Janiss Garza

Axl Rose performing with G N' R at Music Machine in Santa Monica on September 13, 1986

Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal, by Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman comes out today.

It's an amazing account of the four-decades-old genre -- more than 700 pages long, with hundreds of interviews, many of them with essential players.

It gets into everything from the murder of Pantera's Dimebag Darrell to the, um, cannibalism in the Norwegian death metal scene.

There's also plenty on L.A. metal, and a really fun chapter on the glam scene, part of which is excerpted below.

It focuses on the early days of Guns N' Roses, before they had a record deal. When they weren't being wined and dined by labels, they were causing absolute mayhem and, in the case of Axl Rose and drummer Steven Adler, beating the shit out of each other.

Enjoy!

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Lina Lecaro

The Key Club's last day is today! Ever since West Coast Sound broke the story of its impending closure, local music fans have been mourning the place. Personally, we've been to the venue hundreds of times, and worked there as a DJ during Metal Skool's heyday for about two years. We believe the venue's best shows happened under the Pressman family, who own the building currently and are working on a "new project" there. Sure, recently it had become mostly a pay-to-play space, and we knew things were bad when we visited to judge for the Raw Awards and Key Club security tried to make us pay (a couple hundred smackers!) to take pictures. But let's focus on the good times.

See also: Key Club to close

Earlier this week West Coast Sound counted down the five most iconic shows at the venue, but those included performances when it was still Gazzarri's. Two different clubs. So we wanted to focus on Key Club shows, and here are our picks for the best five, four of which we actually attended! RIP Key Club.

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Timothy Norris

In 1975, Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant stood on a balcony at the Continental Hyatt House above the Sunset Strip and screamed "I am a golden god!" Allegedly. From similar balconies at the same hotel, Keith Richards and Keith Moon both hucked TVs to the street below in fits of excess and Jim Morrison hung by his fingers. Also allegedly. Bonzo rode its halls on a motorcycle -- flashing devil horns like a lunatic, for sure. Rock and roll. Holy fuck, dude, those were the fucking days, am I right, bro?

See also: Why the San Fernando Valley Hate Needs to End Once and For All

Indeed. Now, cased in glass, hoovered clean of errant blow, groupie tears and Lemmy's sweat, the rebranded hotel -- now known as Hyatt's Andaz West Hollywood -- stands as a monument to everything that's changed about West Hollywood's Sunset Strip, the golden end of the Boulevard of Broken Dreams where rock excess became L.A. mythology. That squeaky clean veneer is one of the reasons the Sunset Strip has come back and exactly why we're defending it.

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Daniel Kohn

Pacing back and forth in a dressing room at the House of Blues on Sunset, Steven Adler can't control his emotions. His new band, Adler, is performing their first show in Los Angeles in the same neighborhood where he first made his name as the drummer for Guns N' Roses.

For a person who has played across the globe, Alder seems oddly nervous. He looks ragged -- and older than 47 -- due to his many years of drug addiction. He speaks with a speech impediment as the result of a 1996 stroke, which was caused by an overdose. He was once a sex symbol, but his smile isn't what it was once was.

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By now you've surely heard about the "Real Rock" drummer desperately in search of a "NON-Pussy" band in L.A. Since posting to Craigslist almost a month ago (his ad is below), he's become something of a phenomenon, reposted on sites like Buzzfeed, Metal Injection and many many more.

Scads of people have found him greatly inspiring, what with his curly auburn locks, flannel-shirt-and-leather-vest ensemble, dangling cigarette and take-no-shit attitude. After all, he's unwilling to "take direction from ninnies who live in their fucking parents basement and whack off to dreams of hanging with Jack Johnson." In a word, our hero. But is he too good to be true? Is the whole premise as fake as his hair appears to be? After all, one would think that by now he would have revealed himself. And so, we attempted to hunt him down.

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Paul T Bradley

Assholes

See also: Top 20 Hair Metal Albums of All Time

Def Leppard bailed on a fashion show yesterday. We know because we were trying to cover it. Fuck our life.

See, Rock of Ages, the movie, comes out next week, and its title comes from a Def Leppard song. The film features Tom Cruise singing "Pour Some Sugar On Me" (vomit) and apparently Def Leppard were on set when Cruise performed it and they liked it (double vomit).

In any case, the British cock rockers are in promotion mode for the film, which was supposed to bring them to a fashion show in a West Hollywood garden yesterday...

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Photo by Ted Cohen

Van Halen at a Seattle radio station in 1982

By Michael Wilton

See also:
*Van Halen's Babysitter: The band's record label assigned Ted Cohen to go on tour with them in their glory years. Here's what he saw
*Van Halen's 1980 Tour Rider: Why They Demanded The Brown M&Ms Be Picked Out

For our music feature this week we spoke with Ted Cohen, a record company man who was essentially tasked with babysitting Van Halen during their glory days in the late '70s and early '80s. Nowadays Cohen lives in the Hollywood Hills and is not associated with the group, but on the eve of their latest tour -- which hits Staples Center tonight and June 9 -- he spoke to us about his experiences with the group.

On the first day he met Van Halen:
Warner Music invited the band to the Petit Chateau on Lancashire in North Hollywood...to discuss their debut album. David Lee Roth showed up half an hour late, explaining his old Plymouth Valiant had broken down a couple of miles from the restaurant. Out of that lunch, we announced to the guys that they'd be going on a major tour to support their first record, and from there, we took them to the Whisky so they could rehearse for us. I later learned Lee Roth never went to pick up his rusty Valiant, and when I asked him why, he told me that it represented the past. All he was focused on was his future.

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ZOMFG, Denise Richards and Richie Sambora are back together? Apparently. But we didn't ask him about that when we interviewed him on Monday, because we don't care. We care more about the Bon Jovi guitarist's upcoming indie rock album. Yep, that's right, the as-yet-unnamed record will be released by the Silver Lake-based Dangerbird Records, home to acts like The One AM Radio and and The Promise Ring.

Sambora, the Bon Jovi guitarist whose hooks have graced stuffed stadiums and booze-stained karaoke machines alike, spoke with us before getting a philanthropy award called the Golden Heart last night from skid row's Midnight Mission (one of L.A.'s oldest homeless outreach organizations) at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. The man with the perfectly feathered Meg Ryan hair has been involved with the program for seven years donating, time, money, and endless celebrity visibility. But we just couldn't get over the fact that he's making an indie rock album.

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F. Scott Schafer

See also: Top 20 Hair Metal Albums Of All Time: The Complete List

Story by Clay Marshall

Steel Panther guitarist Russ Parrish sports leopard-print Spandex and a tiger-striped ax when the group plays in concert. If all goes well, he'll climb atop the drum riser and stomp on the kick-drum pedal, accompanying himself. Meanwhile the group's bassist, Travis Haley, spends much of the time staring into a sparkly handheld mirror, touching up his makeup.

Cock rock is dead? Hardly. For more than a decade now, the band members -- who also have performed as Metal Shop and Metal Skool -- have built a large fan base by simultaneously skewering and embracing hair-metal tropes at Sunset Strip venues. Their streetwalker attire, their synchronized leg kicks and their devotion to their fans' breasts are all part of the fun.

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See also:
*Def Leppard Are a Bunch of Assholes
*Chuck Klosterman's Favorite Hair Metal Albums

One day I was sitting around thinking I want to write a song about ménage a trois...and the line 'love in stereo' came into my head. Inspiration can happen anywhere at any time. -Jani Lane, Hit Parader magazine

History has not been kind to hair metal. The bulk of the Sunset Strip '80s stalwarts have become resigned to touring out-of-the-way clubs before diminishing crowds. But many of us still have a strong passion for this era. In The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke's titular character and Marissa Tomei's reluctant stripper dance to Ratt's "Round And Round" in a dive bar, drinking beers and agreeing on one thing: The '90s sucked.

Lots of us feel that way. The '80s have come back into fashion because people remember it as a halcyon time. The economy was picking up speed and kids were sowing the seeds of their parents' sexual revolution; in the early part of the decade, anyway, you could hook up without worrying about contacting much worse than crabs. Sure it was heyday of the "me" generation -- epitomized by oversexed pop metalers as much as greedy Wall Street traders -- but it also emphasized self-expression and big dreams.

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