More than four decades after Quiet Riot helped push heavy metal into the American mainstream, the band brought that legacy — and plenty of energy — to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, for The Mountain Music Festival.
Quiet Riot took the stage at the Gatlinburg Convention Center on Saturday, August 24, 2024, during the three-day festival, joining a packed Saturday lineup that included Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, 38 Special, Foghat, Slaughter, Dangerous Toys and others.
For a band whose history stretches back to the 1970s, there was nothing particularly restrained about the performance. Quiet Riot delivered a loud, physical set built around the kind of arena-rock energy that made the band a defining name of the 1980s metal explosion.
At the center of the 2024 lineup was vocalist Jizzy Pearl, joined by guitarist Alex Grossi, drummer Johnny Kelly and bassist Rudy Sarzo — the latter a member of Quiet Riot’s landmark Metal Health lineup.
Sarzo was impossible to miss. Moving across the stage and out toward the crowd, he played with the kind of showmanship that turns a bass player into one of the visual focal points of a performance. At various points, the red bass went overhead, the crowd got involved and Sarzo seemed every bit as interested in putting on a show as simply playing the songs.
That connection carries some considerable history. Sarzo played on Quiet Riot’s breakthrough 1983 album, Metal Health, alongside Kevin DuBrow, Carlos Cavazo and Frankie Banali. The album became the first heavy metal album to reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200, a milestone that helped open the door for the wave of hard rock and metal that dominated much of the decade.
Its biggest crossover hit was Quiet Riot’s version of Slade’s “Cum On Feel the Noize,” which climbed to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album’s title track, “Metal Health (Bang Your Head),” became another of the band’s signature songs and reached the Top 40.
Those songs have long since become more than period pieces. They’re crowd-participation records — songs built to be shouted back from the other side of the barricade — and that translated naturally to a festival devoted largely to the hard-rock audience that grew up with them.
Pearl handled the frontman role with plenty of movement of his own, while Grossi supplied the guitar-heavy edge and Kelly drove the set from behind the kit. Rather than simply reproducing a catalog from another era, the four-piece played it as a working live band.
Quiet Riot at The Mountain Music Festival — Photos © Barrelassin’ Media
That distinction matters with Quiet Riot. The band’s history includes numerous lineup changes and the deaths of longtime frontman Kevin DuBrow in 2007 and drummer Frankie Banali in 2020. Sarzo eventually returned to the band, reconnecting its current incarnation directly to the lineup responsible for its greatest commercial breakthrough.
In Gatlinburg, though, the history didn’t overwhelm the performance. From the front of the stage, this felt much less like watching a band preserve an artifact from 1983 and much more like watching four musicians who understood exactly what this particular festival crowd wanted from Quiet Riot.
Big guitars. Big choruses. A bass occasionally held over somebody’s head.
And, naturally, plenty of noize.
