Memories of My Misguided Youth: Poison's "Fallen Angel"

Thank God Bret Michaels is there to save the Midwestern runaway teens.

“Finally, someone I can trust in this godforsaken town.”

I’ve written here before and elsewhere about revisiting Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, particularly episodes from the 80s, when I was tuning in every Sunday night and current pop music wasn’t an unknowable void for me. Exploring the pop culture of one’s youth is always a treacherous journey, because it means facing the fact that much of it was not, in fact, better than what the kids are into these days, just stupid and bad in its own way.

While we refuse to acknowledge what a chokehold mayonnaise sandwiches like Barry Manilow and Christopher Cross had on American music in the first half of the 80s, we’re even more in denial about the massive popularity of hair metal between 1986 and 1992. Whatever you may think now about the legacy of hair metal (or glam metal, or cock rock), at the time it was far more popular than the music of the Pixies, or R.E.M., or whoever else we think dominated late 80s radio.

It was particularly inescapable if you lived in a working-class suburb, where the only other thing that came as close was hip hop. Because I was once an insufferable music snob, I used to disparage hair metal as music for idiots, the kind of people who took auto shop classes¹, wore shredded denim jackets, and smoked outside the gym. I was clearly in the minority, though, as my senior year’s most popular yearbook quote was “Don’t know what you got till it’s gone,” credited to the now-mostly forgotten metal group Cinderella². Our junior prom theme was Def Leppard’s “Love Bites,” even though it had that weird vocal effect at the end that sounded like a toilet backing up.

Once I accepted that I didn’t know jack shit about music and should probably stop acting like I did, I began to appreciate the good-natured and unpretentious sleazy charm of hair metal. Other than the occasional power ballad, the songs were mostly about having a good time all the time, and by god I respected that. Also, it must be said: a lot of it is just fun to listen to, and everything that doesn’t have to do with being racist or beating women on Appetite for Destruction is truly superior hard rock.

Also, hair metal doesn’t get enough credit for belying the myth that male musicians wearing gender-bending clothes and makeup are a recent development. That’s where the “hair” in hair metal comes from, most of the musicians (and their fans) wore their hair in a poofy cloud around their heads, held up with so much Aqua Net you could see it glittering under stage lights³. If you couldn’t get it to stand up with hairspray, you did like Vince Neil and shored it up with a headband, or whatever else it took to achieve that crucial (a) volume, and (b) crunchiness.

The lewk was often completed with heavy, even garish makeup (Dee Snider looked like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) and a lot of satin and leather clothing, much of it appearing to have been borrowed from various girlfriends. Among the foxiest ladies who were actually dudes was Poison, who, along with Bon Jovi, Guns ‘n’ Roses, and Motley Crue, dominated both pop radio and MTV at the end of the 80s.

Fronted by legendary pussyhound Bret Michaels, it was unsurprising that Poison was even more popular with women than men. While they did plug-stupid “hey baby let’s fuck” songs like “Unskinny Bop⁴,” they also did sensitive love songs like “Something to Believe In,” and “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” a song that played on the radio roughly once every fifteen minutes or so from the end of 1988 until the following summer.

“Fallen Angel” was also released in 1988, and was the only single from Poison’s second album Open Up and Say…Ahh!⁵ to not break into the Billboard Top 10. Its charmingly earnest video was a hit on MTV that summer and fall, however, landing on the top 100 list at the end of the year sandwiched between Bruce Springsteen and Bobby Brown. “Fallen Angel” was released at a time when music videos were in the second of three phases. The first, when the format was new and an unknown quantity, was mostly just literal interpretations of song lyrics (e.g. Devo’s “Whip It”), while in the third (which began in the early 90s) music videos had the budgets of feature-length Hollywood films and were the stepping stones for such major players as David Fincher, Tarsem, and Mark Romanek.

The second phase, post-”Thriller,” was a general acknowledgment that “Wait, we can tell little stories with these things!” Even better, you could incorporate those little stories with actual performance footage of the bands! For hair metal bands, when they weren’t about hot babes putting the X in sex, often those stories were about teenage rebellion, whether against parents (“We’re Not Gonna Take It”) or school principals who were also in The Hills Have Eyes (“Smokin’ in the Boys Room”). Or they were, as Chuck Klosterman called them⁶, cautionary tales, usually about what happens when naive young people leave home to seek their fortunes in the big city.

“Fallen Angel” was released less than a year after “Welcome to the Jungle,” and while their music differs from each other (the former is angry and scary, the latter is more gently chiding), their videos are surprisingly similar, involving small-town kids stepping off a bus into Hell (1980s Los Angeles). But what “Fallen Angel” really resembles is the video for Pat Benatar’s decidedly not metal “Love is a Battlefield,” where a young woman trying to make it in a predatory town nearly loses her soul before gaining it back at the last minute.

The video opens with an unnamed teenage girl (played by model Susie Hatton, who you will be utterly unsurprised to know was Bret Michaels’ girlfriend at the time) announcing to her family at their nice Midwestern dinner table that (a) she wants to move to California, and (b) she’s leaving on Friday. Though her parents react to her announcement with shock and dismay, evidently they don’t try to stop her, because in the very next shot she’s getting off a bus, clad neck to toes in acid-washed denim and carrying a single suitcase.

Presumably she rode the same bus as Indiana hayseed Axl Rose in “Welcome to the Jungle,” whose degradation comes by just watching a Guns ‘n’ Roses video on TV. Our heroine here runs into something more gritty, when she hooks up with a sleazy manager (played by the late Anthony James, best known for being the bad guy Lieutenant Frank Drebin has to fight in a bathroom in The Naked Gun 2 1/2) and becomes a lingerie model, while at home her mother weeps in her father’s arms. Whoever wrote the Wikipedia page for “Fallen Angel” suggests that the girl “feels like she’s selling out her morals for fame,” but mostly she just looks bored while her manager gives her jewelry and leers at her.

Curiously, the final straw for our heroine is not an act of violence or sexual degradation, but rather that she catches her sleazy manager cozying up to another attractive young blonde. Never learning how to share, she walks out, emphasizing her new-found independence by kicking the manager in the crotch. When last we see her, she’s back in her nice girl outfit again and hopping on the back of a motorcycle driven by Bret Michaels, who throws back his head and laughs in a way that suggests he is not planning on taking her to the bus station. As they drive away, another bus pulls up dropping off another girl also clad neck to toes in acid wash, and the cycle begins anew.

Folks, they don’t make ‘em like this anymore, and I mean that sincerely.

While grunge, the genre that inarguably killed it, produced far better music, a sort of cheeky playfulness was lost with the end of hair metal. Even beyond the story of a hot chick who saves herself before riding off into the sunset with walking cold sore Bret Michaels, the video for “Fallen Angel” inadvertently encapsulates everything that made that era of music entertaining. There’s Michaels spitting out water in slow motion, bassist Bobby Dall (great, great name) holding a ciggie in his mouth while playing, guitarist C.C. DeVille (even better name) mugging and doing an Angus Young duck walk across the stage, multiple costume changes (including Michaels’ floppy grandma hat), drummer Rikki Rockett (best name of all) wearing a vest with no shirt on underneath it, and so much leather that an entire herd of cows must have been slaughtered to make the wardrobe. You can’t help but love it, even just a little bit.

Grunge is great music, but is it fun music? Not really. But hair metal was also undeniably part of the misogynist and racist music industry that people like Kurt Cobain railed against. Indeed, there’s a whole lot of talking out of both sides of Bret Michaels’ mouth when he sings both about an innocent young woman “rolling the dice with her life” and also “I can’t have her, I’ll take her and make her,” a line from “I Want Action,” a song that might endorse rape.

But also, considering how much of hair metal’s success relied on music videos, I’m pretty sure lyrics played a very distant fourth at the time in what fans paid attention to, after babes, cute guys, and smokin’ guitar riffs. Also, hair metal would neither be the first nor the last music genre to take a decidedly contradictory approach to women (and that’s without getting into how grunge and punk had their own problems with sexism⁷). Like the cocaine very nearly everyone in the music industry was on in the late 80s, watching a metal video from that era, before Metallica got big and sucked all the irony out of it), is just a quick, dirty little boost to the senses, without the risk of a heart attack later.

1. Joke’s on me, those guys probably own their own houses now and can retire in the next ten years.

2. Though it’s unknown if she actually coined the phrase, Joni Mitchell was the first to use it in a song, “Big Yellow Taxi,” released all the way back in 1970.

3. This was the primary difference between hair metal and regular metal. Regular metal musicians wore their hair long, but never teased.

4. Alas, “unskinny bop” never took off as slang for having sex.

5. Presumably this was not intended to imply that a tongue depressor was about to go in your mouth.

6. He writes about all this much better than I do in Fargo Rock City, the seminal text on 80s metal.

7. Read Kathleen Hanna’s excellent memoir Rebel Girl for more on this, or don’t, because it’s a nightmare.