(I wrote the following for another blog of mine a year or so back, but as I’m bumming heavily on a recent turn of events initiated by the provider of that blog, in apparent “good faith” – I’m moving house. Do excuse the mess.)
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Not long ago, I won this on e-bay:
Yep – NEW BIG HAIR HAS ARRIVED AT MY DOORSTEP.
“Here in a once-in-a-lifetime box set are all the memories, all the music, the fashion and culture from Hollywood’s most-remembered decade, wrapped up in one glorious stargazing vehicle we’re calling Hollywood Rocks – The Audio Companion! Designed as a companion to the book HOLLYWOOD ROCKS!, this two-year project involved collecting demo cassettes, 12” vinyl, CDs, VHS and video tapes submitted by hundreds of current and former rock stars. Listen in awe to the demo-quality of an early DOKKEN. Close your eyes and pretend that you’re in the studio while WARRANT refines their songwriting craftsmanship. There’s no “re-recorded” stuff, either, since we passed on the countless submissions dated post ’93! So, here they are – digitally remastered and represented exactly how they were, straight from the original recordings!”
As I sit here staring at this thing, my mind is transported back to a time when I could barely breathe in Hollywood, what with all the hair spray wafting around the Blvds. God, I remember sifting through record bins in THE ROCK SHOP and paging through issues of BAM and ROCK CITY NEWS, month-after-month, in search of SOMETHING, ANYTHING that might vaguely appeal to a glam-hating, HC kid with a half-shaven head like myself. And always, no dice. I’m not being elitist here: objectively, it was so goddamn caustic, the presence of all that careerist, dead-on-arrival poncy pop hair metal. They were milktoast hacks in corporate candypants. And their rock was SICKLY, man.
Of course we all change, grow, move on. Some mature, others (me?) get progressively lamer, less discerning, more dimwitted. With time my musical and non-musical interests began circling ever closer to the dreaded BIG HAIR aesthetic. Inexplicably, I began to appreciate the presence of skinny, ass-shakin’ banshee dudes in female attire, screamin’ goofiness atop wailing gtr solos. So much so, that I ended up buying the HOLLYWOOD ROCKS! coffee table book last year – so I could BETTER FIGURE MY SHIT OUT.
Now I didn’t mean to win this CD box set, really. I was really drunk when I bid. But I won it, and it’s arrived. And now I’ve got to tell you about it. It’s 4 discs, 1 big fat error-riddled booklet, plus collectable HOLLYWOOD ROCKS! badge and “all-access backstage pass”. I’ll skip over yr WARRANTS, STRYPERS, POISONS – you might already have a better perspective on that stuff, since it still doesn’t mean much to me. But fuck apologies – are you READY to hear about the MEAT of this collection?
