Written by We really had to put up with a lot of crazy bullshit in the 1980s. Video games were just blips and bleeps, Kiss took off their make-up, people wore parachute pants and headbands, some lunatic mashed a guitar and a keyboard together, Tom Cruise was in every movie, and cassettes were considered space-age media technology.
But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part of the 80s was Canada’s phony metal conspiracy. Sure, on paper, the Great White North was awash in metal maniacs. Flying V guitars and cases of hairspray were being imported from the US by the truckloads. Hairy homegrown heroes sprouted up from Vancouver to Toronto, and Canada even boasted its very own metal magazine, the cleverly named Metallion. But it was all a ruse.
Drop the needle on any above-ground Canadian ‘metal’ record released during the high 80s and you’ll discover their dirty secret: they were all AOR bands. Headpins, Moxy, Coney Hatch, Helix, White Wolf, Kick Axe, Killer Dwarfs, the list goes on and on. Sure, they had the trappings of metal (wolves, axes… um, dwarves), but their sounds were glossy, flossy, and radio-friendly. There were a few notable exceptions (Voivod, Exciter, Thor) but for the most part, Canadian metal in the 80s sounded exactly like American AOR in the 70s.
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And for a long time, everybody seemed to be okay with this arrangement. If Canadian headbangers preferred ‘soft metal’, who are we to argue? Platinum Blonde had some decent jams. But things finally went too far for me in 1984, when former nude model Lee Aaron released an album of remarkably tame FM rock and suddenly declared herself – and the album – Metal Queen.
First of all, before we spin off into a tangent, Doro Pesch is, was, and always will be the real ‘Metal Queen’. In fact, she already was in 1984, when Lee attempted to usurp her throne with an admittedly mind-blowing album cover/music video combo, which found our lithe young heroine draped in scraps of leather, alternately getting shackled and manhandled by hooded creeps and wielding a phallic broadsword twice her size. As far as 14-year-old headbanger S&M fantasies go, Metal Queen’s cover and title song music clip are still stunning pieces of work, so sexually potent it almost makes you forget how… Canadian the rest of the record is.
But let’s back up for a moment, for a little backstory. Lee Aaron was once Karen Lynn Greening, a high-school kid growing up just outside Toronto. She was still performing in school plays when she was asked to join a local rock group called ‘Lee Aaron’ in the early 80s. She started out plinking the keyboards and skronking the sax, but it became pretty clear exactly why Lee Aaron gigs were packed with mullet-sporting teenage rocker dudes and, by 1982, Karen became Lee and the original band was replaced by the cream of Toronto’s pseudo-metal crop, including members of Moxy, Santers and Triumph. After attracting significant attention for a nude layout in Oui magazine, Lee and the fellas released The Lee Aaron Project, a drowsy, bluesy AOR album rife with flirty come-ons like I Like My Rock Hard.
The much easier to swallow US version condensed the vanilla-flavoured riffola to four songs, and pressed ’em on a picture disc featuring Lee in suspenders and almost nothing else. Three things were painfully obvious at this point. First, despite her tepid choice of material, Lee had an impressive set of pipes on her. Secondly, visually speaking, just about everything else on her was impressive as well. But most importantly, she desperately needed an angle. ‘Featuring the guy from Santers’ is just not enough of a hook to bust out of the musical ghettos of the greater Toronto area. And so, the Metal Queen was born.
Lee came roaring back in 1984 with a new image and album, and every red-blooded teenage metal doofus responded with huge applause. Lee rode Metal Queen’s fur bikini wave for the rest of the 80s, before dabbling in dance-pop and jazz, finally returning to hard rock in the past few years. She still looks and sounds great, and it’s nice to report a happy ending, for once. But that still doesn’t mean she’s off the hook.
Metal Queen opens with the head-chopping title track, a chugging shovelful of mid-paced flash metal that sounds like early Heart as produced by Zodiac Mindwarp. If Lee maintained this level of ripsnorting swagger throughout the album, you’d be reading this in Metal Hammer. But that’s not the way things went. The first sign of trouble is Head Above Water, a sub-Benatar bit of overdramatic fluff. It’s followed by a plodding power ballad, Got To Be The One, and a radio-baiting, Headpins-esque power-popper, Shake It Up.
It is at this point when metal kids have had just about enough of this. They’re about to head out to the railroad tracks to drink cheap beer and listen to Slayer when Lee coaxes them back with Deceiver, a gloriously cheeseball Judas Priest rip-off. Could all that other softcore junk just be a red herring to throw off the squares, Andy Kaufman style?
Nope. Side two is saddled with more meandering power-balladry. There’s even a few jazzy bits, and a moment or two where you start to wonder if you’ve wandered into the weirdest Stevie Nicks record ever. It all ends with a hook-heavy pop-metal ditty called We Will Be Rockin’ which, ironically, is one of the least rocking songs on the record. And thusly ends the reign of this phony baloney ‘Metal Queen’.
If you were not expecting a broadsword to cleave your skull, I can see how you might enjoy this at least as much as Helix or Max Webster or April Wine. I mean, if you dig your rock Canadian, this one almost oozes maple syrup. The 15-year-old me from 1984, however, remains unimpressed.
Except for the cover. That was awesome.
This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock Presents AOR 7, published in December 2012.
