June 30 · 1 hr 25 minOn daytime MTV, Bon Jovi was becoming the biggest pop-rock act on the planet. Poison was setting the blueprint for everything pop culture now calls hair metal. At the same time, Metallica, Slayer, and Megadeth: were building massive and devoted audiences. These two worlds shared MTV, shared tour bills, and shared fans who were being asked to pick a side. That tension is what makes 1986 unlike any other year in metal history.
The Glam Explosion That Broke Daytime MTV
Here’s what happened between 1984 and 1986: metal expanded beyond just being scary.
After Quiet Riot became the first hard rock band to score a number-one album in 1984, the genre broke into mainstream consciousness. Then the PMRC Senate hearings of 1985 gave the music a problem: it needed to stop being threatening. By 1986, the solution was in the videos. Make them colorful. Make them fun. Start somewhere relatable: a bedroom, a garage, a studio. Then escalate into an idealized fantasy of concert performance. Replace leather and skulls with neon and teased hair. What had been relegated to late-night Headbangers Ball slots now fit the 3 PM MTV daypart. The music and the medium found each other.
Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet is the commercial monument to that shift. Released August 18, 1986, it rolled out singles for nearly a full year after release: “You Give Love a Bad Name” in July, “Livin’ on a Prayer” in October, “Wanted Dead or Alive” the following March, “Never Say Goodbye” in June of 1987. Each one was bigger than the last. The year before, Bon Jovi had been opening for Billy Squier. The key differentiator from their earlier work: the arrival of Desmond Child as co-writer on the two biggest singles, bringing professional hit-making infrastructure to what was already a committed band.
Poison’s Look What the Cat Dragged In was doing the same thing with less money. Their starting address was Enigma Records, home to They Might Be Giants, The Cramps, Dead Milkmen, and Devo. An underground punk label, not a hair metal machine. Capitol entered the picture later, which explains why “Cry Tough” barely moved and “Talk Dirty to Me” became an MTV staple. Poison didn’t just succeed with this blueprint; they franchised it.
Van Halen’s 5150 added keyboards and landed the best Sammy Hagar-era album in the process. David Lee Roth’s Eat ‘Em and Smile amplified the campy fun of his Van Halen years into a career highlight. Cinderella’s Night Songs made the sharpest glam debut of the year: darker and more concise than anything they’d produce later, before the bluesy detours took over. Jon Bon Jovi helped them record it. That’s how fast the food chain was moving in 1986.
The Thrash Revolution Running in Parallel
Here’s the thing about thrash in 1986: it wasn’t hidden. Headbangers Ball existed. The magazines covered it. Metallica opened for Ozzy on the Ultimate Sin arena tour. But in the daytime MTV ecosystem, thrash was not the default. If you wanted it, you had to find it
Master of Puppets is eight songs long, 54 minutes, and sounded like nothing on daytime MTV or rock radio. It is heavy and precise and expansive in equal measure: a record where the title track alone runs over eight minutes and earns every second. It was Metallica’s third album, the last one with Cliff Burton, and it was recorded without a single thought given to MTV rotation or radio airplay. No videos. No singles. Just the record, and the word that spread through tape trading, zines, college radio metal shows, and the underground networks that thrash metal relied on before the internet existed.
What makes 1986 extraordinary is that Metallica wasn’t alone. Slayer’s Reign in Blood came out the same year: 29 minutes of something faster and more extreme than Master of Puppets, an album that even people who don’t follow Slayer know by reputation. Megadeth’s Peace Sells... But Who’s Buying? completed what might be the single most concentrated year of output from the Big Four of thrash metal: three of the four bands releasing arguably their best records in a twelve-month span. Anthrax didn’t have an album in 1986. If they had, it would have been a clean sweep.
From the German side of the Atlantic, Kreator’s Pleasure to Kill was happening simultaneously: the Teutonic thrash scene developing its own parallel lineage that would eventually be recognized as a pioneer of death and black metal. These weren’t crossover acts. They weren’t on MTV. But they were building the foundation that would outlast nearly everything in the charts.
The thrash revolution of 1986 wasn’t a secret, but it was a deliberate choice. Headbangers Ball ran late. Daytime belonged to Poison and Bon Jovi. You could be into both, but at school you were expected to pick a jersey. Admitting you preferred Master of Puppets over Slippery When Wet was a statement, and not everyone in 1986 was ready to make it out loud.
Legacy Bands: Update or Resist?
Every established metal act in 1986 faced the same question: how much do you change?
Judas Priest’s Turbo is the case study in what too much looks like. Their tenth album added synthesizer guitars and chased the MTV aesthetic in ways that have remained controversial ever since. Some decent songs are buried in there, but Turbo is the canonical example of a decade-spanning band trying on a new identity because the culture demanded it, and not quite threading the needle.
Ozzy Osbourne’s The Ultimate Sin represents a different calculation. The image got teased and colorful. The videos fit the 3 PM slot. But the album had Jake E. Lee playing with a flashy intensity that gave it a musical spine the presentation didn’t undercut. Ozzy reportedly hated it. Others call it his best solo record: a bridge between his 1970s legacy and the glam-era present that actually holds together. When Metallica opened for Ozzy on the Ultimate Sin arena tour, the lineup said everything about where the genre stood. The scariest band in the underground, opening for a legacy act who’d made himself MTV-friendly. The irony runs deep.
Black Sabbath’s Seventh Star was never supposed to be a Black Sabbath album. Tony Iommi assembled it as a solo project with Glenn Hughes on vocals, Eric Singer on drums, and Dave Spitz on bass. The label insisted the Sabbath name go on it. The video for “No Stranger to Love” is keyboard-driven and barely resembles Sabbath because, structurally, it isn’t. What it is, divorced from its title and backstory, is a genuinely interesting record with a remarkable cast. It has been submitted to multiple DMO polls. It has not yet won. It keeps getting submitted.
Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time added keyboards lightly and reads today as the last album before the tinkering accelerated. Europe’s The Final Countdown produced one of the most inescapable songs of the decade and an album none of us heard past the singles. The legacy-band class of 1986 is full of acts choosing between integrity and relevance. The ones who chose wrong are instructive.
The Deep Cuts That Shaped Everything (and Nobody Witnessed)
Here’s the version of 1986 that doesn’t show up on year-end lists.
In June of that year, a Swedish doom metal band called Candlemass released their debut album, Epicus Doomicus Metallicus, on a label called Black Dragon Records. It did not sell. It did not chart. It was not played on the radio or shown on MTV. It was, by most measurable standards, invisible. What it was doing, quietly and without witnesses, was inventing doom metal as a genre. Every band that has worked in that sonic territory for the past forty years carries a Candlemass debt, whether they know it or not.
Guns N’ Roses’ Live ?!@ Like a Suicide is a different kind of deep cut: a 1986 self-released EP on GN’R’s own Uzi Suicide label, predating Appetite for Destruction by a full year. Some people had it. They read about the band in Hit Parader and Circus, bought the cassette, and wrote the band’s name on their textbook covers. Then they came home from college and the cassette was gone, lost in a couch cushion somewhere, probably worth a lot of money now. That cassette is a small but perfect metaphor for 1986: the thing you knew about first, the object you can no longer find.
The Transformers: The Movie soundtrack connects 1986 to something else entirely: the year metal started showing up in animated children’s films, delivered by Stan Bush, Lion, and members of Kick Axe performing as Spectre General. For kids who saw the movie it was a first exposure to the genre.
Our Picks, Three Different Arguments
Every roundtable eventually comes down to someone having to choose.
Poison’s Look What the Cat Dragged In. The blueprint for hair metal as a cultural phenomenon. The DIY machine that started on a punk indie label and franchised itself across the next four years. It is not the deepest record of 1986. But it is the one that most completely captures what the year felt like at 3 PM on a Tuesday when MTV was on. That counts for something.
Metallica’s Master of Puppets is the credibility anchor. The last Cliff Burton record. The document of everything Metallica was before the first video and the commercial pivot. Every move they have made since gets measured against this one, and most of them come up short. The underground case, closed.
Ozzy Osbourne’s The Ultimate Sin is the legacy act threading the needle correctly, or at least fascinatingly. Jake E. Lee at full power. Ozzy navigating from his 1970s origin into 1986 accessibility in a way that doesn’t fully betray either. An album Ozzy reportedly hated. A pick none of us saw coming.
That’s 1986.
Episode Highlights
* 0:00: Intro. Why we went back to 1986: the year we were all buying cassettes and picking sides.
* 1:52: The Transformers: The Movie soundtrack as a metal gateway. Stan Bush, Lion, and a very upsetting death for 11-year-olds.
* 4:07: Cassette-buying memories. Where we each were, financially and musically, in 1986.
* 8:08: The PMRC timeline and how hair metal broke onto daytime MTV in 1986, colorful videos replacing darker imagery.
* 11:36: Judas Priest’s Turbo as the prime example of a legacy band adding keyboards and chasing the MTV moment.
* 14:08: 1986 as the greatest single year in thrash metal history. Master of Puppets, Reign in Blood, and Peace Sells all released within months of each other.
* 15:02: Walking into Richfield Coliseum for the last 30 seconds of Metallica opening for Ozzy, and genuinely not caring at the time.
* 16:04: Listening to Master of Puppets in secret on the school bus while claiming to listen to Bon Jovi or Night Ranger.
* 17:28: Why Cinderella’s Night Songs holds up: darker and tighter than later work, no big ballad epics, Jon Bon Jovi’s behind-the-scenes role.
* 20:03: Bon Jovi’s rocket-ship year. The full single timeline from You Give Love a Bad Name through Never Say Goodbye, and Desmond Child’s co-writing role.
* 22:49: Seeing Poison open for Quiet Riot at the Cleveland Agora reopening. Studying the Look What the Cat Dragged In album cover beforehand. Expecting at least one woman in the band.
* 25:22: Poison’s DIY punk ethic and their unlikely starting home on Enigma Records alongside They Might Be Giants and The Minutemen.
* 27:56: Candlemass’s Epicus Doomicus Metallicus: doom metal’s invisible ground zero, released June 1986, heard by almost nobody.
* 30:07: The Guns N’ Roses Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide EP story. Buying it before anyone knew who they were, writing GN’R on textbooks, and losing the cassette after college.
* 32:11: Queensryche’s Rage for Order as a musicians’ landmark, more influential among players than general audiences.
* 34:43: Black Sabbath’s Seventh Star. The Tony Iommi solo album the label forced into being a Sabbath record, and the DMO poll it keeps losing.
* 37:44: Vinnie Vincent Invasion: Poison taken to its extreme. Pink guitars, pop DNA at maximum volume, and a singer switcheroo from Robert Fleischman to Mark Slaughter.
* 45:08: Buying King Diamond’s Fatal Portrait out of sheer fear, based only on a magazine photo with no MTV and no internet.
* 52:30: AC/DC’s Who Made Who: three new songs, six repackaged tracks, Maximum Overdrive tie-in, and the question of whether it needed to be a full album.
* 56:13: The connections bands bucket. Hurricane, London, M.A.R.S., White Tiger, Rough Cutt, Black ‘N Blue: albums bought for who was in them, not what was on them.
* 1:03:36: Rough Cutt’s “Take a Chance” as an all-time genre standout hiding inside a mediocre album.
* 1:07:29: We each name the one album that defines 1986. Three picks, no overlap.
* 1:21:07: Chip’s poll plug for CJSS’s Praise the Loud. Cincinnati power metal. David T. Chastain. Still waiting for its DMO moment.
* 1:24:07: Outro.
Have a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Suggest it here.
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