VH 1's Greatest Hard Rock Artists

      In my pre-teen youth, when I was about thirteen or fourteen years old, I was still pretty much into Madonna and Michael Jackson. Maybe a little bit of Bon Jovi or Poison but nothing really harder than that. But even on the playground when I was in elementary school, kids were allowed to bring their large ghetto-blaster radios out for lunchtime recess(in warm weather) and I knew about bands like Quiet Riot and Van Halen. So the memories were there. And that's what this list represents; in a lot of ways, a walk through history and situations of modern rock music and their influences. 

       Then one day when I was living in a very small town outside of Kansas City, Missouri and a man offered to give me (mostly)free cable. I paid him a one-time fee of $20 and it was the year 2000 and it was Labor Day weekend. As soon as he hooked it up, the first cable channel that came on was the music channel VH-1, and it was just starting. #100 was Quiet Riot, if it had been another band, I probably would've switched to another channel. But I was intrigued and curious, because I had NEVER considered myself into hard rock and mistakenly thought that the title 'hard rock' belonged to bands like Iron Maiden and Slayer, which I definitely wasn't interested in. I just gave the man his $20 and sat down on my couch and didn't really move much for  5 HOURS STRAIGHT. Carmen Electra was the host, not yet married to Dave Navarro of Jane's Addiction, and just out of her marriage to Dennis Rodman. The interesting part of this program was hearing other well respected hard rock artists opinions (all good!), like Sebastian Bach of Skid Row, Lita Ford of The Runaways, and Ozzy Osbourne, and Kid Rock.       But mostly, I was SURPRISED at how many artists I KNEW on this list and actually liked them when it came right down to it.