Tesla bassist Brian Wheat recently spoke out about the “hair metal” label that has long been applied to the band. He shared his thoughts in an interview published by Rock City.
Wheat explained why the term bothers him. He argued that it misrepresents Tesla’s musical identity and lumps them in with acts they have little in common with.
“Well, I think we fit in because we obviously came from that time period,” Wheat said. “One of the things that annoys me personally is when people call us a ‘hair’ band in a condescending way, not in a good way where they’re trying to take the piss out of you.”
Wheat went on to draw a distinction between Tesla and the bands typically associated with the glam or hair metal genre. He pointed instead to more blues-rooted influences.
“Because I look at Tesla and then I look at The Black Crowes or Guns N’ Roses, and Tesla were more like those bands than the hair bands they try to say we were,” he continued. “We were more a blues-based working-man, blue-collar working man rock band, more like a Bad Company or a Free or something in that sense versus a Slade or a T. Rex or that kind of glam thing, that new wave of glam or whatever. And there’s nothing wrong with that — I’m not knocking that or anything — it’s just I think sometimes they mislabel.”
Wheat also addressed the broader tendency to categorize artists. He expressed frustration with the need to fit bands into rigid boxes.
“And the category — everyone has to put you in a category or a box: ‘Oh, well, they’re this kind of band’ or ‘that kind of band’,” he said. “We are just a rock band that wrote songs, hopefully, that people liked for 40 years and that have stood the test of time.”
The comments reflect an ongoing conversation about how legacy rock acts from the late 1980s are classified. Wheat made clear that the “hair metal” label, when used dismissively, fails to capture what Tesla was truly about.
Tesla formed in Sacramento, California, in 1985. The band evolved out of an earlier outfit called City Kidd, which Wheat and guitarist Frank Hannon had put together in late 1981. From the beginning, the band drew its sound not from the flashy theatrics of glam metal but from the blues-soaked hard rock of the 1970s. Influences such as Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Aerosmith, and Free shaped the band’s approach far more than anything happening on the Sunset Strip.
That distinction was apparent in how the band carried themselves. Where most of their contemporaries wrapped themselves in spandex and stage makeup, Tesla took the stage in denim. They never wore outlandish costumes or adopted the polished aesthetic of glam metal. They viewed themselves, plainly and consistently, as a rock band — nothing more, nothing less. It was a working-class ethos baked into both their image and their music.
The “hair metal” label stuck largely because Tesla emerged during the genre’s commercial peak and toured alongside acts like Poison, Mötley Crüe, and Def Leppard. That proximity led to a categorization that the band felt was misleading and, at times, reductive. The term hair metal itself refers to a subgenre defined by flashy aesthetics and a surface-level gloss that Tesla’s blues-driven sound never reflected.
Tesla’s resilience has only reinforced the case they have been making for decades. While many of their peers faded when grunge reshaped the rock landscape in the early 1990s, Tesla endured. Their music was rooted in substance rather than spectacle. Their 1990 all-acoustic release, Five Man Acoustical Jam, was a bold and largely unprecedented move for a hard rock band at the time. It demonstrated a musical depth that went well beyond what the hair metal tag implied. For most of their four-decade run, the band has retained four-fifths of its original lineup. That consistency stands as a testament to a shared commitment to the sound they have always believed in.
