Let’s talk about 1991. Your humble narrator was beginning his senior year of high school, a little album called Nevermind was about to knock the record biz on its ass, and despite the 80s having officially ended the year before, hair metal still ruled the airwaves and MTV. And presiding over the denim, mullets, AquaNet and rampant vapid groupie metal chick sex i was not having was “the world’s loudest heavy metal magazine:” RIP.

RIP Magazine ruled my high school years and more or less dictated my musical taste until college. Unlike bullshit rags like Circus and Metal Edge, which were essentially teenybopper pinup collections for hesher douchebags who didn’t want to be seen buying Big Bopper for the Debbie Gibson glossies, RIP actually gave a damn about the music it was covering–and more importantly, it only marginally cared if you liked it too. Sure, the covers were full of the bigwigs, like Guns ‘N’ Roses and Aerosmith, but inside the same issue whose cover Axl graced, you could see an interview with Faith No More slagging him off. Basically, RIP was ballsy and didn’t give a fuck–probably because it was owned by Hustler kingpin Larry Flynt. Sort of hard to care about public perception when your parent magazine is dedicated to bringing the golden shower to the mainstream.

Leading this show was RIP Editor-in-Chief Lonn M. Friend, who in 2006 published his autobiography, Life on Planet Rock, which i recently devoured after receiving it as a Christmas present this year from fellow SSC scribe Josh “The Fucking Wizard” D.

The book itself, to be honest, is a bit poorly written. Lonn’s stories of turn-of-the-decade heavy metal hedonism are bogged down by overwrought music journalism turns of phrase like the following passage on G’N'R: “Appetite [for Destruction] unfolded like a prurient postcard depicting the zeitgeist of Hollywood near the end of the millennium’s most dubious decade.” (To be fair, i’ve been getting bitey whenever i see some jagoff use the word “zeitgeist” since long before it became a Smashing Pumpkins album title. and to be even fairer, “stories of turn-of-the-decade heavy metal hedonism” is just as borderline clunky, but then, Morgan Road didn’t pay me a fat advance for this blog post, either.) But ignoring the stylistic shortcomings, Planet Rock is filled with riveting, sometimes poignant, and often hilarious anecdotes about life in the middle of the late 80s metal scene (one of the highlights involves Lonn being coerced by Jon Bon Jovi into helping him hawk the latest Bon Jovi CD on QVC, of all places).

But the most resonant stories in Planet Rock, to me, were the tales Lonn spins of his days meeting who would be the poster boys of the Seattle Grunge Explosion–Nirvana and Pearl Jam. When Nevermind and Ten were circulated around guys like Axl Rose and Skid Row’s Sebastian Bach, their first reaction wasn’t “oh my god, the party’s over,” like you hear from Bret Michaels on VH1–it was something more akin to “OMFG THIS SHIT RULES!!1!” To legions of hair farmers, Nirvana and Pearl Jam were hardly seen as the death knell at the time; on the contrary, they were seen for what they were–kickass heavy bands that were about to send the mainstream rock universe into hysterics. (In fact, RIP had already been on board with Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament’s pre-PJ outfit, Mother Love Bone, until their singer, Andrew Wood, pulled a Layne Staley and OD’d on smack about a year before Nevermind’s release.)

What caused real confusion amongst not only the hair bands but their fans as well was a fact that soon became painfully obvious: this was not a mutual admiration society. As we all know, Nirvana and the rest had no use for a group of cartoonish glam-rock caricatures interested in partying, misogyny, and borderline cross-dressing. A pair of anecdotes in Planet Rock capture this sense of bewilderment better than anything i’ve read about that era to date. The story of Nirvana hanging out with Lonn for the first time finds a stunned Kurt Cobain so freaked out by Lonn’s collection of photos of him with various rock stars in various states of undress (including a photo with a mooning-the-camera Metallica) that he tells Come as You Are author Michael Azerrad that Lonn has “a rock ‘n’ roll butt fetish.” Even more amusing (and the story that really sums up the hair/grunge culture clash) is a golf trip involving Lonn, Stone Gossard, Tommy Lee, and Warrant guitarist Joey Allen. The moment after the outing when Stone gets Lonn alone and asks him, “why do you act that way?” is priceless.

It’s weird being a hair rocker-turned-noise rocker who sees both sides of the divide. On the one hand, of course the grunge guys would be looking disapprovingly at the women-objectifying, vapid spandex hedonists. On the other hand, bands like Motley Crue and Poison, despite (or because of?) their obliviousness to concepts like “dignity,” managed to churn out some great songs, and if you ask me, anyone who doesn’t recognize that is just being a snob.

Ultimately, of course, the new bands that prompted Sebastian Bach to proclaim “Holy mother of Jesus! We gotta take this band out with us!” eventually drove his band from the arenas and into Waukesha, WI’s Rooters nightclub. But a not-so-small part of me remembers what it was like to be so ignorant of the politics of genre allegiance that just being able to listen to a song and say “this rocks” wasn’t a sin just because someone else thought it wasn’t cool, or proper, or acceptable. It’s something many a self-important indie rocker could stand to remember these days, and it’s unfortunate that the lesson will be lost just because the mainstream musicians with the most pure, undiluted sense of “i love it loud” happened to wear zebra-striped spandex.

Mind you–i’m not saying you should profess a love of P.O.D. like Lonn does near the end of Life on Planet Rock. After all, there’s something to be said for being discriminating. But if there’s one thing that his book is not, it’s pretentious. And god bless him for it.

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