Shock Rockers of the '70s: What Were Parents So Afraid Of?
Like with so many historic accomplishments in popular music, the Beatles did it first.
Sure, before the Beatles, parents were set aback by Elvis Presley’s untoward stage gyrations, but many eventually accepted him as a mama’s boy and a good Christian when it came down to it. Other ‘50s stars like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis seemed to be talking about something naughty in their lyrics, so plenty of adults made their suspicions known back in the Golden Era of Rock ‘n’ Roll, as well. Those concerns were somewhat soothed, however, when crooners like Pat Boone hit the airwaves with sterilized covers of the original questionable material.
The Lads from Liverpool were different kinds of troublemakers, though. They came along in the early Sixties, first stirring up controversy with their “long” hair. A scant few years later, the long-haired hippie movement would make such shaggy haircuts look conservative. But when the Beatles first exploded onto the world stage, they were downright scandalous.
Then John Lennon suggested the Beatles had become so popular that they were “bigger than Jesus” at a 1966 news conference. This brought a swift end to the warm and fuzzy Beatlemania phenomenon. Lennon was speaking sacrilege to many (especially in America), and the controversy inspired mass album burnings before he clumsily apologized and the furor died down.
A song on 1968’s The Beatles (popularly known as “The White Album”), however, unintentionally led to some truly scary events. First and foremost, “Helter Skelter” was interpreted by the lunatic cult leader Charles Manson as some kind of a coded signal: he must coerce his Hollywood followers into mass murder.
But the song had another more subtle influence. In the minds of many music historians, “Helter Skelter” set the scene for the emergence of “hard rock” in the following decade. The track was really just Paul McCartney wanting to record something brash and noisy—something dirtier and louder than the Rolling Stones or the Who. Lyrically it used the imagery of a British slide-based amusement park ride. Sonically it was all just undisciplined studio rabble-rousing. But the resulting distorted guitars and wailing and bashing—all within the context of a pretty good song—had not been heard before.
John “Ozzy” Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Terry “Geezer” Butler, and Bill Ward of the rollicking pub band Earth were certainly listening intently over in Birmingham, England. They soon morphed their group into a massive-sounding electric blues unit with sinister lyrics inspired by occultist Aleister Crowley called Black Sabbath.
The guitarist for the British Invasion blues-rock band the Yardbirds was also planning to establish a new band in the late ‘60s. Jimmy Page would employ a heavier, guitar riff-based sound with Led Zeppelin, and for a time he, too, became fascinated with Crowley and the dark arts.
It all made for a lot of unhappy parents in the 1970s. Let’s look at some of the most maligned hard rock bands and artists of that time period, all of whom can be listened to on Amazon Music’s killer (figuratively killer, of course, not literally) playlist, Rediscover the ‘70s: Hard Rock.
1. AC/DC
They are the biggest band to come out of Australia (with the possible exception of the Bee Gees, although technically they were English blokes), and for lots of folks, AC/DC are the scariest band to come out of the 1970s.
Exhibit A has to be the cover of the album Highway to Hell (Exhibit B: the album’s called Highway to Hell!). Guitarist and bandleader Angus Young, in his infamous schoolboy’s outfit, stands in front of his bandmates with Devil’s horns protruding out of his cap and looks to be holding his own pointed Devil’s tail. Making matters worse (and reminiscent of Manson’s twisted relationship with “Helter Skelter”), the serial killer Richard Ramirez, named “the Night Stalker” by the media, apparently took on AC/DC’s Highway to Hell song “Night Prowler” as a theme song of sorts.
The song is really about a rascally whippersnapper sneaking into his girlfriend’s bedroom without her parents noticing. Not that that isn’t plenty scary for most parents as it is! But the vast majority of the band’s songs dealt with the same type of straightforward young-boy pursuits: namely, girls, partying, and above all else, rocking! Again, not necessarily what some parents want their kids to focus on, but it’s a lot less menacing than the Devil worship AC/DC were ultimately accused of.
Rumors abounded that the band’s name stood for “After Christ, Devil Coming,” when it was clear the name simply evoked their muscular, fiery sound by referencing an electric current (with album titles like Powerage and High Voltage further backing up this explanation). True, the band would occasionally toy with dark imagery, “Hells Bells,” “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It),” and “Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be” serving as a few examples. But going on 50 years in, it’s safe to say AC/DC’s main agenda is now, and always has been, to have a good time, and to rock hard.
2. Aerosmith
The biggest liability surrounding these Boston bad boys was the bad behavior of singer Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry. They weren’t called the Toxic Twins for nothing, and before their band’s renaissance in the mid-Eighties, their indulgences in illicit substances were enough to not only rile up disapproving parents (and the authorities!) but sabotage their careers.
Aerosmith are one of those bands (much like AC/DC, incidentally) whose career can be split into halves. The second half took advantage of the MTV era and spawned massive video and radio hits like “Dude (Looks Like a Lady),” “Love in an Elevator,” “What It Takes,” “Amazing,” and “Cryin’.” The first half—the ‘70s half—was rawer, and gritty enough to inspire rough-and-tumble bands like Guns N’ Roses and most of the party-happy carousers who made up the 1980s “hair metal” movement. Songs like “Back in the Saddle,” “Last Child,” “Walk This Way,” and “Sweet Emotion” could certainly be construed as crude, although the topics Tyler discussed were almost exclusively about his way with the ladies and not about the bad stuff that was really getting him into trouble.
The most important part of the story, though, is that Aerosmith ultimately saved themselves from self-destruction, career-wise and otherwise, by cleaning up their act. So while the lyrics could still be rather risqué, and Tyler and Perry would never be the best of role models, necessarily, they did eventually turn things around and make the band far bigger than ever. (Plus, it didn’t hurt that record execs got Tyler to write with mainstream co-writers who helped filter his more suggestive lyrical ambitions.)
3. Alice Cooper
There might not be too much sugar-coating it with the band Alice Cooper, and in particular, the man who goes by the name “Alice Cooper,” Vincent Furnier. When they started out, the band were wacky disciples of acid rocker Frank Zappa, and Cooper concentrated on making conservative folks uncomfortable with androgyny. But down the road, they would become known as the Godfathers of Shock Rock, and would cause nightmares, both literally and figuratively, for fans and parents alike.
Around the time the band scored their first worldwide hit, “I’m Eighteen” from 1971’s Love It to Death album, Cooper’s stage antics shifted from general gender-bending to more deliberately macabre illusions and pranks. While Black Sabbath evoked horror movie imagery in their lyrics, Alice Cooper brought that imagery—times 100—directly to the stage.
Ghoulish makeup, live boa constrictors, decapitated mannequins, and fake executions of Cooper all became mainstays at Alice Cooper concerts, with Cooper himself gleefully playing the villainous emcee. The band’s big hits dealt more with teenage angst (“I’m Eighteen,” “School’s Out,” “No More Mr. Nice Guy”), but when the band became a solo project for Cooper in the mid-’70s, he further embraced the role of evil deviant with albums such as Welcome to My Nightmare and Alice Cooper Goes to Hell.
If any “flower power” carried over into the 1970s from the Summer of Love decade before, Alice Cooper was only too happy to finish it off with signature gore and gusto.
4. Black Sabbath
Is there another musical band or artist who is as single-handedly responsible for creating a genre of popular music than Black Sabbath is with heavy metal? The Beatles may have haphazardly touched on hard rock with “Helter Skelter,” but Sabbath made the conscious decision to turn the guitars up, hit the drums louder, and sing about scary stuff—on almost every song on their self-titled debut album.
One of the band’s first songs as Black Sabbath was the song “Black Sabbath.” Its lyrical mentions of Satan coming ‘round the bend and pointing out the narrator as the “chosen one” were all very new, and sufficiently terrifying to much of the unsuspecting public of the late 1960s. “Evil Woman,” “Wicked World,” “The Wizard,” “Hand of Doom,” “Electric Funeral,” “Children of the Grave”—what were these guys talking about? It was like a horror flick, but presented on wax instead of celluloid.
And in fact, good clean fun via spookiness was really all that Sabbath were about in the end. The name of the band was borrowed from the 1963 Boris Karloff horror film of the same name. And not that the band didn’t consciously play up the ominous component to their sound and lyrics, they did. But their only intent at the end of the day was to play music that was wildly different, oddly titillating, and impossible to ignore. Not too unlike what the director of Black Sabbath, the movie, probably intended, right? (Except he wasn’t plagued with accusations of Satanism for the rest of his career!)
5. David Bowie
Especially since his passing in early 2016, the near-universal love and respect David Bowie commands all over the world makes it hard to fathom he might have been absolutely loathed by segments of the general population at one point. Also, you might be asking what Bowie’s doing on a list covering hard rock artists in the first place?
Bowie was always on the cutting edge, especially after delivering the breakthrough David Bowie album, which featured his first hit in “Space Oddity.” (This was his second album, and second self-titled album.) But instead of staying true to the quirky, otherworldly fiction of “Space Oddity,” third album The Man Who Sold the World dealt with unsettling, real-world topics like mental health and global conflict. And the sound of the album was not only heavier, but that of a heavy rock band—the album featured guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Mick “Woody” Woodmansey, who would later be ushered into Bowie’s infamous full-time touring band, the Spiders from Mars.
Another tiny detail that probably didn’t sit well with parents when their kid brought home The Man Who Sold the World: it sure does look like Mr. Bowie is wearing a dress on the cover of that album.
Of course, Bowie would push the boundaries of gender, identity, and sexuality with later classic albums like Hunky Dory and Aladdin Sane, and he even had the audience questioning his own humanity with the alien saga Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It seemed with every new album, Bowie would take on a new persona. Ultimately, though, it was all in the interest of art—and perhaps seeing how close to the edge of public taste one could get and still be accepted by a whole lot of music fans. No one was better at this than Major Tom/Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane/the Thin White Duke/the Picasso of Pop/David Bowie.
6. Judas Priest
Well, first of all…that band name. Obviously taking on the name of the dude who betrayed Jesus must mean the band are aligned at the hip with the Devil himself, right?
In reality, exactly zero members of the band we would come to know as Judas Priest were members of the group when it was named after the Bob Dylan song "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest." The short-lived vocalist of the first incarnation of Judas Priest brought the name with him from a previous band.
That doesn’t mean the real Judas Priest didn’t have plans to shake up the establishment and ruffle a few feathers, though. In terms of sound, the twin guitar attack of Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing was searing enough. But vocalist Rob Halford forevermore threw down the gauntlet for heavy metal vocals when he artfully shrieked his way through the opening track of the band’s second album, 1976’s Sad Wings of Destiny.
A perennial fan favorite, “Victim of Changes” is a nearly eight-minute-long epic that positions Halford’s ungodly howls front and center. Never mind what the song is about: a poor middle-aged lady abusing alcohol to cope with ageism. The song sounds like it originated from the depths of hell—here in the 21st century, and most certainly back in the mid-’70s!
There were plenty of songs from ‘70s-era Priest whose lyrics were horror-movie scary (“The Ripper,” “Tyrant,” “Genocide,” “Beyond the Realms of Death”), but the other facet to the band that probably made parents fear for their children’s souls was their unnerving image. By the time Priest started to break through with albums such as 1978’s Hell Bent for Leather (named Killing Machine outside the United States), they’d adopted a biker gang look that was heavy on leather and studs. And for his part, Halford took to making a dramatic stage entrance by riding out on a burly Harley-Davidson.
The music of Judas Priest was hugely influential to the metal that would come after, but almost as influential was their image and their attitude, which led to their rightful designations as the undisputed “Metal Gods” (which is also a song on perhaps their most classic album, 1980’s British Steel).
7. Kiss
The guys in Kiss saw what the New York Dolls did with rowdy androgyny, and what Alice Cooper did with shocking stage shows, and mixed those approaches to bombastic and lucrative effect in the mid- to late ‘70s. The songs were all but exclusively about picking up girls, but what mattered even more to the teenagers who would found and fund the million-strong Kiss Army was the band’s eye-popping visuals.
What could be more iconic and representative of ‘70s hard rock than the patented kabuki-style makeup and the extreme characters Kiss created for themselves? Okay, there was a slightly less-than-threatening cat character (drummer Peter Criss, who, ironically, was the most volatile off-stage). But then there was the spaced-out alien (lead guitarist Ace Frehley), the starry-eyed lover (singer and guitarist Paul Stanley), and of course, there was evil incarnate, the impossibly long-tongued demon (bassist and singer Gene Simmons).
Kiss’s stage shows were like nothing anyone had ever seen before. They were a combination of Ringling Brothers and Broadway that featured Simmons blowing fire and spitting fake blood (although many concerned citizens just knew he was regurgitating real blood somehow); Criss levitating 50 feet in the air; Stanley ring-leading with “Do you believe in the power of rock ‘n’ roll” stage sermons and Pete Townshend-like guitar sacrifices; and Frehley shooting firebombs from his guitar before sending it up to the rafters as it spewed smoke.
More rumors surfaced (Simmons’s tongue was actually an implanted cow’s tongue!; the band name stood for Knights In Satan’s Service!; Frehley really was an alien from another planet!), and protests outside the arenas became commonplace. It was all great for business. In fact, as the Seventies came to a close, it became clear that the band were more interested in cash cows than cow tongues. The fantastical characters naturally lent themselves to every merchandising opportunity imaginable, from lunch boxes to pinball machines to Halloween masks. Soon the fanbase drastically shrunk in age, shrinking the band’s credibility as real-life scary monsters and rock ‘n’ roll hooligans in the process.
8. Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin’s lyrical content was always far more Lord of the Rings than The Exorcist. Classics including “Ramble On,” “Misty Mountain Hop,” and “The Battle of Evermore” specifically referenced the lands of the hobbit and the Ringwraith. Singer Robert Plant also loved Norse mythology and Celtic lore, which made for even more mysterious messaging that seemed to inhabit some other plane of understanding.
Guitarist Jimmy Page, on the other hand, really did go through a phase where he studied and was influenced by the turn-of-the-20th-century occultist and magician Aleister Crowley. Pair that with Plant’s mysticism, guitar riffs that were often even more intense than those of Black Sabbath, and their reputations as absolute heathens off-stage (see the infamous rock biography Hammer of the Gods), and you get a band that could be plenty scary.
And yet, like most bands on this list, the phases these musicians went through when they were in their early twenties were just that: phases. Is there really a difference between a teenager loving Freddy Krueger movies and that same teenager loving Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath?
The vast majority of music and movie fans know the difference between the fantasy evoked in their favorite forms of media content and reality. That said, Zeppelin still inspired a healthy (or unhealthy, as it were) amount of skepticism from some members of the public. The brash Brits just had to be more than occasional pub delinquents. ”I’ve listened to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ backwards ten times, and I can now say with absolute certainty that Led Zeppelin are agents of Lucifer!”
Such speculation, of course, only added to their legend.
9. Motörhead
Why were Motörhead considered dangerous? Let us count the ways!
This entire entry could focus solely on that ominous umlaut. They weren’t the first well-known band to use it to toughen up their image—that honor goes to Blue Öyster Cult—but once a band as raw and rebellious as Lemmy Kilmister and crew used it, it became a heavy metal tradition. Mötley Crüe, Queensrÿche, and (for comedic effect) Spin̈al Tap were those high-profile acts that thought it essential to follow in Motörhead’s grammatically ambiguous footsteps, and to satisfyingly menacing effect.
Motörhead were plenty scary aside from the umlaut, though (which also factors into Nazi Germany’s heritage, unfortunately, adding another terrifying connotation to the double-dots). Lemmy was, with the possible exception of Ozzy Osbourne, heavy metal’s all-time lovable miscreant. He paid zero mind to the giant moles and warts on his face. He had that nasty upward-looking stance at the mic, with the microphone positioned well above his head. And he had an even nastier bass guitar sound, which was intentionally trebly and distorted. And he was addicted to speed—in terms of his rip-roaring, punk-tinged metal music as well as his extracurricular tendencies.
The undisputed king of all Motörhead classics, “Ace of Spades,” from the album of the same name, was about high-stakes card games. “Iron Fist” (sure enough, from the album of the same name) was a fantastical tale about flying horses and ghost riders in the sky. Both songs mentioned the Devil in them. Most Motörhead songs probably mentioned the Devil in them. And if they didn’t, we’ll go on believing they did anyway.
And yet, the real Lemmy proved to be a harmless, funny old geezer till the very end. His favorite pastime was playing video card games at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on the Sunset Strip till the wee hours. And he might have looked rather intimidating doing it, but you could tell he meant no harm.
10. Scorpions
Speaking of “The Tap,” when the fictional band is considering titles for their new album in the 1984 heavy metal sendup This Is Spin̈al Tap, they run into a bit of a snag. Their record label expresses some trepidation over releasing a record entitled Smell the Glove, the album cover depicting a woman in a compromising stance of which we need not go into detail.
Sadly, Tap director Rob Reiner may very well have modeled the offending farcical album cover on the slightly less gross real-life album cover for a Scorpions album called Animal Magnetism. And the album before that one (Lovedrive) featured a cover that would end up being censored in conservative countries like America as well. Censored, too, would be the somewhat less risqué (but still a bit risqué) cover for the enormously successful Scorps album Love at First Sting.
Maybe it’s just that the band, Germany’s biggest rock export, come from a country that’s a bit looser in their depictions of male-female relations. They all seem like lovely guys in interviews; maybe they just don’t know any better. And they have far more heartfelt ballads (“Holiday,” “Still Loving You,” “Believe in Love”) and emotion-soaked rockers about missing their girls from the road (“No One Like You,” “I’m Leaving You,” “Can’t Live without You”) than they have tracks suggesting anything less than their being respectful to women.
It’s just those darn album covers. Who knows how many times kids were told to march right back to the K-Mart where they got that filthy record and return it?
Chilling bonus mystery: Were the Scorpions end-of-the-Cold-War spies? Their biggest hit, the worldwide Number 1 ballad “Wind of Change,” was the subject of a popular investigative podcast called Wind of Change in 2020. The premise: Scorpions vocalist Klaus Meine, who does not play an instrument but is credited as the track’s sole songwriter, did not write the tune. The CIA did, to help along the fall of the Soviet Union.
At its conclusion, the podcast leans toward this wild theory being fiction after scoring a series-ending interview with Meine, but…either way, “Wind of Change” serving as the theme song for millions of newly emancipated Soviets back in 1990 makes up for at least some of the Scorps’ icky album covers, doesn’t it?
Like with so many historic accomplishments in popular music, the Beatles did it first.
Sure, before the Beatles, parents were set aback by Elvis Presley’s untoward stage gyrations, but many eventually accepted him as a mama’s boy and a good Christian when it came down to it. Other ‘50s stars like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis seemed to be talking about something naughty in their lyrics, so plenty of adults made their suspicions known back in the Golden Era of Rock ‘n’ Roll, as well. Those concerns were somewhat soothed, however, when crooners like Pat Boone hit the airwaves with sterilized covers of the original questionable material.
The Lads from Liverpool were different kinds of troublemakers, though. They came along in the early Sixties, first stirring up controversy with their “long” hair. A scant few years later, the long-haired hippie movement would make such shaggy haircuts look conservative. But when the Beatles first exploded onto the world stage, they were downright scandalous.
Then John Lennon suggested the Beatles had become so popular that they were “bigger than Jesus” at a 1966 news conference. This brought a swift end to the warm and fuzzy Beatlemania phenomenon. Lennon was speaking sacrilege to many (especially in America), and the controversy inspired mass album burnings before he clumsily apologized and the furor died down.
A song on 1968’s The Beatles (popularly known as “The White Album”), however, unintentionally led to some truly scary events. First and foremost, “Helter Skelter” was interpreted by the lunatic cult leader Charles Manson as some kind of a coded signal: he must coerce his Hollywood followers into mass murder.
But the song had another more subtle influence. In the minds of many music historians, “Helter Skelter” set the scene for the emergence of “hard rock” in the following decade. The track was really just Paul McCartney wanting to record something brash and noisy—something dirtier and louder than the Rolling Stones or the Who. Lyrically it used the imagery of a British slide-based amusement park ride. Sonically it was all just undisciplined studio rabble-rousing. But the resulting distorted guitars and wailing and bashing—all within the context of a pretty good song—had not been heard before.
John “Ozzy” Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Terry “Geezer” Butler, and Bill Ward of the rollicking pub band Earth were certainly listening intently over in Birmingham, England. They soon morphed their group into a massive-sounding electric blues unit with sinister lyrics inspired by occultist Aleister Crowley called Black Sabbath.
The guitarist for the British Invasion blues-rock band the Yardbirds was also planning to establish a new band in the late ‘60s. Jimmy Page would employ a heavier, guitar riff-based sound with Led Zeppelin, and for a time he, too, became fascinated with Crowley and the dark arts.
It all made for a lot of unhappy parents in the 1970s. Let’s look at some of the most maligned hard rock bands and artists of that time period, all of whom can be listened to on Amazon Music’s killer (figuratively killer, of course, not literally) playlist, Rediscover the ‘70s: Hard Rock.
1. AC/DC
They are the biggest band to come out of Australia (with the possible exception of the Bee Gees, although technically they were English blokes), and for lots of folks, AC/DC are the scariest band to come out of the 1970s.
Exhibit A has to be the cover of the album Highway to Hell (Exhibit B: the album’s called Highway to Hell!). Guitarist and bandleader Angus Young, in his infamous schoolboy’s outfit, stands in front of his bandmates with Devil’s horns protruding out of his cap and looks to be holding his own pointed Devil’s tail. Making matters worse (and reminiscent of Manson’s twisted relationship with “Helter Skelter”), the serial killer Richard Ramirez, named “the Night Stalker” by the media, apparently took on AC/DC’s Highway to Hell song “Night Prowler” as a theme song of sorts.
The song is really about a rascally whippersnapper sneaking into his girlfriend’s bedroom without her parents noticing. Not that that isn’t plenty scary for most parents as it is! But the vast majority of the band’s songs dealt with the same type of straightforward young-boy pursuits: namely, girls, partying, and above all else, rocking! Again, not necessarily what some parents want their kids to focus on, but it’s a lot less menacing than the Devil worship AC/DC were ultimately accused of.
Rumors abounded that the band’s name stood for “After Christ, Devil Coming,” when it was clear the name simply evoked their muscular, fiery sound by referencing an electric current (with album titles like Powerage and High Voltage further backing up this explanation). True, the band would occasionally toy with dark imagery, “Hells Bells,” “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It),” and “Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be” serving as a few examples. But going on 50 years in, it’s safe to say AC/DC’s main agenda is now, and always has been, to have a good time, and to rock hard.
2. Aerosmith
The biggest liability surrounding these Boston bad boys was the bad behavior of singer Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry. They weren’t called the Toxic Twins for nothing, and before their band’s renaissance in the mid-Eighties, their indulgences in illicit substances were enough to not only rile up disapproving parents (and the authorities!) but sabotage their careers.
Aerosmith are one of those bands (much like AC/DC, incidentally) whose career can be split into halves. The second half took advantage of the MTV era and spawned massive video and radio hits like “Dude (Looks Like a Lady),” “Love in an Elevator,” “What It Takes,” “Amazing,” and “Cryin’.” The first half—the ‘70s half—was rawer, and gritty enough to inspire rough-and-tumble bands like Guns N’ Roses and most of the party-happy carousers who made up the 1980s “hair metal” movement. Songs like “Back in the Saddle,” “Last Child,” “Walk This Way,” and “Sweet Emotion” could certainly be construed as crude, although the topics Tyler discussed were almost exclusively about his way with the ladies and not about the bad stuff that was really getting him into trouble.
The most important part of the story, though, is that Aerosmith ultimately saved themselves from self-destruction, career-wise and otherwise, by cleaning up their act. So while the lyrics could still be rather risqué, and Tyler and Perry would never be the best of role models, necessarily, they did eventually turn things around and make the band far bigger than ever. (Plus, it didn’t hurt that record execs got Tyler to write with mainstream co-writers who helped filter his more suggestive lyrical ambitions.)
3. Alice Cooper
There might not be too much sugar-coating it with the band Alice Cooper, and in particular, the man who goes by the name “Alice Cooper,” Vincent Furnier. When they started out, the band were wacky disciples of acid rocker Frank Zappa, and Cooper concentrated on making conservative folks uncomfortable with androgyny. But down the road, they would become known as the Godfathers of Shock Rock, and would cause nightmares, both literally and figuratively, for fans and parents alike.
Around the time the band scored their first worldwide hit, “I’m Eighteen” from 1971’s Love It to Death album, Cooper’s stage antics shifted from general gender-bending to more deliberately macabre illusions and pranks. While Black Sabbath evoked horror movie imagery in their lyrics, Alice Cooper brought that imagery—times 100—directly to the stage.
Ghoulish makeup, live boa constrictors, decapitated mannequins, and fake executions of Cooper all became mainstays at Alice Cooper concerts, with Cooper himself gleefully playing the villainous emcee. The band’s big hits dealt more with teenage angst (“I’m Eighteen,” “School’s Out,” “No More Mr. Nice Guy”), but when the band became a solo project for Cooper in the mid-’70s, he further embraced the role of evil deviant with albums such as Welcome to My Nightmare and Alice Cooper Goes to Hell.
If any “flower power” carried over into the 1970s from the Summer of Love decade before, Alice Cooper was only too happy to finish it off with signature gore and gusto.
4. Black Sabbath
Is there another musical band or artist who is as single-handedly responsible for creating a genre of popular music than Black Sabbath is with heavy metal? The Beatles may have haphazardly touched on hard rock with “Helter Skelter,” but Sabbath made the conscious decision to turn the guitars up, hit the drums louder, and sing about scary stuff—on almost every song on their self-titled debut album.
One of the band’s first songs as Black Sabbath was the song “Black Sabbath.” Its lyrical mentions of Satan coming ‘round the bend and pointing out the narrator as the “chosen one” were all very new, and sufficiently terrifying to much of the unsuspecting public of the late 1960s. “Evil Woman,” “Wicked World,” “The Wizard,” “Hand of Doom,” “Electric Funeral,” “Children of the Grave”—what were these guys talking about? It was like a horror flick, but presented on wax instead of celluloid.
And in fact, good clean fun via spookiness was really all that Sabbath were about in the end. The name of the band was borrowed from the 1963 Boris Karloff horror film of the same name. And not that the band didn’t consciously play up the ominous component to their sound and lyrics, they did. But their only intent at the end of the day was to play music that was wildly different, oddly titillating, and impossible to ignore. Not too unlike what the director of Black Sabbath, the movie, probably intended, right? (Except he wasn’t plagued with accusations of Satanism for the rest of his career!)
5. David Bowie
Especially since his passing in early 2016, the near-universal love and respect David Bowie commands all over the world makes it hard to fathom he might have been absolutely loathed by segments of the general population at one point. Also, you might be asking what Bowie’s doing on a list covering hard rock artists in the first place?
Bowie was always on the cutting edge, especially after delivering the breakthrough David Bowie album, which featured his first hit in “Space Oddity.” (This was his second album, and second self-titled album.) But instead of staying true to the quirky, otherworldly fiction of “Space Oddity,” third album The Man Who Sold the World dealt with unsettling, real-world topics like mental health and global conflict. And the sound of the album was not only heavier, but that of a heavy rock band—the album featured guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Mick “Woody” Woodmansey, who would later be ushered into Bowie’s infamous full-time touring band, the Spiders from Mars.
Another tiny detail that probably didn’t sit well with parents when their kid brought home The Man Who Sold the World: it sure does look like Mr. Bowie is wearing a dress on the cover of that album.
Of course, Bowie would push the boundaries of gender, identity, and sexuality with later classic albums like Hunky Dory and Aladdin Sane, and he even had the audience questioning his own humanity with the alien saga Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It seemed with every new album, Bowie would take on a new persona. Ultimately, though, it was all in the interest of art—and perhaps seeing how close to the edge of public taste one could get and still be accepted by a whole lot of music fans. No one was better at this than Major Tom/Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane/the Thin White Duke/the Picasso of Pop/David Bowie.
6. Judas Priest
Well, first of all…that band name. Obviously taking on the name of the dude who betrayed Jesus must mean the band are aligned at the hip with the Devil himself, right?
In reality, exactly zero members of the band we would come to know as Judas Priest were members of the group when it was named after the Bob Dylan song "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest." The short-lived vocalist of the first incarnation of Judas Priest brought the name with him from a previous band.
That doesn’t mean the real Judas Priest didn’t have plans to shake up the establishment and ruffle a few feathers, though. In terms of sound, the twin guitar attack of Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing was searing enough. But vocalist Rob Halford forevermore threw down the gauntlet for heavy metal vocals when he artfully shrieked his way through the opening track of the band’s second album, 1976’s Sad Wings of Destiny.
A perennial fan favorite, “Victim of Changes” is a nearly eight-minute-long epic that positions Halford’s ungodly howls front and center. Never mind what the song is about: a poor middle-aged lady abusing alcohol to cope with ageism. The song sounds like it originated from the depths of hell—here in the 21st century, and most certainly back in the mid-’70s!
There were plenty of songs from ‘70s-era Priest whose lyrics were horror-movie scary (“The Ripper,” “Tyrant,” “Genocide,” “Beyond the Realms of Death”), but the other facet to the band that probably made parents fear for their children’s souls was their unnerving image. By the time Priest started to break through with albums such as 1978’s Hell Bent for Leather (named Killing Machine outside the United States), they’d adopted a biker gang look that was heavy on leather and studs. And for his part, Halford took to making a dramatic stage entrance by riding out on a burly Harley-Davidson.
The music of Judas Priest was hugely influential to the metal that would come after, but almost as influential was their image and their attitude, which led to their rightful designations as the undisputed “Metal Gods” (which is also a song on perhaps their most classic album, 1980’s British Steel).
7. Kiss
The guys in Kiss saw what the New York Dolls did with rowdy androgyny, and what Alice Cooper did with shocking stage shows, and mixed those approaches to bombastic and lucrative effect in the mid- to late ‘70s. The songs were all but exclusively about picking up girls, but what mattered even more to the teenagers who would found and fund the million-strong Kiss Army was the band’s eye-popping visuals.
What could be more iconic and representative of ‘70s hard rock than the patented kabuki-style makeup and the extreme characters Kiss created for themselves? Okay, there was a slightly less-than-threatening cat character (drummer Peter Criss, who, ironically, was the most volatile off-stage). But then there was the spaced-out alien (lead guitarist Ace Frehley), the starry-eyed lover (singer and guitarist Paul Stanley), and of course, there was evil incarnate, the impossibly long-tongued demon (bassist and singer Gene Simmons).
Kiss’s stage shows were like nothing anyone had ever seen before. They were a combination of Ringling Brothers and Broadway that featured Simmons blowing fire and spitting fake blood (although many concerned citizens just knew he was regurgitating real blood somehow); Criss levitating 50 feet in the air; Stanley ring-leading with “Do you believe in the power of rock ‘n’ roll” stage sermons and Pete Townshend-like guitar sacrifices; and Frehley shooting firebombs from his guitar before sending it up to the rafters as it spewed smoke.
More rumors surfaced (Simmons’s tongue was actually an implanted cow’s tongue!; the band name stood for Knights In Satan’s Service!; Frehley really was an alien from another planet!), and protests outside the arenas became commonplace. It was all great for business. In fact, as the Seventies came to a close, it became clear that the band were more interested in cash cows than cow tongues. The fantastical characters naturally lent themselves to every merchandising opportunity imaginable, from lunch boxes to pinball machines to Halloween masks. Soon the fanbase drastically shrunk in age, shrinking the band’s credibility as real-life scary monsters and rock ‘n’ roll hooligans in the process.
8. Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin’s lyrical content was always far more Lord of the Rings than The Exorcist. Classics including “Ramble On,” “Misty Mountain Hop,” and “The Battle of Evermore” specifically referenced the lands of the hobbit and the Ringwraith. Singer Robert Plant also loved Norse mythology and Celtic lore, which made for even more mysterious messaging that seemed to inhabit some other plane of understanding.
Guitarist Jimmy Page, on the other hand, really did go through a phase where he studied and was influenced by the turn-of-the-20th-century occultist and magician Aleister Crowley. Pair that with Plant’s mysticism, guitar riffs that were often even more intense than those of Black Sabbath, and their reputations as absolute heathens off-stage (see the infamous rock biography Hammer of the Gods), and you get a band that could be plenty scary.
And yet, like most bands on this list, the phases these musicians went through when they were in their early twenties were just that: phases. Is there really a difference between a teenager loving Freddy Krueger movies and that same teenager loving Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath?
The vast majority of music and movie fans know the difference between the fantasy evoked in their favorite forms of media content and reality. That said, Zeppelin still inspired a healthy (or unhealthy, as it were) amount of skepticism from some members of the public. The brash Brits just had to be more than occasional pub delinquents. ”I’ve listened to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ backwards ten times, and I can now say with absolute certainty that Led Zeppelin are agents of Lucifer!”
Such speculation, of course, only added to their legend.
9. Motörhead
Why were Motörhead considered dangerous? Let us count the ways!
This entire entry could focus solely on that ominous umlaut. They weren’t the first well-known band to use it to toughen up their image—that honor goes to Blue Öyster Cult—but once a band as raw and rebellious as Lemmy Kilmister and crew used it, it became a heavy metal tradition. Mötley Crüe, Queensrÿche, and (for comedic effect) Spin̈al Tap were those high-profile acts that thought it essential to follow in Motörhead’s grammatically ambiguous footsteps, and to satisfyingly menacing effect.
Motörhead were plenty scary aside from the umlaut, though (which also factors into Nazi Germany’s heritage, unfortunately, adding another terrifying connotation to the double-dots). Lemmy was, with the possible exception of Ozzy Osbourne, heavy metal’s all-time lovable miscreant. He paid zero mind to the giant moles and warts on his face. He had that nasty upward-looking stance at the mic, with the microphone positioned well above his head. And he had an even nastier bass guitar sound, which was intentionally trebly and distorted. And he was addicted to speed—in terms of his rip-roaring, punk-tinged metal music as well as his extracurricular tendencies.
The undisputed king of all Motörhead classics, “Ace of Spades,” from the album of the same name, was about high-stakes card games. “Iron Fist” (sure enough, from the album of the same name) was a fantastical tale about flying horses and ghost riders in the sky. Both songs mentioned the Devil in them. Most Motörhead songs probably mentioned the Devil in them. And if they didn’t, we’ll go on believing they did anyway.
And yet, the real Lemmy proved to be a harmless, funny old geezer till the very end. His favorite pastime was playing video card games at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on the Sunset Strip till the wee hours. And he might have looked rather intimidating doing it, but you could tell he meant no harm.
10. Scorpions
Speaking of “The Tap,” when the fictional band is considering titles for their new album in the 1984 heavy metal sendup This Is Spin̈al Tap, they run into a bit of a snag. Their record label expresses some trepidation over releasing a record entitled Smell the Glove, the album cover depicting a woman in a compromising stance of which we need not go into detail.
Sadly, Tap director Rob Reiner may very well have modeled the offending farcical album cover on the slightly less gross real-life album cover for a Scorpions album called Animal Magnetism. And the album before that one (Lovedrive) featured a cover that would end up being censored in conservative countries like America as well. Censored, too, would be the somewhat less risqué (but still a bit risqué) cover for the enormously successful Scorps album Love at First Sting.
Maybe it’s just that the band, Germany’s biggest rock export, come from a country that’s a bit looser in their depictions of male-female relations. They all seem like lovely guys in interviews; maybe they just don’t know any better. And they have far more heartfelt ballads (“Holiday,” “Still Loving You,” “Believe in Love”) and emotion-soaked rockers about missing their girls from the road (“No One Like You,” “I’m Leaving You,” “Can’t Live without You”) than they have tracks suggesting anything less than their being respectful to women.
It’s just those darn album covers. Who knows how many times kids were told to march right back to the K-Mart where they got that filthy record and return it?
Chilling bonus mystery: Were the Scorpions end-of-the-Cold-War spies? Their biggest hit, the worldwide Number 1 ballad “Wind of Change,” was the subject of a popular investigative podcast called Wind of Change in 2020. The premise: Scorpions vocalist Klaus Meine, who does not play an instrument but is credited as the track’s sole songwriter, did not write the tune. The CIA did, to help along the fall of the Soviet Union.
At its conclusion, the podcast leans toward this wild theory being fiction after scoring a series-ending interview with Meine, but…either way, “Wind of Change” serving as the theme song for millions of newly emancipated Soviets back in 1990 makes up for at least some of the Scorps’ icky album covers, doesn’t it?