History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
Electric hair crimping of some kind has existed since the 1920s....
....and the first crimping irons appeared shortly after the first portable electric curling iron wands in the early 1970s.
But the Somebody-Just-Dumped-A-Bowl-Of-Top-Ramen-Noodles-On-My-Head look didn't become all the rage until the late 1980s.
They were popular from 1984 until 1992. But it wasn't until 1987 when pop star Taylor Dayne turned crimped hair into a national epidemic.
You probably knew some chicks (and even a few dudes) with crimped hair. Photo: Back To The '90s
The crimping iron, by frying your hair, added poofy volume to it. Tease it out and you had something like this.
Next to the can of Ultimate Hold Aqua-Net hairspray to shellac your 'do with, they were staples of anyone with big hair in the late 1980s.
I shellacked my hair with enough of this crap in my big hair days to collapse a mile of ozone. And Mother Nature is starting to get back at me for it.....
Back in 1979, Alberto VO5 hair products made several American TV commercials with "superstar" Rula Lenska.
There was just one problem. While Rula Lenska was famous as a TV, film and stage actress in the UK, in America she was known as "that woman on the hair spray commercials nobody's ever heard
of."
Originally sold as a flexi-disc part of a novelty card (I would hope so), here's Tiny Tim with his rendition (?) of the Rod Stewart classic.
No "Tiptoe Through The Tulips" falsetto here. If you're too scared to click on the YouTube video, imagine Al Jolson on amyl nitrate and backed by the Mos Eisley Spaceport Cantina Band and you'll have an idea of what this sounds like.
(Somehow, the logo typeface, the label and it's typeface scream a
custom pressing by Capitol for Seneca....just an educated record
collector observation. If not, then it's one of the best damn imitations I've
ever seen.)
You aren't a TRUE Dio fan if you don't know this one. And yes, it's from 1958.
Ann Wilson (of the superstar rock group Heart) released this lost classic in 1986. Her only non-duet solo single. It appears on the soundtrack to the Eddie Murphy hit The Golden Child.
This song also reminds me of "Little Queen" .........
Z-Rock was a national hard rock radio
network from the late '80s to December 1996. Z-Rock was very popular
with the headbanger metal crowd. They were heard over some FM stations,
but most of Z-Rock's affiliates were third tier local AM stations that
didn't find much success in any other format.
Z-Rock's days were
numbered once the Seattle Grunge Revolution hit nationwide in 1992 and
music tastes started changing towards alternative rock. In October 1993,
the network further exacerbated their demise by pulling the plug on
their AM affiliates and going FM only. As the network dwindled, so did
their remaining affiliates until Z-Rock was taken off the air by their
parent company, SMN Networks. However, the remaining local affiliates
were allowed to retain the Z-Rock logo and imaging for their
stations.....
Some time in the late '60s or early '70s, a strange record appeared
I see a fence back there and I'm really hoping this cover shot was taken at a state hospital.
It gets worse. Look at the back cover. Click on it to enlarge. Read it.
You read this correctly. This was a middle aged woman, (allegedly) channeling a three year old.
How a woman like this is loose on the streets (let alone allowed anywhere near children. Or a recording studio) is beyond me. But it takes "Born-Again Christian" to a brand new low (instead of being "born again", why don't they just GROW UP.)
I honestly don't know what it is with evangelist women and big hair, geological layers of makeup and poodles, I just don't.
But it's not just this woman who scares me like crazy. It's her enablers. Jay W. Turney, Steve Chandler, Eddie Crook and the entire staff of Electric Arts Studio of Madisonville, KY.
Mr. Turney is also this woman's husband. Whom she also refers to as "Daddy". And the oozing disgust about this record only BEGINS there.
There's nothing I can say that can illustrate this horror better than LISTENING to this record itself.
Well, let me put it this way. Billy Squier was cool. SUPER COOL. At one time, he REALLY was the most popular solo rock artist in the early '80s in America, At one time eclipsing Bryan Adams, George Thorogood and Pat Benatar COMBINED. And if you don't believe it, I'll remind you:
But in 1984, something went wrong......Horribly wrong
He was at the peak of his career when he released Signs Of Life, and from all indicators, it was going to be ANOTHER blockbuster album. And it was. This baby shipped platinum straight from Capitol Records on pre-orders ALONE. And a catchy new song hit the airwaves, "Rock Me Tonite" and all was going according to plan.
And then MTV aired the World Premiere Video of "Rock Me Tonite".......
....and you could hear the sound of a million jaws collectively hitting the floor.
For one thing, EVERYTHING was wrong with the video. Famous heterosexual rock guitarists just weren't supposed to prance around in ripped tank tops and pajama bottoms. Or dry hump the floor. Or wear ANYTHING pink. Or stumble around with the band like a drunken drag queen (with a PINK guitar.) It was a TOTAL image clash from the Billy Squier of just a year ago then. Fans scratched their heads and said "What the fu.....?"
And it was proof positive a HUGELY successful music career can be destroyed almost overnight by just ONE bad music video.
And Billy Squier, who once HEADLINED stadiums was suddenly reduced to playing much smaller music venues. (His loyalest fans were still plentiful, but the mainstream fans had all but instantly deserted him.) Over ONE video......
The next few years were rough as he tried to live down the "Rock Me Tonite" video. He released an album in 1986 Enough Is Enough which was a far more serious effort in an attempt to recover from the video debacle and return to form. But rock radio and MTV had mostly ignored it. They were too focused on the hair metal bands who, ironically, pranced around in ripped tank tops and pajama bottoms. Dry humped the floors. Wore ANYTHING pink. And stumbled around like a drunken drag queens.
Some even had PINK guitars.
His comeback finally came in 1989 with the release of Hear And Now, which scored him his first #1 rock hit since "Rock Me Tonite" called "Don't Say You Love Me"and things looked good again....
But Seattle grunge came and soon wiped everyone off the map.
He left Capitol in the early '90s and the music business for the most part, doing nature conservancy work but he still makes occasional appearances at Classic Rock shows.......
AWESOME lost one hit wonder....and some of the biggest '80s hair of any non-glam metal band you'll ever see!!
Device
was a band formed by Holly Knight. She was the writer of some of the
biggest hit songs of the '80s, including "Love Is A Battlefield" (Pat
Benatar), "Better Be Good To Me" (Tina Turner) and "Obsession"
(Animotion). Plus many others too numerous to count.....
