For some of us, the ’90s grunge era was a huge relief: We could finally give in to our hair’s natural tendency to obey gravity and stop curling, blow-drying, teasing and spraying it in a vain attempt to look like one of the strippers in Motley Crue’s “Girls, Girls, Girls.” For others, like the rock stars attending the premiere of Rock of Ages in Hollywood last week, big, crispy hair is one of the things they miss most about the era. If you weren’t alive or conscious in the ’80s and early ’90s, let us just tell you, there’s a reason they called it “hair metal.”

Through their Rock of Ages characters, Julianne Hough and Russell Brand allow us to look back fondly at some of the best and most embarrassing of styles that took the phrase “The higher the hair, the closer to God” to heart. Tom Cruise‘s Stacee Jaxx, meanwhile, recalls the latter years of Bret Michaels’ ‘do, which traded spiked up locks for the comfort of a bandana and cowboy hat, which to this day, he says, “makes it killer!” Here are some of our faves:

“The hair was so cool,” Lita Ford told VH1 News. “I remember one of the guys had this big old hairdo, and I said to him, ‘How the hell do you get your hair to do that?’ Because I was always with the Aquanet, trying to get my hair to stand straight up, and you can’t get it up enough. So he told me he slept upside down.”

Oh, that’s what we were doing wrong all that time!