Writer & Editor
With an album as popular as Def Leppard’s Hysteria, the memory of when you first heard it may be overshadowed by the point at which you became sick of it.
As with Def Leppard, so went the fates of pop metal — they reached their height of fame with Hysteria, released in 1987, and it’s arguably one of the last great albums in the genre. The numerous singles released from it kept it on the airwaves for years, and that was part of the problem.
A compilation album may not often make it onto a “best of” list, but I’ll always be biased when it comes to AC/DC’s Who Made Who. It was a Christmas present in 1986 and my gateway album into the world of heavy metal. Once I’d heard it, I never looked back.
Does the world need a hair-metal holiday album? Yes. More to the point, does it need a good one? Even more YES. Because the motley collection We Wish You A Metal Christmas and a Headbanging New Year isn’t it.
Which is a shame because there’s some heavy-metal star power on display here, including Lemmy Kilmister (Motörhead), Alice Cooper, George Lynch (Dokken, Lynch Mob), Bruce Kulick (KISS), Scott Ian (Anthrax) and Geoff Tate (Queensrÿche) to name a few. Sadly, their varied efforts at Christmas classics misfire as often as not.
Regular visitors to As You Were may have noticed a new badge or two on the site — the ones from Alltop.com. I’m happy to say after seeing Alltop recommended as an aggregator of web content, I submitted As You Were to Alltop’s discerning editors in the categories of “heavy metal” and “werewolves.” They got back to me a number of weeks ago to tell me As You Were had been approved in the “heavy metal” category, and it’s now listed under that topic on their site.
Jon Mikl Thor, born in Vancouver, BC, started out as a bodybuilder in the 1970s and moved into the theatrical world of heavy metal. His shows featured feats of strength to the adoration of screaming fans. But as he tells it, taking the God of Thunder as your stage name doesn’t grant you immunity from trouble…
“There are many dangerous parts about being Thor in New York. One time I did a TV show and had the make-up on and long blonde hair. My wife likes Bojangles chicken, right? So I went to a Bojangles in a sort of shady area of New York City and then I was calling her, ‘Hey, I have some Bojangles chicken!’
I first had the opportunity to talk to Jon Mikl Thor back in 2005, while he was in the midst of a gruelling tour and had recently suffered an onstage accident in which he was nearly electrocuted. Despite that, he was very upbeat about his music career and made for a great interview. The only kicker was, I was interviewing him for Lögberg-Heimskringla, an Icelandic ethnic newspaper, and in the course of the interview learned he was not of Icelandic background at all.
