Paramount+ seems to have emerged as the unofficial home of the three-part docuseries that could have been a movie instead. The latest is Nothin’ But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of ‘80s Hair Metal.
Directed by Jeff Tremaine, best known as the director of the Jackass movies, and based on a book of the same name, Nothin’ But a Good Time goes back through that entire era of hair metal, interviewing some (but not close to all) of the key players. MTV produced it, but like most things under the MTV banner these days, it isn’t airing on MTV, but rather Paramount+.
I should be the target audience for a documentary like this. I was into this music when I was a kid, and to this day I’ve been known to listen to the Hair Nation channel on Sirius XM, often coming across songs that I hadn’t thought of in 30 or so years.
We Already Knew This
But the new documentary is a bit of a disappointment. It doesn’t really go beyond the basic information that most people know.
Did you know that a lot of of these bands, led by Mötley Crüe, partied a massive amount and did lots of drugs? Were you aware that, in their early fame, a lot of these guys were broke and lived with their girlfriends? Were you aware that strippers really like to dance to Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me”? And that this entire era came to an abrupt end as soon as those opening power chords of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” played in 1991?
If you’ve read The Dirt, you’ve heard most of the crazy Mötley Crüe stories, and those and others are rendered creatively in animated sequences. This includes one in which former Great White frontman Jack Russell — who passed away earlier this year — shot a maid. Russell tells a bunch of stories that sound like the Rick James “Cocaine’s a helluva drug” bit from Chappelle’s Show, although a certain other Great White incident goes unremarked upon.
Yes, there’s a few minutes spent, over footage of Warrant’s notorious “Cherry Pie” video, on how sexist all this stuff tended to be, while a member of Ratt mentions that heavy metal shows tended not to be attended by that many women. But not really discussed much is that these manly men favored makeup and long hair.
The other shocking thing? These guys are old. And they tended not to live especially healthy lifestyles.
Hair Metal Undefined
However, a few things about the documentary left me cold. For one thing, there’s not much of a definition of hair metal. Def Leppard, it appears, made the cut, but not Bon Jovi. This may be because Phil Collen (Def Leppard’s guitarist) participated, but no one from Bon Jovi did, although they just did their own documentary.
Also, not many frontmen are interviewed, aside from Bret Michaels—the project is, after all, named after one of his songs—and Russell. No one from Crüe is involved.
Also omitted? Tesla, my favorite band from the era. The film even features Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt taking credit for the unplugged revolution, as if “Five Man Acoustical Jam” didn’t exist.
And one more important thing is omitted here: When hair metal was popular, I don’t remember anyone calling it “hair metal,” as that term didn’t surface until years after the genre’s heyday. (The term “Power ballad” didn’t exist until much later either; I don’t believe it emerged until commercials in the late ’90s for a box set collection of such songs.)
If you’re a hair metal fan, you might enjoy this documentary. But I felt like Paramount+’s Yacht Rock film a couple of years ago was a better version of this sort of thing.
