Three New Heroes in the Hard-Rock Parade : A look at the diverse degrees of machismo among this year’s platinum arrivals

To outsiders, most hard-rockers seem patterned after the same stereotypical images: swaggering, macho dudes living a life on the extremes--all parties, women and booze.

This notion does have basis in fact, solidified and distilled as the hard-rock torch has been passed from generation to generation--from the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin down through Motley Crue and Guns N’ Roses.

It’s the ultimate teen party music and there’s a never-ending parade of new stars. This year’s new heroes include Skid Row, Warrant and Winger. All three bands debuted this year with platinum-selling albums.

And there is an element of hard-rock tradition in each of the groups that, to outsiders, may leave them looking and sounding alike. But there are differences--nowhere more apparent than in the attitudes of the groups’ lead singers.

Kip Winger of Winger, Jani Lane of Warrant and Sebastian Bach of Skid Row even disagree on whether it even matters commercially to act out the stereotypical rock-as-macho tradition.

Skid Row’s lead singer is metal’s new bad boy. “I’m no angel and I’m proud of it,” he declares.

Though it was guitarist Dave (Snake) Sabo and bassist Rachel Bolan who started the New York-area-based band two years ago and who remain its main creative forces, Bach is its major attraction. He’s generally regarded as the chief reason Skid Row stands above the rest of the pack of newcomers--and probably the main reason its first album has sold over 2 million copies.

Bach is at one end of the heavy-metal extreme--the rude, crude, lewd party animal--the kind of guy who typifies metal for those who hate it. He’s every parent’s worst nightmare: the swaggering, untamed metal hero who’s dedicated to decadence.

True to that form, Bach missed a scheduled interview for this article. Someone who works with the band shrugged and tried to explain that he was out partying.

At a rescheduled session, Bach, 21, was brimming with youthful energy and restlessness. “I’m like a racing car that’s always in overdrive,” he boasted. “I’ve got energy to burn and I know some fun ways to burn it up.”

How about the metal stereotype? Does he consider himself a macho man?

“What does that mean, anyway?” he replied. “I’m a rugged guy who likes women and likes to have fun. If that’s macho, that’s me.”

With his pretty looks and soft, almost feminine features, Bach may stretch the definition of macho.

“Yeah, they call me ‘pretty boy,’ ” he said. “But I can’t help the way I look. But I don’t act like a pretty boy. I sure as hell don’t act like a girl.

“I don’t think I look like a girl. A lot of these heavy-metal people wear five layers of makeup. You might say those guys look like girls. They don’t look so macho. I wear a little bit of eye liner and that’s all.”

He sarcastically explained the lure of the androgynous look that’s popular in metal.

“Some of these guys, you can’t tell whether they’re women or men,” he said. “Girls look at them and say: ‘Damn, I wish I looked that good.’ The guys look at the girls’ reaction to that look and say: ‘If I looked that good, I’d get all these chicks.’ Chicks like guys who look like that. So there must be something to that look.”

Bach, who is from Toronto, is a high-school dropout--and isn’t ashamed to admit it.

“I didn’t need school,” explained the singer, whose first name really is Sebastian, though he keeps his true last name secret. “I knew what I wanted to do--rock ‘n’ roll. I got into rock ‘n’ roll so I could do what I wanted to do. Here I am at 21, with a double-platinum (2 million copies sold) album. So who was right?

“My parents didn’t understand where I was coming from. My father said finish school or get out of the house. So I got out.”

For a while, Bach proudly claims, he was something of a gigolo: “At 16, I had 30-year-old women turned on to me. I lived with various girls. One would kick me out, so I’d go live with another. Meanwhile, I was getting my music career together.”

Bach, who admittedly doesn’t take many aspects of life seriously, is dead serious about one thing: “Singing rock ‘n’ roll has always fascinated me and been a passion of mine,” he said. “When I was 13, when other kids were playing stick ball, I’d be up in my room singing Judas Priest songs. When I was singing, I was on top of the world.”

One of those fiery, all-out vocalists, Bach doesn’t like singers who have “wimpy” styles. “I’m into singers who push their voices to the limit,” he said. “I don’t want to sing like that guy in INXS.”

In a high soft voice, he mimicked Michael Hutchence singing “I Need You Tonight.”

“Who needs that soft (junk),” Bach said derisively. “I like macho singing. You want to know what macho is? It’s singers who go to the limit. That’s macho.”

Next to Bach, Warrant’s lead singer and chief songwriter Jani Lane, 25, is mellow and low-key. While suggesting that he dabbles in the stereotypical metal life style, he insists it isn’t a dominant factor in his life.

“I’m a guy who was into musical theater when I was younger,” said Lane, a native of Cleveland. “Instead of singing hard rock, I could just as easily be singing ‘The Fantastiks’ or ‘Pajama Game’ somewhere.”

Some of his tranquility is reflected in his vocals, which, on the album at least, are nicely modulated. There’s no constant, pervasive fury in his singing. His melodic, soul-influenced vocals are one of the most distinctive aspects of Warrant’s first album, Columbia’s “Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich,” which has sold more than 1.9 million copies.

Warrant is a product of Hollywood’s fertile Sunset Strip hard-rock scene, where the stereotypes are as inescapable as anywhere. But Lane seemed distanced from all that as he sat in a nearly empty Westside restaurant one afternoon and reflected on his perspective of macho .

“It comes from inside,” he said. “It’s this hard, masculine quality that’s hard to define. If you have it, you’re not a wimp.”

Is he a macho singer?

“Maybe,” he said. “But I don’t like to blow my own horn. I’m not that kind of guy. I get the job done and turn some people on in the process, I hope.”

There’s a powerful, appealing sense of machoism, Lane suggested, in hard rock and metal that’s like a magnet to young male fans: “For some guys, they associate loud, tough, gutsy music with being male. It is very masculine music. There’s a whole sexy thing--a masculine sexy thing--about hard rock and heavy metal that pulls guys in.”

But, he added, metal macho isn’t real manliness: “You don’t have to act like a biker from hell to be a man. That’s not what being a man is about. It’s about being a responsible human being, with some decent values--and taking care of business.”

When in his late teens, Lane nearly diverted into a different line of musical business. “I was offered a musical-theater scholarship at Kent State,” he recalled. “But I turned it down. I was too into rock ‘n’ roll to consider another career.”

Some of his heroes too were not from the usual roster of influences for a hard rocker: “Musical comedy was always my favorite. Danny Kaye is one of my favorite people in the world. I loved both Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.

“There’s something about that music, about the happy, carefree feeling it generates. It’s timeless. I loved being in it, I loved being around it. The only problem was that I loved rock ‘n’ roll more.”

In high school, Lane said, his interest in musical theater was considered “sissified.” He balanced it out by playing defensive back on his high-school football team.

“When I was doing musical theater, there always were the jerks who’d ask why I was doing that sissy stuff,” he said. “I had to prove to them that I wasn’t a sissy, which I did by playing football. I wish I didn’t have to prove it but I did.

“So I did the macho thing. I showed them I was a man. Yeah, I showed those jerks that I was macho. That’s funny, isn’t it?”

Kip Winger’s background and interests may be even more off the beaten track for a metal man than Lane’s. The 28-year-old singer/bassist of Winger--whose debut album, “Winger,” on Atlantic Records has sold more than 1 million--is probably the only hard-rock hero who’s been ballet dancing off and on for the last 10 years.

“I’m really a frustrated dancer,” said Winger--intelligent, gentlemanly, serene and heartthrob handsome--during breakfast at a West Hollywood hotel. “In many ways dancing is more a part of me than rock ‘n’ roll. Whenever I can I’ll take dance classes on the road.”

His lone lament about dancing: “I started too late. To be competitive I would have had to start when I was 10. But when I was that age I’m not sure I had the discipline to be a dancer.”

Winger, who was raised in Golden, Colo., danced with the Colorado State Ballet Company in the early ‘80s before moving to New York in 1985, where he recorded and toured as part of Alice Cooper’s band. He and Cooper keyboardist Paul Taylor began writing songs together and eventually put together the band Winger.

But all the while Winger himself kept up with his other artistic passion. “I even took classes with the Joffrey Ballet company,” he said. “But I only took classes, I wasn’t part of the company. . . . I used to play in a band all night and then go to a dance studio the next day from 10 to 3.”

Can a ballet dancer be macho?

“Some people don’t think so,” he said. “I’m sure some people have thought I was gay or a sissy. They think of some guy in a tutu. Is that macho? Not to them.”

Is he macho?

“Me, I’m a dancer, remember,” he joked. “We’re supposed to be sissies. How can you be macho and a sissy at the same time?

“Me, I’m just a guy. I don’t think of myself as macho. I don’t like guys who think of themselves as macho. Those kind of labels are dumb. They can be misleading.”

But Winger said he has no problem fitting into the macho world of metal. “I just mind my own business and go my own way,” he said. “But I’m not like those guys. I don’t wear macho on my sleeve. I don’t have to do that.”

Winger was very candid about his musical talents. “I’m a good singer but just an OK bass player--and I started playing bass when I was eight,” he admitted.

Explaining how he maintains his humility, Winger said: “Whenever you think you’re great just listen to a real great, like Mozart or Debussy. That will put you in your place. One bar of Mozart puts me in my place.

“I’m very humble--more humble than macho.”