Quite a Riot

  • Andrea Miller<br>Enterprise features editor
  • Monday, March 3, 2008 10:00am

Have you checked your “Metal Health” lately? Your diagnosis is waiting April 13 as Mill Creek’s Silver Dollar Casino brings 1980’s rock band Quiet Riot to the stage of BC’s Beach Club.

If you thought Quiet Riot had faded away with the other “hair bands” of the 80’s, you’d be wrong. The California quartet, best known for revitalizing the career of 1970’s rockers Slade by covering “Cum on Feel the Noize” and “Mama Weer All Crazee Now,” has been touring and recording off and on since the mid 1990’s. This time around, Quiet Riot has regrouped to tour with their original 1983 “Metal Health” album lineup: lead singer Kevin Dubrow, drummer Frankie Banali, bassist Rudy Sarzo and guitarist Carlos Cavazo.

Quiet Riot’s distinction as the first heavy metal group to top the pop charts is only overshadowed by something less well known about the band. Founded in 1975, Quiet Riot’s first incarnation included Dubrow, bassist Rudi Garni, drummer Drew Forsyth and the late, great Randy Rhoads, better known as Ozzy Osbourne’s larger than life guitarist. Against the backdrop of the late 1970’s Los Angeles club scene, Quiet Riot began to make a name for themselves.

Despite the loss of Rhoads to Osbourne’s band (and Rhoads’ tragic death in a plane crash in 1982), Quiet Riot went on to make their major label debut in 1983 with the album “Metal Health.” The videos for “Cum on Feel the Noize” and “Bang Your Head (Metal Health)” were all over that new cable music channel, MTV, and “Metal Health” became a multi-platinum album, selling over six million records.

Quiet Riot’s 1984 follow-up “Critical Condition” was also a commercial success, fueled by songs like “Mama Weer All Crazee Now” and “Party All Night.” By the late 1980’s, however, the excesses of fame coupled with the listening public’s changing tastes found Quiet Riot in the same sinking boat as most of the other bands of their genre. For the next decade, the group struggled on, at one point even firing Dubrow and, for a time, disbanding entirely.

Nostalgia (real or manufactured) for 1980’s music can probably be held responsible for the resurrection of the “Metal Health” Quiet Riot lineup, which has been on-again, off-again since 1999. That year the quartet released a live album and DVD, “Alive and Well” and followed up in 2001 with “Guilty Pleasures.”

You’ll want to take advantage of Riot’s up-close and personal swing through the club circuit: it’s just a warm up for this summer’s “Rock Never Stops 2005” tour, a 1980’s hair band extravaganza in which Quiet Riot will be sharing the stage with the likes of Cinderella, Ratt and Firehouse. Northwest dates have yet to be set.

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