I know cos I was there,
but the critics and TV shows
make it seem like one day
we sported spandex and lipstick
and the next day flannel shirts
climbed up our torsos
like kudzu. And listen, dude,
I know, narrative needs
tidy endings. But shit was
complicated in ’91. Metalheads
liked Nirvana fine, but people
loved Tesla a lot, too. Plus
Ozzy’s new album didn’t blow,
and nobody was putting Bon Jovi
out of the Bon Jovi business.
You don’t go back to 1991
and tell Def Leppard or Van Halen
to take a powder. Sure,
Dokken flew the coop.
Night Ranger, too.
But nobody begged for a tune
that sounded like Boston
dry-humped Hüsker Dü
to get played
every ten minutes.
So what we get now is this
whole flashback-montage,
Velvet Revolver-type
flattening of history.
Some suit puffs a cigar
and thinks, “Sure, why not
have Slash and that dude
from Stone Temple Pilots
make an album or two?”
It’s easy to think
heavy metal died off
in the fall of ’91
when you never listened
to Judas Priest in the first place.
It’s easy to laugh at men in lipstick
when you never took mushrooms
and saw KISS back in makeup
at Madison Square Garden.
Or if all you do is brood
to Leonard Cohen all day.
Or think pure thoughts
about form and minor chords,
and how Mickey Rourke
in The Wrestler was realistic
about Kurt Cobain ruining
his Mötley Crüe’s heyday.
Heavy metal was just
something you saw on TV.
Go back in time
to September 21, 1991—
“Smells Like Teen Spirit”
made the lowest debut
on Billboard, behind
the Chili Peppers and Siouxsie.
Any time you pit truth against myth,
myth takes the cake.
And the truth is, some of us
never stopped making devil horns.
The number of the beast never changed.
Metal doesn’t die because of
one song. It tours South America
and waits things out.
So, listen, you go back to 1991
and tap on Ronnie James Dio’s shoulder.
Tell him heavy metal bought the farm.
I’ll be right here, playing air guitar.
Daniel Nester is the author of Harsh Realm: My 1990s, a poetry and prose poetry collection coming out in 2022 from Indolent Books. He is the editor of Pine Hills Review. He’s on Twitter, reluctantly, @danielnestermfa.