Farewell, Quiet Riot

http://www.slate.com/id/2178720/

Farewell, Quiet Riot
By Jody Rosen
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2007

Kevin DuBrow, the lead singer of Quiet Riot, who died Sunday at age 52, will be remembered as a guy who was in the right place at the right time, with the right song. The place was the Sunset Strip; the time was late summer, 1983; the song was "Cum On Feel the Noize," a raucous party tune originally recorded by British glam-rockers Slade, which Quiet Riot inflated into the anthem that first took pop-metal to the top of the Billboard charts. Quiet Riot distilled the pop-metal formula, toning down the darkness and nihilism of progenitors like Black Sabbath while preserving the decibel levels, adding poodle hair, spandex, gratuitous guitar histrionics, lots of salaciousness, and, above all, melody. Other, better bands—Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi—would ride the tide to superstardom, but Quiet Riot got there first, when "Cum On Feel" propelled the band's third album, Metal Health, to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 200, for one week exactly, in November of '83. That success was due in no little part to DuBrow's vocals, a raspy yowl, and to his bug-eyed stage presence—more in the Alice Cooper-lunatic tradition than the Robert Plant sex-god vibe that others would exploit. "Cum On Feel" was DuBrow's supreme moment. (And, let's be frank, it was more Slade's triumph than his.) But Quiet Riot's originals were a blast, too. Watch this vintage performance of "Metal Health," with DuBrow stalking the stage in a striped shirt and tight leopard-print pants. "I want it louder/ More power/ I'm gonna rock ya 'til it strikes the hour," Dubrow sings, a goofy but not inaccurate boast.