthed lead singer, Kevin DuBrow, a sufferer of male pattern baldness, sports a wig that would make Dame Edna blush. One wonders if the band sensed any irony in the fact that the one man in the video most persuasively (and elaborately) dressed like a fascist dictator is the drummer of the persecuted band.

Somebody decided to heap as many spangles, silks, and hairspray—in wigs no less—onto a chintzy, poorly-thought-out dystopian plot for an otherwise untenable lead single. The song itself is an overproduced flop, basically a cornball chorus bookmarked by already outdated rap-style “samples” and “scratches,” overlaid with a nauseatingly thick symphony of synthesizers.

Of course, as often in Quiet Riot videos, it all turns out to be a dream . . . . or was it? This is, in essence, the story of their career, poof, gone in a moment, as if a dream, so perhaps it may be credited with a larger symbolic value.

Can it get any worse? Oh yeah.

- Ernest Hilbert

Rock bands, especially heavy metal bands, have always enjoyed big stage shows. My father, a man devoted to the music of Wagner and Mozart, saw the flashing lights and hip gyrations as some kind of recompense for the poverty of the music. Later generations have come to understand that the style, the look, of a band is as palpably relevant to their reputation as the music itself. To think otherwise is to risk being thought of as a cynic or, worse, a rock purist of some kind, known collectively and pejoratively as “rockists.”

This led me to think, however, that perhaps my father was, in many cases, if not most, correct in his observation. Perhaps I’ve reached an age when I can comfortably admit that my old man was right most of the time. So I’ve decided to investigate the matter a bit further, using a number of 1980s heavy metal videos as case studies.

Manowar, “Gloves of Metal” (from the 1983 album “Into Glory Ride“)

Manowar is a heavy metal band from upstate New York that inhabits its own fantasy realm. The band — ever true to leather, fur, loincloths, swords, and other fully Conanesque accoutrements — has gained some notoriety beyond the shallows of heavy metal fandom, partly due to the fact that many in the “normal” world simply can’t believe that Manowar isn’t some kind of joke. They are pure metal. Pure adolescent fantasy. This is as good as it gets.

“Gimmicks,” such as they are — makeup, flash pots, teased hair, outfits, smashed instruments, etc. — usually have a single, spontaneous origin somewhere in the history of rock music, but they soon become standard repertoire. Sometimes, these visual tricks completely overtake the music itself, in essence smothering it and making it almost irrelevant. This is what interests me most. Van Halen, for instance, is remembered for big, circus-like shows, but rock critics and fans alike were drawn to their high-energy and usually high-quality rock music.

Some of these “show-biz” tricks added value to rock concerts of an earlier era, but after KISS, David Bowie, and other in the 1970s, the box of stage theatrics had been fully raided. After a while, the routines become just that: routines, worn out, boring, and unimaginative.

Of course it is possible to enjoy the music of many bands without the outrageous show, but rock music was, after all, a part of the entertainment industry, a big part in its day. There emerged in the 1980s a variety of hard rock, or heavy metal, group that sought to gain attention by simply piling tricks one on top of another until the whole manic contraption simply crumpled under its own weight.

Rob Reiner, “This is Spinal Tap” (1984)

To be sure, Manowar skirts the vales of the unreal and is akin to the mighty Spinal Tap, but then we must remember that they are one of the very reasons that Spinal Tap exists in the first place. Nonetheless, they are immune to criticism. Manowar is a band beyond parody, beyond the call of adulthood, for whom the shades of the prison-house have not begun to lengthen, possessed of impressive longevity (formed in 1980) and an extraordinarily devoted following.

To confirm their “Tap”-like credentials (Tap was described sardonically as “England’s Loudest Band”), Manowar entered the “Guinness Book of World Records” in 1984 as the world’s loudest band. They have since broken their own record . . . twice.

In their debut video, for the single “Gloves of Metal,” Manowar has about as much fun as grown men can, leaping about an oversized stage in leather pants and fur mantles, while cutting away to images of themselves galloping on horses through streams and woods, brandishing swords, swinging scantily-clad women over shoulders, smashing enemies across the face, no doubt seeking revenge on some dark tyrant, very likely a high school gym teacher.

This is as much testosterone as one may safely pour into a video. Or is it?

- Ernest Hilbert