Quiet Riot-Live At Memorial Auditorium, Burlington Iowa, 1983

Southeast Iowa wasn’t a bad place to grow up in the first half of the 1980’s. We made our own fun most of the time, were fortunate enough to live next to Missouri where fireworks were legal, and every once in a while a band would travel through and play in a 2,000 seat auditorium.
In 1983, that band was Quiet Riot. It was strange having a band that popular come through the area, but if I remember correctly, they were just a few months shy of having Metal Health hit number one.
Nonetheless, the auditorium’s limited seating made this a fairly hot ticket and the closest we could get to see the band was in the upper corner of the balcony. Not that there’s a bad seat in a 2,300 auditorium-there’s just a few that happen to be better.
The band had chosen Axe as openers, a better-than-average bar band that also happened to have a minor hit album with Offering from the year prior and who were supporting their most recent Nemesis album.
Axe played rock music, and they played it well. They were ugly looking. They didn’t have a lot of flash. But they were used to having to prove themselves every single night as the band seemed to be stuck on a never-ending road of supporting act set lists. Forty-five minutes a night with an occasional headlining gig at a nightclub.
Their set was tight and memorable. I remember thinking that their performance was much better than their album and I even toyed with the idea of getting one of their t-shirts, primarily because it said “Yo’ Mama Tour 1983” on the back. This was obviously some kind of inside joke, but it was hilarious to me.
I passed on it, thinking that maybe I’d pick up one of the headliner’s shirts when the show was over.
Quiet Riot has but one speed: irritating. And the entire 90 minute set proved to be one big rush of irritant, to the point where afterwards you actually hated the band.
Kevin DuBrow pranced around the stage in an endless parade of “Make some fucking noise!” “Come on!” “Let me see your hands” and eardrum breaking screams. He was thin, old, losing his hair, and running to both stage left and stage right in these ridiculous red tights. He accessorized his ensemble with a bunch of shit from the sales rack at JoAnn Fabric.
The drummer-Frankie Banali-sped everything up for some reason and played a stupid drum solo where at the end all the lights went out except for a lone spotlight on him. Suddenly, he looked up from the kit and he was wearing that retarded mask as seen on the cover of Metal Health.
Bassist Rudy Sarzo did that dumb thing where he played the bass over the top instead of fretting it from below. He also licked the bass neck like it was a penis.
Guitarist Carlos Carvazo played with such ear-piercing monotony, you wanted to punch him in the face. They gave the douche at least ten minutes for a solo that went nowhere, so bad that the crowd even began to grow quiet after he tried a bit of “call and response” playing for the millionth time.
But the biggest douchebag by far was DuBrow, who did every single move that you’ve seen on video already that you wonder if the guy could improvise even if he wanted to. There was the “I’m acting like I’m playing Carlos’ guitar” move. There was the “Let me spin my black and white mic stand” move. There was the “Let me act like the black and white mic stand is my penis” move.
And so on. And so on.
From that moment on, whenever Quiet Riot appeared on TV, the channel got changed. But the most telling moment was during the next summer when they had some Quiet Riot special on MTV while supporting their dismal Condition Critical album.
The one where Rolling Stone had the good sense of reviewing it with two words: “Condition terminal.”
One would think that it was just Rolling Stone being a bit of a buttplug against anything remotely metal-and it may very well could have been-but they were surprisingly spot on with that review. It featured the stupid lead single “Party All Night,” and you could actually win a chance to have Quiet Riot throw you a party at your house.
Seventeen people entered this dumb contest and a rubberneck from Kentucky won the honors.

I’m sure there were a few people that enjoyed the show, but from my vantage point, a bunch of people got Quiet Riot fatigue around the halfway point.
I got so bored that I began paying more attention to the crowd. I noticed a dude that I used to play football with in a vacant lot when I was younger standing in the aisle that led to the balcony seats. He was watching the show standing up with a stoner friend, and neither one seemed to be having much fun. This was before security guards ruined everything by telling people to “move along” or “put out that joint” and it was clear that my old acquaintance was up to no good.
His friend motioned that he wanted to leave and he began to go towards the stairway. Before he followed him, he ran up to an unsuspecting audience member in the back row of the seats in front of the doorway and took the Quiet Riot shirt that was slung over his back. He bolted before the guy had a chance to figure out what had happened, and by the time the dude weaseled his way out of his seat to investigate, the guy was long gone with a free shirt.
That’s really the best way to summarize the show: a performance so entirely mundane that the real excitement came when some dude snagged another dude’s concert tee. I left the venue with $15 more than expected (t-shirts were a lot less expensive back then-especially when you didn’t buy one), a 36 hour case of tinnitus, and a strange appreciation for the band Axe.
What I didn’t leave with was any future desire to feel the noise in any shape or form.
Fast forward to a little over ten years later when Quiet Riot called our radio station with an offer to do an interview. You read that right: our station didn’t contact anyone. The band actually picked up the phone, called us, and asked if they could stop by to do an interview.
Since the station ran spots promoting the gig, we thought it would be rude to decline the band performing at one of our paying client’s establishments.
Then the problem became “Who wanted to interview Quiet Riot?” The answer was the overnight dj who would have normally been sleeping at that time, but who generously got dressed and came back to the studio to record a quick interview with the band that would air about an hour prior to their performance at a bar on the outskirts of town (I’m not making that up, either).
Only Carlos and the band’s new bassist Kenny Hillery came by. DuBrow-they said-was in the tour bus sleeping. Carvazo tried desperately to hit on the receptionist and did not take off his sunglasses the entire time, even when we went into the dark bowels of the station’s production studios.
The overnight guy peppered the interview with Spinal Tap references, to the point where I was rolling with laughter in another studio as I eavesdropped on the interview. Carvazo was oblivious, but the bass player eventually caught on. He politely laughed it off, not taking offense even though any band with half a brain would have seen that the overnight dude was really taking a piss on his two subjects.
Finally, the interview was over and we attempted to lead them towards the front door. The two band members stopped into my office and gawked at the promo posters that covered my walls and eyeballed all of the promo items I had out for on-air giveaways.
“Oh man! Is that the new Cure album?” asked the bass player.
“Kenny likes all that alternative shit.” Advised Carlos.
“Yeah” I replied.
“Man, I love the Cure” the bassist continued, surprisingly showing that he was pretty well versed about Robert Smith’s band, stating that he had a big appreciation for Cure bassist Simon Gallup.
“You can have a copy if you want.” I told him, handing him a cassette of Wish.
And with that, the floodgates opened. Pretty soon, both men were digging through all of my items, looking for freebies until I literally had to put myself in between them and my promo shit.
Carlos offered to autograph something, which was a bit awkward because we had no Quiet Riot albums for him to sign. I suddenly scrounged up the cassette copy of Metal Health that the Program Director went out and bought just so that we had some Quiet Riot music to play for the commercial that we did for the nightclub. He opened up the blank sleeve of the cassette and signed his name.
None of us made it to the show that night. For me, I had seen my share of Quiet Riot and could have actually used a refund for the first show from ten years prior. I heard it was good, if not a bit embarrassing as the club only held about 100-150 people at the most.
About a decade after that, I learned that the replacement bassist that we had fun with actually killed himself.
I felt bad that I didn’t give him more free shit.

Quiet Riot - Metal Health

What people forget with Quiet Riot’s Metal Health album is that it is really the band’s third album. The band’s first two were only released in Japan and they featured a young Randy Rhoads on guitar, recorded before he was tapped as Ozzy’s lead guitarist.
Is there a reason why the band’s first two albums were overlooked in America?
You bet.
It’s because they sucked.
Quiet Riot was merely a mediocre band out of Southern California that pounded the circuit, honing their chops while they went nowhere. Their claim to fame was that their guitar player was awesome, and when provided with a chance to leave for greener pastures, he bolted.
This should have been it for the rest of the band, who were really a band only in name-Quiet Riot was vocalist Kevin DuBrow’s project-and five years after releasing Quiet Riot’s second album, he built a new band around the material he accumulated and viola: overnight success!
Metal Health may be the dumbest rock album ever to hit number one. At nearly every moment, DuBrow opens his big fucking mouth and utters something stupid, but he does it at such a consistent and overblown rate that you can’t help but think that he had little expectation that the album would make the impact that it eventually did.
By impact, I don’t mean that Metal Health was influential-hardly-it just means that the record ended up in nearly every teenager’s collection after the summer of 1983. The moment that Quiet Riot-scratch that, Kevin DuBrow-began taking himself way too seriously is the moment that their career took a quick slide into irrelevance.
Let’s be clear, there’s not a chance in hell that the band would have a lengthy career at the top of the charts, but in looking at the rise in hair metal after Metal Health’s success, you have to wonder if they could have had a couple of additional big ticket releases afterwards.
They didn’t, so the band was left with only one chart topper and a career of county fair and club dates to milk off of it.
Side one is positively flawless. It features the enviable title track that encouraged a nation of pimple-faced kids to “bang your head” and then encouraged them to seek out a little known hard-rock band from England called Slade with their cover of “Cum On Feel The Noize.”
The band covers themselves with II’s only decent moment “Slick Black Cadillac,” pretends to be all sensitive with “Don’t Want To Let You Go” and then begins to show a bit of musicianship with “Love’s A Bitch” before DuBrow before utters “Love’s got me by the ass again” and ruins the entire mood.
Side 2 is more of the same; DuBrow continually yaps at every available moment, aside from the 90 seconds or so that he gives guitarist Carlos Cavazo for the solo “Battle Axe.” It doesn’t matter much as Cavazo is a very one-dimensional player with a limited palate and a monochromatic barking tone.
There is one hint at a greater range with “Thunderbird,” a tribute to the deceased former member (Rhoads) who, ultimately, got the band a record deal after the tragedy of his passing spread across the music print landscape. Suddenly, DuBrow found himself with an offer-provided that he change his line-up’s name from “DuBrow” to the band name he had when Rhoads was performing with him.
Metal Health essentially gives DuBrow his closest brush with his Humble Pie worship, but he fails miserably at capturing that band’s soulful subtlety, thinking instead that his swagger can get away with such shit like “Wanna kiss your lips/Not the ones on your face.”
It’s embarrassing, for sure, but Metal Health’s fuck-all attitude makes it easy to understand why it became as successful as it did and a guilty pleasure that sounds better with each passing beer.

Kevin DuBrow R.I.P.

Kevin Dubrow was found dead in his home in Las Vegas yesterday at the age of 52. Like many other high school kids, I was enthralled with Quiet Riot’s breakaway album Metal Health; it was one of those albums that seemed to be in everyone’s tape case.
The hysteria also prompted me to check out the band on the Metal Health tour that ended up just a few miles from my home. Although I was more impressed with the openers, Axe, I remember a few things about the headliners.
The drummer put on the infamous mask featured on the cover of Metal Health. Guitarist Carlos Cavazo did an extended guitar solo (“Battle Axe”) that seemed to go on forever. And Kevin DuBrow provided an obligatory soliloquy to original guitarist Randy Rhodes immediately before the band went into “Thunderbird.”
Ten years later, Quiet Riot again came near my hometown, only this time in a small-town bar that barely held 100 people. It represents how low the band had gotten in terms of respectability…and it shows how relentless DuBrow was in terms of making sure his career remained as the lead singer of a hard rock band.
For all the shit that he’s received (and admittedly, DuBrow was himself to blame for a lot of it), you’ve got to hand it to a guy that did everything, from playing in front of a nudist camp to playing in a tiny bar in Fort Madison, Iowa, to keep his dream alive. I’m sure that, like most of us, DuBrow would try to change things a bit to try a prolong Quiet Riot’s sales streak, but I’m fairly sure the guy died knowing that his day job, regardless of the venue, certainly was a helluva lot more awesome than the day job you’re in now.
The video below is almost verbatim like the show I saw them do in ’83, including the annoying DuBrow banter.
Inspriational Verse: “Wanna kiss your lips/Not the ones on your face”

Notes From The County Fair Circuit

I worked in radio for nearly a decade, at student run radio station, non-commercial public radio and at tradition commercial radio outlets. The experience was mostly enjoyable, but there was plenty of frustration too, typically centered on the arena of low pay which is a problem that continues to be echoed among radio employees to this day.
With that being said, I left radio in the mid-90’s for purely economic reasons.
Meaning: I was tired of living paycheck to paycheck.
During the time I worked in radio, there were opportunities to converse with artists that were shelling their latest effort. These interviews were typically met with enthusiasm or reluctance depending on the band or artist. In other words, for every Mike Watt interview, there were at least two unknown acts (Animal Time anyone? How about Zane Grey?) for you to spend time with. Nothing against them; sometimes the interviews were a blast (Zane Grey, a band from Texas in the late 80’s, were great guys, only to fold under the insurmountable weight of trying to build an audience), but there’s a limited amount of questions you can ask a band with only one album under their belt and a few dozen fervent fans from their hometown.
Those dynamics change when you get an opportunity to interview artists who’ve seen better days and even better sales figures.
The last radio station I worked for had a pair of chuckleheads for the General Manager and Program Director positions who also happened to run a yearly summer event called “Riverfest.” Riverfest was a weeklong celebration of shitty carnival attractions and national bands enjoying success on the county fair circuit. Since the station was a primary sponsor of the event, we got exclusive access to bands like Foghat, Nazareth, and other acts with more than a decade gone since their last notable release.
The weekends for Riverfest typically included artists that were on the county fair circuit for the first time in their careers. What that meant was, instead of more than a decade plus since the last notable release, these bands may have only seen 6 or 7 years pass since their last chart entry.
Here’s some behind the scenes memories of those brushes with “greatness.”
CHEAP TRICK-Cheap Trick has been known to play anywhere and they’re still notorious roadhogs to this day. When the band played Riverfest, they were on the road down their second career freefall, a few years after their last major chart entry with Lap Of Luxury. Unfortunately, I was not working at this particular station during their Riverfest stop, so all I have to offer is second and third-hand information from the people working the festival. According to these sources, the band was uncharacteristically smug, giving the perception that they were too important to be playing in such a small town. Several of the organizers claimed the band was under the influence of drugs (the consensus was cocaine) and that a contract rider disputes almost caused the band to boycott the performance. One of the Riverfest members threatened to impound Cheap Trick’s equipment if the band failed to make their end of the bargain. The band performed with no additional issues. As a fan of Cheap Trick, I found this information disheartening, but can share with you that most of the organizers of Riverfest were notorious drunkards and could barely run a radio station let alone a week-long music festival. I’ve taken the criticism of Cheap Trick with some serious salt.
R.E.O. SPEEDWAGON-Missed this one too, but for reasons which may bewilder the average reader. This band was the most successful performance that Riverfest ever had, drawing a record crowd of 16,500 people for the show. That figure was 4,500 more people than the town’s population and, incredibly, came well after the band’s heyday. The show sold out, and the idea of fighting the crowd and summer heat to see a band that I don’t give a shit about prompted me to stay at the station and smoke pot with my girlfriend who also worked there during the evening shift. Reports were that Kevin Cronin was a douchebag, but he later referred to the event in the band’s awful The Second Decade of Rock & Roll 1981-1991 liner notes as some kind of triumph.
? & THE MYSTERIANS-Poor Question Mark. He recently lost his possessions in a fire, but I doubt the setback will slow him down. Even in the early 90’s, he continued to participate with the oldies-circuit, providing the crowd with not one, but two stabs at “96 Tears.” Now I’m a fan of that song, and I’m a fan of Question Mark’s well documented weirdness. What I’m not a fan of is a man in his fifties getting ready to go on stage in gold lamé pants…with ragged looking tighty-whities visible above the back waistband. Question Mark pranced as good as Mick Jagger on stage, but every time he shook his ass for the crowd, the underwear took center stage.
NIGHT RANGER-It was a rainy night on the Mississippi riverfront, which meant the attendance for this particular show was unusually light. Escaping the rain in the band’s trailer, I had a chance to talk with guitarist Brad Gillis and drummer/vocalist Kelly Keagy. Now understand, I could give a Ratt(s) ass about Night Ranger, as a matter of fact, the band was so disrespected in my metal loving hometown that many of the metalheads referred to them as “Night Scrounger.” I’m sure Gillis and Keagy understood that I really could care less about them, but they endured my small talk. Some example questions include: (To Keagy) Isn’t it hard to drum and sing at the same time? (To Gillis) What’s Ozzy like? (To Gillis) How did you make that double guitar sound in the solo of “You Can Still Rock In America?” (To Keagy) So what happened to the dude that always wore the hat and a pair of shades? In case you’re wondering, that man (keyboardist Alan Fitzgerald) used to play with Montrose and, because of his history with Sammy Hagar, had scored a gig playing off-stage keyboards for the Van Halen tour. Both Gillis and Keagy sounded a little jealous that the old bald dude from Night Ranger was making more than they were. Both guys were very cool and seemed genuinely passionate about their performance even while the rain continued to fall throughout the set.
EDDIE MONEY-What the fuck? Eddie Money?! To confess, I vaguely remember thinking that his “I’m not doing cocaine anymore” effort, No Control, wasn’t that bad. It had “I Think I’m In Love” and some song about passing by the graveyard. I also knew that he was discovered by Bill Graham who had recently died a few days before the phone interview. He called the station because we were one of the first to play his last chart entry, “I’ll Get By,” a sappy by-the-numbers ballad that barely dented the lower throngs of the American top 40 in 1991. So the entire interview consisted of me talking to him about his prior cocaine addiction and what a good guy Bill Graham was. He then did a couple of station liners (“You’re listening to the river cities music leader…”) where he referred to himself as “The Moneyman.” Call me naïve, but I never knew Eddie Money had a nickname prior to hearing that.
MOLLY HATCHET-These Southern rockers came to town and every slack-jawed Southern rock fan came out of the woodwork to get drunk and party with the Hatchet. The late Danny Joe Brown got drunk with them, but after years of hard drinkin’ and hard rockin,’ he didn’t miss a beat during the entire show. When it came time for him to do a couple of station liners afterwards, a drunk Danny Joe completely botched the call letters and names of radio personalities. While I returned to the station to piece together his mistakes, the band tried to make off with all of the beer backstage. I will forever have this mental image of a drunken Molly Hatchet returning cooler after cooler of beer with their tails between their legs before being allowed to leave the festival grounds in their tour bus. If you try to steal beer in Southeast Iowa, you’re flirtin’ with disaster.
ELVIN BISHOP-A complete douchebag. He made the circuit based on a hit ("Fooled Around And Fell In Love") that he didn't even sing on. I was familiar with his Alligator Records output and at least was prepared for the good-time blues show that he gave the crowd. It was actually pretty good, even when the crowd wondered why he didn't get around to playing the hit he was famous for. To me, however, he was famous for being in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, so I couldn't wait to ask him questions about it. So while all the radio stations are in his trailer trying to conduct an interview with the guy, he starts to get a little pissy at all of the "So, do you still keep in touch with Mickey Thomas?" questions and then he completely shuts down when I start asking him about working with Butterfield, the East-West album and the late Michael Bloomfield. All of the other stations keep quiet as the tension grows between Bishop and me. It got to the point where I actually said something like "I didn't mean to make you mad." To which he replied "Then don't!" Even when I tried to bring it back around to more appropriate topics like his current release, he continues to act like I was wasting his time.
AIR SUPPLY-I was forced into this one and I wasn't happy about it. Singer Russell Hitchcock was dressed like Peter Pan and he even sported a Peter Pan tattoo on his arm. All of the other radio station people seemed positively thrilled to be with the two dudes from Air Supply, so I just hung out and listened to them chat.
QUIET RIOT-I’ve saved the best story for last. Quiet Riot was scheduled to play a very small bar down the road from our station on a weeknight. We had no connection with the show, so I was surprised when the receptionist paged me to announce that Quiet Riot had stopped by to do an unscheduled interview. The overnighter agreed to talk to the guys and we brought guitarist Carlos Cavazo and (then) bassist Kenny Hillery downstairs to the studios. Even though the studios were dimly lit, Cavazo never took off his sunglasses and he seemed stoned the entire time he was there. Hillery seemed nice enough; as the newest member of this Q.R. configuration, he allowed Carlos to act as the official spokesperson. Lead singer Kevin DuBrow did not show up. The overnight announcer, Blake Davis, agreed beforehand to fuck with them throughout the entire interview. His questions were riddled with absurd questions and blatant Spinal Tap references. While Blake tried to contain his own laughter, Cavazo would answer each question earnestly. It got to the point where Hillery, who was about the same age as us and, therefore, younger than Cavazo, figured out we were having a laugh at their expense and would try to clue Carlos in on the joke. Seriously, he had no idea that questions like “Do your amplifiers go to eleven?” and “Is there a fine line between clever and stupid?” were rigged only to provide amusement to people in on the joke. To Cavazo, these were legitimate questions and he considered each one intently. Afterwards, we all had production work to do and we assumed that the two of them had to get back to the bar for soundcheck. That’s when it got uncomfortable as neither one of them showed any desire to leave the station. For a while, we stood in the hallways talking about anything that came up. Then, they followed me into my office and noticed the wall full of promotional material. Hillery seemed very excited that The Cure had a new album out, so I gave him a copy of it. He then proceeded to press for more free stuff. After allowing him to swipe about four or five albums from our prize vaults, I cut him off and we dropped some fairly obvious hints that Quiet Riot had to leave and allow us to get back to work. Three years later, Kenny Hillery would take his own life; perhaps because I refused to give him that Stanley Clarke cd he wanted.
My tenure at the radio station ended in 1995, as did Riverfest. Plagued by two consecutive summers with shitty weather conditions and the resulting poor ticket sales, the financial coffers that were built by bands like R.E.O. and Cheap Trick had finally diminished. The festival was reduced from seven days to five and then four. When the lower operating costs still didn’t provide enough return, the organizers were forced to approach the local gambling boat for financial support. The casino, of course, wanted to assume complete control over the festival and they proceeded to divert more money from the uncertainty of live concerts towards more family friendly activities like fireworks displays.
With my own financial coffers diminishing, I went towards a more reliable source of income too. But on occasion, just like those bands touring the county fairs and small-town festivals, I get a desire to revisit those glory days and get a backstage pass to witness the spectacle that is the obligatory career slide. Typically, you get a pretty good idea about the personalities of the musician by how they handle the downfall. Some handle it with grace and seem grateful that they have an opportunity to play (Night Ranger, Nazareth). Some bands seem bitter that their careers have been reduced to this (Kansas, R.E.O.). Some bands seem oblivious to their downfall (Eddie Money) while others are oblivious only because they’re too loaded to care (Badfinger, Quiet Riot, Molly Hatchet).
What remained consistent were the fans, oblivious to any downfall and perhaps a little grateful of it for bringing a band from their past a little closer to home.