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What matters is that they arrived on our stages in 1983. The devastated band threw in the towel barely six months later.īut I am not interested in that sad part of the story. In early December 1984, Hanoi Rocks drummer Razzle was killed in a car accident in Redondo Beach, resulting in a vehicular manslaughter conviction for the guy he was on a beer run with, Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil. A few more albums followed, and the band arrived in the United States in 1983 and, well, changed everything.Īs you likely know, the story has an unhappy ending. In 1982 they moved to London, where the hugely influential British music press, mired in the gloom of post-punk and the earnest grimaces and greasy hair of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal movement, quickly and enthusiastically embraced these loud cowboy peacocks. Hanoi Rocks formed in Helsinki, Finland in 1980, releasing their first album in 1981. There it was, live on stage: the ultimate pink pop cartoon and the greatest gut-grabbing rock & roll dream, everything you had ever wanted the boogying electric rooster to be, in all its supreme and silly erotic terror! If you saw Hanoi Rocks in 1983 or 1984, you witnessed a certain kind of god. True, they most obviously resembled the New York Dolls, but Hanoi Rocks almost completely discarded the R&B aspect of the Dolls while retaining their sleazy, rolling, doo-wop-abilly 1/4/5 churn. Uniquely, Hanoi Rocks found a way to wrap a punk-rock frame around the fleetest, fastest and most fist-pounding splices of Aerosmith, Thin Lizzy, Alice Cooper and James Gang. It wasn’t just the look it was the sound, too. From the singers with the serpentine hips to the skipping, swirling guitar players wearing attitudinal hats to the too-cool, vested rhythm guitarists, it all had its roots in Hanoi Rocks. The whole platinum, spiky and rouged middle of the decade looked like them. without hitting a group that were created in this one band’s image.
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Heck, in the mid- and late-1980s, you couldn’t throw a drink ticket in L.A. Hanoi Rocks, as seen on the cover of their 1982 record, Self Destruction BluesĪs Guns N’ Roses prepare for their upcoming shows at the Staples Center and the Fabulous Forum, let’s take a moment to remember that the leviathans of Sunset Strip rock owe almost their entire existence to one single artist.