Way back when in 1992, a friend and I were driving somewhere or other. The DJ on the radio was introducing a new single from a band called Saigon Kick. "Love Is On the Way," that's what it was called. I heard the acoustic guitar and the slow tempo of the intro and, in my objective, tolerant way, I went ballistic. It had been a long time coming too, so there was nothing to do but let all the venom and toxins spill out.

"That is it!" I yelled, "Off! Turn it off! I've had it, and enough is enough! In the name of all that's holy, turn this off right now!"

My friend Jeri looked somewhat perplexed.
"Have you heard this album yet, Farrell? You ought to give it a listen-"

"Turn it off, I say! I don't care anymore. I am through, I tell you."

"What's your bag?" she said, hitting another pre-tuned button, "You would dig Saigon Kick if you gave them a chance. What's the problem?"

"Nope, no, un-unh, no more. I have been a headbanger for as long as I can remember, but I quit. Every new band releases a ballad right out of the box, first single off of every album. Nobody rocks anymore. Nobody experiments. It's all hard rock, but it's weak and diluted and dead from the dick down."

"I don't see why that means squat to you anyway. You don't listen to anything but old farts. Maybe you should break yourself away from your Deep Purple albums and give something new a try."

That tore it; I could feel blood bloating in my eyebrows and neck veins. "Listen to me very closely, blasphemer. I'm done with the goddamn power ballads. I'm done with the goddamn glam and the goddamn sleaze and the goddamn hairspray. I'm done with those lousy, dumb ass, thrash-dunces too. From this moment on, I am no longer a metal fan."

"Christ, don't be so dramatic," said Jeri, "It's just a song."

"Screw you."

I'd like to take a moment and point out that, commercially speaking, metal folded up its tent right about the same time. There could have been other factors, but I like to think that heavy metal just couldn't bear the thought of being successful without me.

In the spirit of true confessions, it must be said that I am fully ashamed of the year I spent outside the borders of Metalvania. My renunciation seems pretty craven now, more like a desertion than a protest. What did I do when the music I love needed fans like me most? I retreated from the fray and did exactly what Jeri thought I would do: I spent twelve restless and unhappy months listening to the "old farts," hard rock from the Sixties and Seventies that sure sounded metallic in retrospect. It was, at best, a most empty rebellion.

And how did I return to the fold, you ask? Well, I had promised myself that I'd listen to a lot more progressive rock, which meant that I could freely listen to Rush, King's X, and Dream Theater. An even stronger realization struck me when I found myself trying to rationalize why Blue Oyster Cult and Sabbath might conceivably be labeled "progressive." My conversion was nothing of the sort. I figured I could either return to the fold of a heaviness devotee or I could quit being a music fan altogether. Needless to say, I chose to reinstate myself, but only after I gave myself a stern reprimand and a demotion in the ranks.

Even so, I refuse to take all the grief for my underhanded abandonment. The climate amidst the metal faithful from '87 to '91 wasn't exactly conducive to party loyalty. My type of fan had first flowered back in the almost-underground scene of the early Eighties, back when leather and chains were the rule instead of the exception. Back then, iron and steel counted for something; you counted yourself a headbanger or you didn't count at all. We saw ourselves as a self-contained vanguard of iron men and rock soldiers and defenders of the faith. We were the ones who loved it loud, and we were certain that heavy metal would one day conquer the world.

Unfortunately, we were right.

When metal finally did attain world domination, it was in a form largely foreign to those of us who were reading Creem and Circus in '85. Most obvious was the fact that hardly anybody was wearing the "denim and leather" dress code imposed by Saxon. Half of the newer bands were wearing lipstick, fishnet, and teasing their hair (a no-no, even if they were chicks--which they weren't) and the other half were wearing only tattered jeans and T-shirts (which was fine, but it didn't exactly require a lot of effort). Why this mattered at all to a subculture that sloganeered obsessively about "freedom to live how we want" and "the music is all that's important" is beyond me at this late date.

We had been fully expecting Judas Priest and Iron Maiden to topple Michael Jackson from his perch, but some of us had real psychological problems with Def Leppard being the ones to do it. None of us expected mainstream metal (your Dios, your Accepts, your Kroki) to dwindle so precipitously or to get squeezed out by two polarized camps, one full of day-glo cross-dressers and the other full of psychotic snake-handlers. If we had known, it would have been something like being informed that your parents had died and that you'd henceforth be raised by your oldest aunt and your craziest uncle.

And we didn't know what the fuck to make of Axl Rose. This condition persists to the present.

The most objectionable thing to rear its head in the late Eighties was the "power ballad." Out of all the musical categories, heavy metal had always been the alley-brawler, the street tough with a switchblade in his pocket and brass knuckles in its fist. Post-1987, all heavy metal bands had in their fists were roses. There is nothing worse than a bunch of snarly, tattooed, longhaired delinquents getting all goddamned sensitive. Schmaltz and tripe and love songs... there was enough of that crap on the radio. And, to this day, "Open Arms" by Journey makes me more violent than the entire Slayer catalogue.

It seemed, in that heyday of metal, that everybody was getting into the power ballad game. Oh sure, there had been early pioneers of the form, what with "Sister Christian" by Night Ranger and Dokken's "Alone Again." When Coverdale & Co. gave us "Here I Go Again" and White Lion did likewise with "Wait," the formula was still enough of a novelty not to bring bile up anybody's throat. No such luck once "Heaven" and "Miles Away" entered the picture. By the time we were holding our lighters aloft to "House of Pain" and "The Ballad of Jayne," I was just about ready to throttle somebody. Then came "Love Is On the Way," played on Milwaukee's premiere hard rock station that would go belly-up two years later and take on a smooth-jazz format. The rest, as they say, is history.

As it turns out, I was wrong about power ballads. Well, "wrong" is possibly too strong a term; overly judgmental, maybe. Although power ballads will never be my favorite cup of battery acid, they most certainly do have a place in heavy metal. What I've always advocated for metalheads is a balance diet, and that means that there's a minimum daily requirement for pop-metal love songs too. You see, no other musical format (with the possible exception of jazz) has as many genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres as heavy metal. If your goal is to be a true connoisseur, one must treat the thirty-five years of hard rock history as a vast smorgasbord. Will yourself to try a little bit of everything. That way, you'll get your money's worth.

The problem with metal's chart dominance in the late Eighties was that the diet wasn't balanced. MTV and mainstream radio were puppeteering the genre and engineering their own brand of heavy metal, which was "heavy" only on the love songs and the mid-tempo numbers with catchy choruses. Even the mighty Tesla, who were artistically head and shoulders above all their brethren, received a major push from "Love Song"--despite the fact that it was one of the least satisfying tracks off of "The Great Radio Controversy."

Nowadays, however, I really enjoy the pop-metal and glam and the L.A. sleaze records from that timeframe, ballads and all. When I was first encountering it, I just couldn't allow myself the luxury of an unbiased listen. But my personal tastes are really irrelevant. There are better, wholly objective defenses for the validity of the power ballad. Two of them, in fact.

The first originated with a roommate of mine from the early Nineties. He and I were getting our apartment prepped for an imminent party. Otis was picking out the music for the festivities and reeling off his picks for my approval. When I complained that he hadn't selected enough of the heavier stuff, he summed it up with this response: "Farrell, the slow songs are what the chicks like. And the chicks are what I like."

I dismissed it at the time, but Otis's horny rationale was an explanation of near-genius proportions. Fact of the matter is, females weren't all that interested in metal until metal got interested in the power ballad. Once the artists indulged themselves in being romantic, the girls swarmed in like a plague of chiggers--or a flood of warm water. The metalhead community badly needed some women around by that time; all-male, drunken hordes wearing leather is not a goal anyone should work towards. Okay, it worked for Attila the Hun, but that's it. The late Eighties allowed a full-blown gender cease-fire. The two sexes would go to the concerts together, and the men would bang their heads to the rockers and the women would hip-sway to the ballads and all would be right with the world (except for cranks like me, who couldn't understand when the babes weren't impressed by "Holy Diver"). Go to any random metal show today and I guarantee you that there'll be a much higher percentage of females there than there was at any concert in 1984.

The second sensible reason for embracing the power ballad is this: no matter how creative or powerful or gutsy or idiosyncratic it manages to be, rock critics despise heavy metal. Above all else, rock critics hate the dreck that is "the power ballad."

In my opinion, anything that pisses off rock critics to such an extent can't be all bad.

Finally, I resolutely stick up for power ballads using the best reason of all--some of them are just damn good music. "Nobody's Fool" by Cinderella is a bare-bones, exhausted study of love gone wrong, straight from a heart that has been clawed and crumpled all to hell. Def Leppard's "Hysteria" will give you gooseflesh if you don't prepare yourself ahead of time, with guitars that sound like ripples in a pool. Without a doubt, "Sweet Child O' Mine" set the standard for revelations of vulnerability from a confirmed asshole; Slash's solo rolls over, gets out of bed, and then slaps you around the room some. Speaking of great solos, the coda in "Lady Starlight" by the Scorpions will have you drowning in the heavens--the song is every bit as pretty as the meteor shower it evokes.

If only for these four tunes alone, the power ballad would be worth all the damage it has done. But there's also "Love Is On the Way" to think of, isn't there? The eerie chord changes and archangel harmonies combined to make it one off the classiest entries in the power ballad fray.

So what the hell was I thinking?