Sex, Drugs, & Awesome Hair

THE UNSEEN HAND in Twin Cities metal was the talent agencies. There were a half-dozen of them. The Good Music Agency, or GMA, worked with Findling to assemble Slave Raider, but there were always tensions with the agency. The band insists it developed its image organically, but GMA built an entire development wing claiming it could do for metal bands what it had done for Slave Raider. Findling has a good relationship with the band's GMA agent to this day. Sabin has nothing but venom: "They were whores."

The agencies had a lock on the big clubs in town. They would sell packages to the clubs—if the Payne Reliever wanted a Slave Raider show, they'd have to take three other, lesser-known bands as well. And the lesser-known bands, by the mid-'80s, were everywhere. Most of them were cover bands, and the agencies wanted them that way. For bands looking to showcase their originals, it was tough going. Drummer Brian Reidinger started a band called Axis in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in 1981. The Twin Cities, he says, was a sort of epicenter for bands like his. "All we wanted was to play Ryan's and Mr. Nibs."

Today Reidinger runs In the Groove Music in downtown Minneapolis, a publishing company and recording studio where a team of engineers and musicians make music for the advertising industry and television networks. He came to town in the early '80s and met with a talent agent at Alpha Entertainment. "The guy handed me a list of songs we'd have to learn if we were going to play in the clubs here," he says. Billy Ocean's "Caribbean Queen" was on the list. "But we're a hard-rock band!" Reidinger protested. The agent shot back: These are the songs people want to hear. When they hear these songs they want to dance. When they dance they get thirsty. When they get thirsty they buy drinks.

"I hated these guys at the time," Reidinger says. "But hey, these agents had mouths to feed. They were doing their job."

Arens remembers the agencies well. Obsession worked with nearly all of them. "They had sexy receptionists," he says, "the whole bit."

All the big Twin Cities metal bands played covers. Dare Force did. Obsession did. Slave Raider had a Led Zeppelin medley that people talk about still. Pressure to dabble in Top 40 was something the big bands had leverage to circumvent. For a young band it was different. The bands thought of themselves as heavy metal bands. The agents saw them as bar bands. The scene still had plenty of bands writing their own music. But many other musicians started to internalize the pocketbook logic of the talent agencies and started filling their sets with covers while their own songs died slow deaths on demo tapes or self-released records. With heavy metal music worming its way into the Billboard charts and onto prime-time MTV rotation, the fans on the dance floor wanted to hear the radio, not the demo tape.

There was another, more aesthetic transformation happening: Heavy metal was becoming "hair metal." To the untrained eye, it is all hair metal. To a guy like Arens, hair metal was heresy—and he blames Hollywood. "Before Hollywood," Arens says, "metal had more ties to bands like the New York Dolls than bands like Loverboy. We would glam it up in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, like old English guys wearing drag—but the drag turned into bands beginning to look like the chicks in their audience. Then the guys started singing with those stupid high voices."

Bart says once hair metal hit MTV, it very quickly "transposed itself on the Twin Cities clubs."

"It just became bloated," Arens says. "Then again, if you take anything in this whole wide world—from rock 'n' roll to teaching—and throw enough money at it, it will eat itself."

The new hair metal bands, Reidinger says, "always sort of rode the shoreline. They were never trying to 'make it'—or they weren't trying very hard."

One of those bands was Gemini. At the end of the '80s, Reidinger, a working drummer all his adult life, joined the band, attracted to their predictable draw and income. Gemini had an album of original material when he joined. He wasn't yet ready to admit to himself that he had joined the kind of cover band he had fought to keep Axis from becoming. A few years later he ejected himself from the scene altogether.

His epiphany moment was particularly lucid. Gemini was playing the Press in St. Cloud, a rock club that went back to the Dare Force days. The place was packed. Come encore time, the rest of the band walked backstage and Reidinger was stuck on the tiny stage behind an enormous drum kit. "So I just ducked down behind the drum riser. I had two bass drums. Nobody could see me." The crowd was shouting, but not for Gemini: "Me-tal-li-ca! Me-tal-li-ca! Me-tal-li-ca!"