If you don't think "Poison" was hair metal, I don't know what to tell you:
Alice Cooper, 'Trash' (1989)
After surviving decades of decadence, shock-rock icon Alice Cooper sobered up, teamed up with a big-haired bassist named Kip Winger and staged a quiet comeback in the mid-Eighties on a couple of middling hard-rock albums that hovered below the Top 50. But he didn't have another platinum record until he teamed with glam-metal songwriting guru Desmond Child and a star-studded guest list (Jon Bon Jovi, Steven Tyler and Kip Winger, who'd earned his own hits by then) for 1989's
Trash. The hit quasi-ballad "Poison" contained lyrics lascivious enough for Kiss fans but snarky enough for Alice fans; "House of Fire," which Joan Jett co-wrote, is a perfectly dude-ly relationship song; "Bed of Nails" features gang-vocals singing "ow-ow-ow"; and "Only My Heart Talkin'" is the sort of hair-metal crooner Nikki Sixx would write if he could be contrite. "I would get into my Corvette, turn on the radio and hear all these great songs by Bon Jovi and Aerosmith,"
Cooper told Raw in 1989. "When I found out how many Desmond had been responsible for, I knew he was the man to get."
K.G.