It wouldn’t be a state fair without a hearty dose of hard-rock, and this bill split between Jackyl, Dokken and Slaughter dishes out the heavy stuff in spades. Co-headliners Jackyl can safely be called one of the oddest acts the genre has ever produced. Arriving in the early ’90s, an era when hair metal and AC/DC-styled rock were eclipsed by grunge, Jackyl were proudly anachronistic, playing loud party rock and scoring a novelty hit with “The Lumberjack,” a silly song made sillier by a chainsaw solo from singer Jesse James Dupree.
The Los Angeles heavy metal band Dokken was a commercial powerhouse during the heart of the ’80s, scoring hits like “Dream Warriors,” the title track to the third Nightmare on Elm Street filmso awesome was the band that in the video for that song, Dokken even defeats Freddy Krueger himself, fighting him off with a searing guitar solo. The band reunited in 1993 after a five year hiatus, and last year released its most acclaimed album since its reformation, the fittingly titled Lightning Strikes Again, which fans and critics alike have hailed as a return to Dokken’s classic sound.
Slaughter, meanwhile, emerged in 1988, at the peak of the glam metal movement, a time when any hair band could score radio play with the right power ballad. Theirs was the sentimental “Fly to the Angels.” The band’s output slowed significantly after they lost guitarist Tim Kelly to car accident in 1998, but the group did rally for one last album, 1999’s Back to Reality, a much harder-edged album than their glossier early material.
