Stuff Your Dad Likes: Power Ballads
| Jacob Zinn can’t give you fatherly advice, but he can eat your girlfriend’s Valentine’s Day candy. |
You know it’s coming up soon. That one day per year when you’re either in love and affectionate or you’re lonely and miserable: Valentine’s Day.
With February the 14th approaching, couples young and old are giving each other flowers, planning romantic evenings and buying lubricant by the bottle. While you might be courting someone with chocolate and roses, your dad may’ve courted your mom with power ballads.
Extreme’s “More Than Words”. Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home”. Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone)”. The sole purpose of these songs was to get into women’s pants. Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” may be the sappiest, most cliché power ballad of the era, but it opened a lot of… opportunities.
There’s a good chance you might have been conceived to one of these songs.
However, odds are your dad had better taste in power ballads than the hair metal ones. Aerosmith’s “What It Takes” or “Angel” might’ve been rotating on his record player.
Or maybe he was more upfront with sexually explicit and implicit songs like Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” or AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long”. Perhaps he traded Warrant’s “Heaven” for a slice of that sweet “Cherry Pie”. (Oh yeah!)
Either way, power ballads got him laid. He may not like power ballads, but the down-tempo, three-chord, lyricized high school love notes were saturated with just enough passion to bring star-crossed lovers together. And if your parents got married in the late ‘80s, you can bet someone requested “I’ll Be There for You” by Bon Jovi at their wedding.
Now that power ballads are often only played as joke songs at weddings and karaoke nights, they’re no longer the genre of choice for bedding mates.
But your dad doesn’t know that. If he digs out his crate of vinyl records from the basement, it might be to set the tone of the evening.
Whether or not you have a date on Valentine’s Day, I highly suggest that you make plans to go out and stay out past curfew until you’re certain both of your parents are asleep. You’ll thank me later.
Top 5 Cock Rock Frontmen
It was the early ’70s. The hippie counter-culture was on its way out and all that was left to do was popularize cock rock for the next several decades.
The name of the genre refers to the bulge in the tight pants of rockstars–a bulge responsible for the bedding of plethoras of groupies. A prominent resurgence three decades ago saw peace, love and music make way for sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll; women walked this way for Steven Tyler and teachers were hot for David Lee Roth.
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While cock rock climaxed in the ’80s, this list looks at the forefathers of the genre, the ground-breaking lyricists who made in-your-face, pelvis-thrusting crotch shots not only mainstream, but the norm.
5. Paul Stanley of KISS
Stanley can be credited with bringing cock rock moves to the oversexed genres of glam rock and hair metal. KISS had always worn tight leather pants, but as the frontman, Stanley was the only member to use it to his advantage. Gene Simmons might’ve had the tongue, but Stanley had the balls… to flash his cod-pieced Love Gun to the crowd.
4. Roger Daltry of The Who
There perhaps is no better a display of cock rock than The Who’s 4:00 a.m. performance from Woodstock ’69. Daltry shakes his wild locks during parts of “My Generation” and “Pinball Wizard”, with low angles complementing his protrusion. Whether it’s real or not, groupies of the time might or might not say they won’t get fooled again.
3. Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones
Arguably the first to introduce the moves, Jagger is a prominent sex symbol of the time, known for shuffling his hips during songs like “Honky Tonk Woman”. With allegedly countless love-children, Jagger proved that these moves work, creating a legion of followers who want the same pants as those on the cover of Sticky Fingers.
2. Jim Morrison of The Doors
The Doors’ music may not have been as sexual as their peers, but Morrison’s onstage performances left little to the imagination of fire-lighting gypsies. While Morrison wasn’t as controversial as Oliver Stone made him out to be in the 1991 biopic, The Doors, he was certainly one of the earliest rockers to use the moves, which surely got him more than a few L.A. women.
1. Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin
Anyone who’s seen the 1976 concert film The Song Remains the Same has witnessed one of the originators in all his long-haired, bare-chested, blue-denim bell-bottom jeaned glory. Plant made every woman in Madison Square Garden sweat and groove with the sway of his hips, putting them in a hypnotic trance. His two-sizes-too-small britches that emphasized his trouser snake made him an icon for cock rock, one that both men and women looked up to (figuratively and literally).
Honourable Mentions
- Steven Tyler of Aerosmith
- David Lee Roth of Van Halen
- Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe
- Bret Michaels of Poison
- Sebastian Bach of Skid Row
Jacob Zinn :: journalist + photographer 
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