With the exception of the comedy rock band, “The Upper Crust,” once powdered wigs went out of fashion at the end of the 18th century, men kept their hair cut short and neat until the early 1960s. When the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 with their mop-tops it sparked a revolution in men’s fashion and the youth of America began to forsake their crew cuts in favor of long hair. The mop-top was so named because it reminded the older generation of a wet mop.

Of all the rock hairstyles, I find the mullet the most fascinating. No other haircut has transcended so many genres, from being worn by virtually everyone to being completely reviled. Somehow this style moved fluidly from Tom Jones in the 60s to Glam rockers like David Bowie in the 70s and then on to the antitheses of glam rock androgyny, machismo heavy metal. I myself had my hair cut into a mullet in the fall of 1986 just in time for kindergarten. I remember bursting into tears when the beautician turned me to face the mirror. Not only had she cut it into a mullet but she’d blown it out into a giant bouffant. Even at that tender age, I knew I looked ridiculous.

The pompadour is a rock n’ roll hairstyle with teased roots going back to 18th-century France. This hair style is named for the woman who started it, Madame de Pompadour, the official mistress of Louis XV.

Madame de Pompadour was born on December 29th, 1721 in Paris to a bourgeois family who spared no expense on her education. She was taught by renowned singers and actors to play the clavichord, dance, sing, and recite entire plays by heart. She was a real scenster of a gal and her reputation grew such that the King himself wished to meet her. He threw a royal masked ball as an excuse to meet her and became so smitten that, less than a month after the ball, she was living at Versailles in an apartment directly below his.

The Mohawk hairstyle has been around for centuries. Mohawk tribe warriors would cut all their hair except for a three inch strip in the middle of the head before going off to battle. In 2003 the well preserved remains of a man were found in a bog in Ireland. The corpse was over 2,000 years old. Clonycavan, as he’s been named, was sporting a Mohawk styled with gel made from plant oil and pine resin, imported from France or Spain.

Style is an important part of rock culture and each generation and genre has had its own sense of what’s cool. Some rock movements take a cheeky approach to style, having as much fun with it as they can while other genres of rock use style as a political statement. No matter how different rock styles are, they all have one thing in common: Hair.

Check back every Tuesday through March 2nd, for the next installments of this series, on some of the most prolific rock hairstyles and their history.