You Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone)

Hair Metal, like my own luscious locks, disappeared as soon as it arrived

I wish I’d have learned about the importance of accepting impermanence when my hairline began receding back in high school.

I have a distinct memory of standing at my locker at Granada Hills High School my junior year, my friend Scott Zimmerman coming up to me, pushing my greasy bangs back, revealing my oversized forehead and crying out, “You are so going bald!” Then laughing maniacally like he discovered that I had a 3rd eye.

I’m making it sound meaner than it was. High school boys just razz each other and point out each other’s irregularities. It wasn’t bullying — it was a way for me to grow thicker skin (since growing thicker hair was not in the cards).

And it’s not as if I was unaware of my receding hairline. Proof that I would soon be as bald as Telly Savalas, as hairless as Captain Stubing from The Love Boat, as cue-balled as Peter Garrett, lead singer of one of my favorite bands, Midnight Oil, could be found plastered across the walls of my house. Every day, going up and down the stairs to and from my bedroom I would pass by the wedding photos of both sets of grandparents, my Papa Al and Papa Harry’s smiling 20-something faces beneath mostly bald heads. Back then, men kept the smiley-face ring of hair that travelled from just behind one ear around the occipital ridge to the other ear. A reminder of what used to hold residence upon the rest of the skull. There’s probably a solid medical reason why that area is allowed to keep it’s home base where the rest of the head must say bye bye to the follicle. I invite those in the know to edumacate me in the comments.

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UC Santa Cruz 1987 - the punk rock mullet wearer

I would get a few more years of locks ownership before they would finally begin their quick descent. I for some reason chose to spend them with an unfortunate shaggy mullet during the first couple years of college. But as soon as I moved to the Bernal Heights neighborhood in San Francisco in 1993 at 26, I decided to embrace my natural, follicle-free destiny. I planned a head-shaving party and invited all my friends to come and take turns with the electric razor, shaving off my hairy past and welcoming me into a new, clean, sleek future.

I have done the math and I’ve figured that I’ve saved more than 3200 hundred dollars on professional haircuts and stylings in the 32 years I’ve shaved my head myself. My numbers might be faulty as I have no idea how much haircuts actually cost or how often men usually get their hair cut. I was going with 4x/year at 25 bucks a pop at someplace like Supercuts. I’m not including the 200-300 dollars spent on new head shaving devices, so it’s all relative.

I also feel I must consider time. I have saved a ton of it not having to “do” my hair each day, but I have, on average, shaved my head 2 to 3 times a week and each time is about 10 minutes so that should be considered. Also, the time at salons, which I have figured to be 128 hours if each haircut was an hour and 32 x 4 being the number of haircuts I’ve avoided. 128 hours is, according to my calculations, 5.333333 days. So I’ve gained 5 and 1/3 days of life by going bald. Probably double that if I was smart enough to subtract shaving time from potential hair prep time.

A picture with my egghead twin circa 2005 or 2006.

When I first shaved my head back in 1993, there were some unfortunate connotations that came along with it. You might be called a skinhead. And skinheads were thought to be scary, white-supremacists. It was nothing like today when it seems like more than a third of men over the age of 35 are bald. I won’t get into a whole history of the bald man experience, as that would require way too much work on my part, and I’m sure there are wonderful books out there about all that should you want to learn more. I did find this interesting article from a few years ago in the Independent from a man asking Hollywood to stop portraying bald men as evil villains. Personally, I don’t have a problem being portrayed as evil. As long as I’m not seen as an evil skinhead.

What I have learned about myself, literally just now, is that one possible major reason that I was never much of a fan of the hair metal genre is that all the teased, permed, lion-maned hair styles so prominent in that scene felt like a slap in the face. Like a club I’d never belong to. In heavy metal and hard rock, genres also famous for glorifying the long-haired musician, there were always exceptions. Rob Halford, lead singer of Judas Priest. Scott Ian of Anthrax. Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins.

In the Hair Metal world, it seemed to me, being bald was not an option. If Hair Metal lived in a tree house, the wooden plank sign outside the entrance would say, “No baldies allowed.”

During the early-to-mid 80s, my love of hard rock and heavy metal, still in strong supply and influence, had expanded in the punk and new wave directions. My sonic palette was dining on a variety of new exciting flavors but there was one genre that left a mostly sour taste in my mouth.

It was becoming impossible to ignore the influx of interchangeable hair-spray and rouge bands, each one trying to differentiate themselves by how high off their heads they could get their hair to stand. These bands acted like they were rocking hard and some did incorporate glam rock into their sound in way I could get behind, but most of the songs and videos seemed to be all about posing and posturing and out glamouring the scantily clad women cavorting in cages — a trope that seemed to be a requirement in every music video. The songs themselves lacked true passionate, inspired songwriting chops. There was a hair metal formula and most of these bands were happy to stick to it.

That said, some of my favorite songs from the 80s come from these so-called hair metal bands. “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn,” by Poison. Ratt’s “Round and Round.” Despite my attempts at pushing them out, these songs wormed their way deep into my skull, and 30 plus years later they still reemerge to show their (now wrinkled and botoxed) faces.

One of the best of these hair bands, in my humble opinion, was Cinderella. Though visually they fit the mold (big hair, lots of makeup, girls in cages), musically they showed surprising range during their reign (4 albums over 8 years). They could pull off blues rockers ("Bad Seamstress Blues"), add a bit of country twang ("Shelter Me"), pull off some serviceable soul ("Love's Got Me Doin' Time"), honor their forebears with AC/DC-style hard rock ("Hell on Wheels") and — completing the requirement for true hair metal super-status: master the power ballad.

The successful power ballad must, must, must start off with a solo acoustic guitar or better yet a piano, the accompanying music video for MTV filmed atop a cliff-side at sunset or in the middle of a wintry blizzard outside a rustic cabin. Of course a scantily-clad "rock chick" (often with hair much shorter than all the men in the band) would need to be seen walking aimlessly but with purpose, heading, we would discover, to the exact spot where the full band would magically appear, on a spooky asoundstage surrounded by giant cages and candelabras.

Cinderella's video for their 1988 hit song, "You Don't Know What You've Got (Till It's Gone)" meets all of these benchmarks and then some. We get the solo grand piano on the beach, acoustic guitars, cliff-side silhouettes and sunsets. No scantily clad women here though — likely because this was a "serious" song and the band was trying to rise above the sexist cliches. Though it was probably in their rider that they must have the prettiest faces in the video.

I have to admit that despite my aversion to the genre, "YDKWYG" is catchy-as-hell and hits all the right emotional/cheesy notes. It builds and swells like the perfect surfer's wave, and lyrically offers a universal, timeless message. I mean, the truth embedded in the song's title is inarguable. It was true back in the '80s, it's true today, and surely a hundred years from now it'll still be true. It's the human condition. We will never fully appreciate what we have until it’s no longer there.

But a song like this needs more than a strong melodic, dynamic sense; it needs a vocalist who can pull it off, who can maintain power when quiet AND loud, and Tom Keifer was one of the best. He had the perfect blend of gravelly screech and true melodic chops. One part Axl Rose, one part Bret Michaels, with a truer sense of desperation.

Also, he played a mean guitar, taking the lead on many of the guitar solos on their records. He plays slide guitar on "Shelter Me" (below) and, as shown in the video above, he twinkles the ivories too. He was (and is) a true musician. The rest of the band fit into their roles well, but Keifer clearly was the main force in Cinderella.

I was lucky enough to see Cinderella in concert around 18 years ago, when they opened for Scorpions on the first of their "farewell" tours (Scorpions, not Cinderella, though it may have inadvertently been Cinderella's farewell tour as well). I had forgotten about them at the time, having gone to the show to see the Scorps, but was amazed at how many of their songs I knew.

"Oh, wait, this song is Cinderella? And this one is Cinderella too?” Maybe it was because all those 80s hair bands, for me, blended into one another, which can happen when you grow up in a sea of Aqua Net. My appreciation for this band — and I have to hand it to them for not spelling their band name Sinderella, which 99% of the other hair bands would have done — came well after their heyday. But that's how it is for a lot of music. For a lot of life.

Sometimes we just don't know what we got, till it's gone.

OK, I hope this piece is enough to get this fucking song out of my head for at least a few months...