Monday, October 02, 2017

Rocktober Hair Band Song #1: "Cum On Feel The Noize" by Quiet Riot

For the first song of this Hair Band Rocktober, I'm going with a song that is one of the key's to the success of the Hair Band Era.  After toiling away on the LA hard rock scene in the late '70s and going through a few lineup changes, Quiet Riot reformed in 1982 after former bandmate Randy Rhoads died in a plane crash to record a tribute song, "Thunderbird."  The band enjoyed recording with each other so much that they decided to make a whole album.

In 1983, the band released Metal Health, a seminal album in the annals of hard rock and metal history, as it became the first American heavy metal album to top the Billboard album charts.  That certainly caught the attention of record company execs, and paved the way for the Sunset Strip bands that followed.  Eventually, Metal Health went platinum six times.

Much of the album's success was due to Quiet Riot's cover of Slade's 1973 hit "Cum On Feel The Noize," which reached #1 in the UK for Slade, but barely cracked the Top 100 in the U.S.  Quiet Riot's version was pretty faithful to the original, but a little harder and with a sweet guitar solo.  It's a fun and catchy song that rose all the way up to #5 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it the highest-charting metal song up to that point in time.  Soon thereafter, more and more hair bands began to climb the charts, and the most glorious era in hard rock was upon us.

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