In a new interview with Anthony Bryant of The Hair Metal Guru, Jason McMaster of Texas rockers DANGEROUS TOYS, who achieved a short-but-sweet burst of success in the midst of the late 1980s glam metal boom, spoke about how the rise of grunge in the early 1990s forced most hard rock bands off the radio and MTV, with album and tour sales plummeting. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I was kind of living in my own bubble. And if someone says that grunge killed hair metal — I throw up in my mouth every time I say ‘hair metal’, but I’m trying to be crystal clear — I think that that’s wrong. I think that hair metal killed hair metal. Too many bands got signed and there [were] too many terrible bands [that] got signed. And if you think that DANGEROUS TOYS is one of those terrible bands, I’m open to that. I’m cool with you thinking that. But it was ridiculous as to how far it got taken with the whole look and the whole feel of everything. I feel like it didn’t have any balls anymore. And it was supposed to have some balls.
“Me and all the TOYS guys really respected a lot of the bands that were sort of not at war against hairspray or whatever,” Jason continued. “It was more like they felt real to me, and those are bands like JUNKYARD and RHINO BUCKET and RAGING SLAB and CIRCUS OF POWER, and there’s a shit-ton of them. There’s a bunch of that sort of movement that had more of a punk, dirty alleycat style of whatever — just rock and roll. It was coming more from maybe a southern rock attitude or an early AC/DC attitude where it wasn’t about hair. I mean, I know people that call AC/DC a hair metal band. I know that [TWISTED SISTER‘s] Dee Snider doesn’t like the term ‘hair metal’ because it doesn’t really play in to what they were kind of about, because they were kind of a street rock band. And anyway, I think that DIRTY LOOKS was one of those bands as well. And like I said, I could keep going — there’s a stack of them that didn’t really play in to… And I won’t mention — just whatever you think is hair metal might be quite different than what I think is hair metal.”
McMaster added: “So I think hair metal killed hair metal. I think grunge was about to happen anyway. For those of you who might not know, SOUNDGARDEN and NIRVANA — I’ll just stick with them — they were touring their first records in, like, ’87. So, I don’t know. It just took a minute [for those bands to break], just like it took a minute for GUNS [N’ ROSES to have commercial success]. GUNS didn’t break [right away], and that record, ‘Appetite [For Destruction]’ was out for a year, year and a half before it really had any numbers to speak of.
“It’s interesting how music kind of has to sort of warm up and people have to discover it in the underground before someone can really make it stick,” Jason concluded. “And that’s usually radio and back then MTV. Now it’s content.”
Founded in 1987, DANGEROUS TOYS released four full-length albums and one live album before unofficially disbanding at the turn of the millennium.
DANGEROUS TOYS‘ self-titled debut album, which came out in 1989, eventually went gold (although it took until 1994),while the group’s follow-up, 1991’s “Hellacious Acres”, failed to launch.
Although DANGEROUS TOYS continues to perform live, the band has not released any new material since 1995.
A few years ago, McMaster was asked by Metal Edge magazine why he thinks “Hellacious Acres” failed to reach the same levels of success as DANGEROUS TOYS‘ debut. He responded: “I think it had a lot to do with the whole Seattle movement. That record came out in ’91, the same year NIRVANA and PEARL JAM dropped their first albums. But a lot of people got really into grunge, and that buried a band like DANGEROUS TOYS. It felt like the streets in cities like L.A. emptied, and everyone changed their wardrobes overnight. So, when I think of ‘Hellacious Acres’, I think about what could have been. It’s an awesome record, and at the time, it boggled my mind that people weren’t into it.”
Asked if that is what led to DANGEROUS TOYS eventually being dropped from Columbia, McMaster said: “Absolutely. You had this new style of rock music that had all these people latching on to it, and it killed bands like us. The radio and MTV wanted nothing to do with us and refused to play our stuff. So, an album like ‘Hellacious Acres’ never had a chance. Couple that with the giant moguls and money-making machines throwing all their weight behind grunge and acts like DANGEROUS TOYS were essentially dead in the water. So, with Columbia, labels have to do whatever the trends say they must do for them to pay their giant rents or whatever. It wasn’t a shock that Columbia jumped ship on us, just like all the other major labels did with other bands. I mean… I know they were trying their best to have some sort of ditch effort with Alice Cooper, JUDAS PRIEST, METAL CHURCH and MOTÖRHEAD around that time, but it didn’t matter. If you played hard rock or metal, you were screwed. By ’91, they cleaned the shelf of all that was popular in the ’80s, which meant sleazy hard rock was dying, and our record and our deal died with it.”
