When I was in high school, I would accompany my Dad every Saturday morning to a scrapyard a few towns over from where we lived. My Father would comb the rows of totaled cars looking for parts that he could resell online for a massive profit. While he did that, he would give me a list of vehicles with valuable pieces that would be easy for me to break off with a few tools and send me to go wander. I learned many valuable lessons in that scrapyard: how to work with my hands, how to break into cars, and which glam rock bands are worth listening to. See, while I was relieving the decaying corpses of yesterday's sedans of their cheap plastic bits, I was also rooting through the glove boxes, center consoles, and backseats for cassettes. Every trip, I would walk out of the yard with a bag full of Dio, Def Leppard, and Alice Cooper tapes, which I would conveniently forget to tell the yard’s management about. This little crime spree left me with a permanent love for glam rock, something which many people find distasteful. Hate on it all you want, I still think Warrant rocks, and I’ll die on that hill. But not today, no, today I’m going to fill you in on the Glam Rock single I haven’t been able to get out of my head lately.
“Road Away from Home” is the latest single from North Carolina-based glam rock band Pageant. It’s a lament-filled track about the reality of being away from home while pursuing a dream, something anyone who has left behind the scrapyards of their youth to write about music in the mean streets of Indianapolis can relate to.
The song leans a little bit closer towards glam metal than glam rock; think more Def Leppard and less Aerosmith. It's a mounting current that starts slow but builds to an explosive chorus, only to drop back and start the process all over again. It perfectly captures the sound of 80s glam metal, when the genre was at its peak, and the massive quantity of hairspray its fans were using was ripping a hole right through our ozone layer. At the same time, it doesn’t feel like Pageant is recycling old material. There’s something fresh to “Road Away from Home,” which is hard to pin down. It sounds as though there is just a touch of the 2000s in there, a splash of the kind of rock n roll we got before the recession, while grunge was taking its dying breaths. Surprisingly, glam rock and post-grunge, two genres with wildly different attitudes, mix beautifully.
Pageant has created what I think should be considered the goalpost for modern glam rock. There are several other bands out there fighting to keep the genre alive, but none of them have done it as well as Pageant has. “Road Away from Home” has everything that made classic glam rock great, but it still adds to the genre, taking it in new directions that haven’t been explored before.
If you’re a fan of the oldies from glam rock, you’re going to like “Road Away from Home.” It sounds like many other singles that can be found on cassettes sitting in the smoke-stained backseats of rusted-out Firebirds all across America. Pageant is one of the extremely few bands that have contributed something great to glam rock in the modern day. They’re paving the way for a new generation of rock music. If they keep producing tracks like this, then Pageant may just find themselves becoming the poster children for that new generation of rock and roll.
