The last hair metal hit
Who were Firehouse, and how did they score a top 40 hit in 1995?
New Order’s “Touched By the Hand of God” music video, directed by future Oscar-winning filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, is a parody of ’80s hair metal bands, and the incongruity of that image paired with a synthpop song would have been pretty obvious and pretty funny to anyone who saw it on MTV in 1987. I’ve always kind of wondered how many people would get the joke now. I’m guessing that most people who come across the video online do — you probably only get New Order in your YouTube recommendations if you already watch a lot of old music videos — but there’s got to be someone who heard the very ’80s song and saw the very ’80s outfits and thought, yeah, of course that’s what these guys looked like.
I don’t blame that hypothetical person! These days, genre distinctions matter less than ever, and there’s nothing weird about seeing Whitney Houston and Bon Jovi and Depeche Mode and Run-D.M.C. and Phil Collins together on the same 80s Hits playlist. To a lot of young people, it’s all one big amorphous blob of stuff that happened before they were born. I’m not even that young, but I’m still young enough that all of that stuff is before my time too. Synthpop never went away, but it doesn’t sound like New Order anymore,1 and aside from Kesha’s self-described “lost-member-of-Whitesnake” aesthetic and that time Train asked us to remember Winger,2 hair metal hasn’t been relevant since I’ve been listening to pop music, or at any point in my life.
I’ve always known that the grunge-killed-hair-metal story wasn’t as simple as it is sometimes portrayed. It’s not like everyone heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and immediately wrote off the entirety of glam metal — while that song was climbing the Hot 100, so was “To Be With You” by late-breaking hair band Mr Big, which made it all the way to #1 in early 1992 — higher than “Teen Spirit”’s #6 peak. Later that year, Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain” would peak at #3, also higher than “Teen Spirit”.3 1992 was the transitional year where the two genres co-existed; Mr Big were the last hair metal band to have a #1 hit, and while “November Rain” marked the end of Guns N’ Roses’ time as hitmakers, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” marked the beginning of Nirvana’s.4 You could extend that transition period to 1993 — the genre’s biggest hits weren’t so big that year, but Def Leppard, Mr Big, and Ugly Kid Joe scored some top 40 singles5 — or even 1994, when Def Leppard, whose 1983 hit “Photograph” helped introduce glam metal to mainstream audiences, scored one last hit with “Miss You in a Heartbeat”, which only just counts as a top 40 hit and a 1994 hit, peaking at #39 for two weeks in January. But after that, hair metal was over, and in 1995, I was born into a world where it was but a distant memory.
Or so I thought. It turns out that five entire years into the 1990s, when Kurt Cobain was dead and grunge’s moment was over and the biggest band in America was Hootie and the Blowfish, a hair metal band scored one last top 40 hit. I don’t believe in astrology, but I do care about my birth chart — by which I mean the Billboard chart dated the week I was born — and I had to know how Firehouse,6 a hair metal band who debuted in 1990 and who conventional wisdom says were living borrowed time from day one, wound up on it.
You may hit play on Firehouse’s “I Live My Life For You” only to find yourself thinking, wait, this was hair metal’s last hit? These guys sound about as metal as New Order! Yeah, that’s the thing about hair metal: most of the really big hits, especially late in the genre’s run, were ballads. Though the first wave of hair metal hitmakers found success with upbeat rockers like Quiet Riot’s “Cum on Feel the Noize” and Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It”, by the time the genre made the big leagues in the latter half of the ’80s and started scoring #1 hits, it was with power ballads. And Bon Jovi songs. But mostly power ballads.
Not every band had their biggest hit with a ballad — Mötley Crüe had their greatest chart success with the hard-rocking “Dr Feelgood”, which peaked at #6, and while #1 hit “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is certainly the lightest and most romantic song on Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction,7 it’s not exactly a ballad — but many did, and the last couple of hair bands to make it big had their only hits with lighter songs. All three of Mr Big’s top 40 hits were ballads. Extreme topped the chart in 1991 with the stripped-back acoustic ballad “More Than Words” and had their only other top 40 hit with a more upbeat acoustic number, “Hole Hearted”, which peaked at #4. I imagine that some casual listeners who liked the hits but had never heard “Addicted to That Rush” or “Get the Funk Out” may not have even realised that Mr Big and Extreme were primarily hard rock acts.
This was the chart landscape into which Firehouse emerged. In late 1990, when they released their self-titled debut album, it was still possible for a hair metal band to have a hit with a rock song, like Warrant’s delightfully dumb “Cherry Pie”,8 and that’s what Firehouse did too. Their second single and first charting hit, “Don’t Treat Me Bad”, is fast, fun, and definitely on the poppier end of the genre. Not pure pop, like Nelson — who had a #1 hit that year with “(Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection”, and who, even if you take a big tent approach to the genre, as I tend to do, barely count as glam metal — but Firehouse were definitely more on the Bon Jovi and Poison end of the spectrum than the Guns N’ Roses and Mötley Crüe end. “Don’t Treat Me Bad” did pretty well on the charts, especially for an unknown band, peaking at #19 in early 1991, but it was Firehouse’s next single, “Love of a Lifetime”, that really set the tone for the rest of their career. It’s your classic hair metal power ballad, with typical lyrics about love and devotion. They’re not breaking any new ground here — they don’t lay on the operatic bombast like Use Your Illusion-era Guns N’ Roses, nor do they strip back and go fully acoustic like “More Than Words” and “To Be With You” — but it’s a well-done ballad, and AllMusic’s review of the album highlights “Love of a Lifetime” as a standout track.
“Love of a Lifetime” peaked at #5 in June, and it remains Firehouse’s highest-charting song. The last single from Firehouse’s debut album, faux-live rocker “All She Wrote”, missed the top 40, stalling at #58 in January 1992. That same month, the band won Favorite Heavy Metal/Hard Rock New Artist at the American Music Awards, but the choice of Firehouse over Nirvana and Alice in Chains, who would go on to be two of grunge’s most successful acts, didn’t exactly age well.9 “Reach For the Sky”, the lead single from Firehouse’s sophomore album, Hold Your Fire, only made it to #83, but that track, an outlaw rocker in the vein of Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive”, clearly wasn’t the song for the moment. It was with the album’s second single, “When I Look into Your Eyes”, a ballad whose piano intro recalls Journey’s “Faithfully”, that Firehouse struck gold again. The song went all the way to #8, becoming Firehouse’s second top 10 hit, and, unless I’m missing something, hair metal’s last. The genre still had a few fairly big hits left in it — Saigon Kick10 would take “Love is on the Way” all the way to #12 in December 1992, and Def Leppard would peak just outside the top 10 a couple more times11 — but it was on its way out, and it looked like Firehouse were too. Their next single, “Sleeping With You”12 peaked way down at #78. They didn’t release anything else until 1995, a year that one might assume would not be kind to them. In the mid-90s, people wanted Hootie and Oasis and Green Day, not these hair metal stragglers.
Far bigger names than Firehouse were struggling to adapt. Mötley Crüe’s attempt to go grunge on their 1994 self-titled album alienated existing fans without winning over the alternative crowd.13 Poison’s 1993 album Native Tongue was similarly unsuccessful, producing only one minor hit that peaked at #50 when every prior album had charted at least one song in the top 10, and they wouldn’t release another album for the rest of the decade.14
Late-breaking acts who ought to have been better-suited to the ’90s fared no better. Skid Row, who pivoted to a harder style early, following their more accessible 1989 debut with an aggressive sophomore album in 1991, which was too heavy for pop radio but sold very well,15 couldn’t keep up the momentum on their third outing, 1995’s Subhuman Race. Extreme, whose music always incorporated elements of funk, didn’t sound wildly different from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were one of the biggest rock acts of ’90s. The first time I heard Ugly Kid Joe’s biggest hit, “Everything About You”, I didn’t immediately identify them as hair metal — the lyrics are so distinctly ’90s, and their image was so un-glam, that I mentally sorted them into the alt rock category and didn’t realise that they were seen as a hair metal band until I started researching this article. Enuff Z’Nuff always seemed like more of a Cheap Trick-style power-pop-meets-hard-rock band16 who got pegged as hair metal because it was the in sound when they debuted. They certainly looked the part in early music videos, but they didn’t actually have any top 40 hits in the hair metal era,17 which ought to have helped them rebrand and avoid the hair band baggage. It didn’t. Even though some of these acts released singles that would have sounded right at home on alt rock radio — Skid Row’s “Breakin’ Down” and Mr Big’s “Take Cover” are my top could’ve-been-a-hit picks — every band who tried to court the alternative audience failed.
Firehouse succeeded by not trying. “I Live My Life For You”, the lead single from their creatively titled third album, 3, sounds a lot like their early ’90s hits. The track made its debut on the Billboard Hot 100 on February 25, 1995, entering the chart at #76, and by mid-March it was in the top 40. It peaked at #26 in April and held steady for a few weeks before beginning to drop in May. By the first week of June, the song was out of the top 40, but it stuck around the lower reaches of the chart until mid-July. Though it didn’t peak particularly high, “I Live My Life For You” spent long enough on the chart to make Billboard’s Year-End Hot 100 at #91.
So how did this happen? Well, what looked like Firehouse’s greatest weakness, that they hadn’t changed their sound since 1990 and weren’t exactly cutting edge even then, was actually their greatest strength. No matter how much they changed their sound or their look or their attitude, grunge and alternative fans who didn’t have time for Ugly Kid Joe and Enuff Z’Nuff were never in a million years going to listen to Firehouse. By staying the same, the band not only kept their existing fanbase happy, they retained their appeal to the audience that had long been instrumental in keeping hair metal afloat — Bryan Adams fans.
Now, when I say Bryan Adams fans, I don’t actually mean fans of Canadian singer, songwriter and AllMusic foe Bryan Adams specifically. What I’m really talking about are listeners who liked the kind of slickly produced rock power ballads that Bryan Adams had hit after hit with, and would happily listen to a hard rock or heavy metal band’s take on that kind of ballad, but didn’t care for those acts’ heavier songs. Maybe not all of them loved Bryan Adams, but he was the king of that style of music,18 and his reign, which lasted from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, lined up almost exactly with the era of hair metal power ballads. In fact, his final chart-topper, “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman”, hit #1 the same week Firehouse’s “I Live My Life For You” left the top 40, and both likely appealed to the same audience. The ballad-only fans were not entirely or even primarily responsible for hair metal’s success, but songs that appealed to both hard rock and adult contemporary audiences generally did better on the charts than heavier ones whose appeal was limited to fans of the harder stuff.
Power ballads have always been a genre unto themselves, and songs within the style tend to have more in common with each other than with the artists’ wider ouvres, and it’s not uncommon for a ballad to move from one genre to another on its way to becoming a hit. Diane Warren wrote “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” with Céline Dion in mind, but instead it became Aerosmith’s first and only chart-topper. “I Will Always Love You” started its life as a Dolly Parton country song, only to become one of the best-selling singles of all time in Whitney Houston’s hands. When Cheap Trick were given two power ballad demos and told to record one, the one they chose, “The Flame”, was a #1 hit for them, and the one they turned down, “Look Away”, was a #1 hit for Chicago. Cheap Trick and Chicago are very different bands, but aside from the fact that Robin Zander is a much better singer than Bill Champlin, there’s really not a lot of difference between those two songs. There’s not a lot of difference between those songs and “I Live My Life For You” either. You could imagine Robin Zander singing it. You could imagine any of Chicago’s various vocalists singing it. You could definitely imagine Bryan Adams singing it. It really only counts as the last hair metal hit on a technicality, and it’s actually even more of a technicality than you might think.
Firehouse were not the last band who had at one point in their career been classed as hair metal to have a hit song. In 2008, the title track and lead single from Guns N’ Roses’ long-awaited Chinese Democracy album debuted on the Hot 100 at #34, spending one week in the top 40 and three weeks on the chart in total. There is some debate over whether Guns N’ Roses in their heyday belonged to a grittier, sleazier subgenre of hair metal or a separate genre entirely, but there was no question that by 2008, GN’R had left that style behind in favour industrial-inflected hard rock, and other cuts from that album have something of a nu-metal vibe. Whatever it was, it wasn’t hair metal, but it still technically counts as the last top 40 hit by an artist who has ever been classified as such.
Even if you don’t count “Chinese Democracy” as a true hit due to its incredibly brief digital-download-era chart run, Guns N’ Roses weren’t the only one-time hair band to make the top 40 in the 2000s. Bon Jovi, who transitioned from hair metal to a more arena rock style with their 1992 album Keep the Faith, went on to have a better ’90s than any other former hair band, taking power ballads “Bed of Roses” and “Always” all the way to the top 10. But those hits pale in comparison to their 2000 single “It’s My Life”. While the song actually only reached #33 on the Hot 100 — barely higher than “Chinese Democracy” — it was a top 10 hit internationally, even going all the way to #1 in several countries, and it eventually went double-platinum in the US, making it the band’s best-selling single since “Wanted Dead or Alive”. “It’s My Life” is currently Bon Jovi’s third-biggest song on Spotify — impressive for a song by a band with four #1 hits — and it’s the group’s most-viewed music video on YouTube, with over a billion plays.19
Bon Jovi illustrate a path to success that surprisingly few former hair bands took. Though grunge and alternative dominate the cultural memory of the decade’s rock music, the ’90s were not a bad time to be an over-the-hill hard rock act, especially one with a knack for power ballads. Aerosmith saw success throughout the decade, not only with “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” but also “Cryin’” and “Crazy” and “Pink”, and Van Halen had a top 40 hit with “Can’t Stop Loving You”, which you’ll find not far below “I Live My Life For You” on that 1995 Year-End list. AC/DC had their highest-charting Hot 100 hit in the early ’90s with “Moneytalks”20 and saw continued success on the mainstream rock radio chart throughout the decade. Overall, bands who aimed for the adult contemporary, mainstream rock and classic rock listeners fared far better than those who tried their luck with the new alternative crowd, who were, depending on how you see it, either more discerning or more elitist in their tastes.
What was truly unique about Firehouse, then, was not that they remained capable of a hit in alternative rock’s heyday, but that they were still officially classified as hair metal when they did it. Though AllMusic’s review of 3 says that the album sees the band stripping away their harder edges, 1995 deep cut “Get a Life” rocks about as hard as 1990’s “Don’t Treat Me Bad”, and if there’s a slight change in their sound, it’s minimal compared to the rest of the hair metal scene’s more drastic pivots. Genre can be a tricky thing to pin down, and marketing and image often play as big a part in determining an artist’s genre as their actual music, and by that metric, it appears that Firehouse were still widely seen as a hair metal act in 1995. AllMusic lists 3 as a hair metal album, while Wikipedia uses the synonymous term glam metal, and when Firehouse frontman C.J. Snare was asked about “hair bands” in a 2005 interview, he viewed his own group as one of them.
Right there in the early 90’s, we surprised a lot of people because we were the only band of that genre that I can remember that actually had a top 20 hit right in the middle of that whole Seattle scene. That was with “I Live My Life for You” in 1995.
“I Live My Life For You” was Firehouse’s last hit. A second single from 3, “Here For You”, charted on Billboard’s Bubbling Under chart, which tracks songs that just missed the Hot 100, and they haven’t touched any of Billboard’s song or album charts since. Their last album of original material came out in 2003, and their only release in the last 20 years was a re-recorded greatest hits album from 2011, but they’re still together, still touring, and all but one of the original lineup who played on their first album are still in the band.21 They’re also very popular in Asia. Not just Japan, which is actually kind of normal for this genre — Mr Big are so big in Japan that they’re the page image for Wikipedia’s Big in Japan article — but also in Southeast Asia. Their 1996 acoustic album Good Acoustics22 is certified gold in Malaysia, Thailand, and the Phillippines, and the cities where they have the most Spotify listeners are all in Indonesia and the Phillippines.
When any song becomes a hit, there are a myriad of reasons behind it — genre trends, marketing, technology, the cultural mood — but there’s always one constant: people liked it. The most satisfying way to end this piece would be to say that in the course of researching and writing this piece, I listened to “I Live My Life For You” a million times and it became my favourite song and I totally get why people in 1995 liked it. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I do like the song. I’d probably say that “Don’t Treat Me Bad” is Firehouse’s best song — even though all the reviews say that ballads were their strength, I always tend to like harder-rocking tunes more — but “I Live My Life For You” is a good one too. Someone has to have the last hit song in any genre, and it’s kinda cool that a band who didn’t have the first hit or the biggest hit or the most hits get to say that they had the last hit, and that they did it with a pretty good song.
Well, not usually.
“November Rain” wasn’t just big in 1992, it was big in 2018, when it became the first music video from the 20th century to reach one billion views on YouTube, and in 2023, when it was the first to reach two billion.
Technically, Nirvana also had their last top 40 hit in 1992, but that’s because Billboard only allowed singles to chart if they had a physical release, but barely anyone bought singles in the ’90s and record labels often sent songs to radio without a physical release, so a lot of popular songs, including most Nirvana singles, were ineligible to chart on the Hot 100. Nirvana continued to have hits on Billboard’s genre charts and on international charts that didn’t have dumb eligibility rules, and Billboard finally changed that rule in 1998.
Mr Big with a Cat Stevens cover and Ugly Kid Joe with a Harry Chapin cover, which is a very weird place for hair metal to end up.
Sometimes stylised as FireHouse, but the band’s official Spotify and YouTube pages don’t capitalise the H, so I’m not going to either.
“Think About You” is also a sweet song and one of Appetite’s underrated gems, but it’s way more uptempo.
Warrant, somewhat surprisingly, also scored their biggest chart hit with a power ballad, “Heaven”, a #2 hit, but “Cherry Pie”, which peaked at #10, has more than three times as many streams on Spotify and is undeniably their signature song.
Ironically, Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley actually got his start in the Seattle hair metal scene.
Who clearly want you to confuse them with glam metal progenitors Hanoi Rocks.
Including #15 hit “Let’s Get Rocked”, whose music video features some of the worst CGI that I have ever seen in my life.
Musically, this song is reminiscent of Extreme’s “Hole Hearted”, and lyrically, it’s Bon Jovi’s “Living in Sin”.
If you’re interested in hair metal bands trying to survive the ’90s, then YouTube music critic Todd in the Shadows’ deep-dive on Mötley Crüe’s 1997 album Generation Swine is a must-watch.
Bret Michaels was too busy making terrible movies.
If you’re a chart nerd, you may know Skid Row’s Slave to the Grind as the first album to debut at #1 in the SoundScan era, which says a lot more about SoundScan than it does about Skid Row. Good album, though.
AllMusic compares them to Cheap Trick in literally every single album review.
I don’t understand how the insanely catchy “New Thing” wasn’t a smash hit, but it only made it to #67, and their biggest hit, “Fly High Michelle”, also missed the top 40, peaking at #47.
Interestingly, while Adams topped the Hot 100 with four different ballads, his most enduring song is “Summer of ’69”, a nostalgic pop rock tune that peaked at #5 but has twice as many streams as his next-biggest song on streaming.
As an aside, “It’s My Life” was co-written by Max Martin, the Swedish producer known at the time for his work with teen pop acts like Britney Spears and The Backstreet Boys, and who went on to have one of the most successful behind-the-scenes careers in pop music history, producing smash hits for the likes of Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and The Weeknd, and has writing credits on more #1 hits than anyone but Paul McCartney and John Lennon. But before he turned to pop, Martin got his start in a Swedish glam metal band named It’s Alive, so his work with Bon Jovi isn’t as out-of-left-field as it initially may seem.
Not only is it surprising that AC/DC had their biggest chart hit with a ’90s song, it’s weird that it was that ’90s song and not “Thunderstruck”.
The guy who left, Perry Richardson, is alive and well and playing bass for Stryper.
Interestingly, the most-played version of “I Live My Life For You” on Spotify is the one from this album. I’m not sure if that was the hit in Asia or if this is another case of streaming changing the canonical version of a song.