First I remember seeing it here in north Texas was about 79-80, often bleached white and associated with button covered members only jackets, white dress shirts and thin black leather ties.
Totally newwave fer shur dude!
Not at all bogus like now.
DasUnterMensch. You remember seeing it around 1979-80. Any idea if it has a name back then? When’s your first memory of hearing “mullet” as the name?
I too remember that hairstyle being around as far back as the late 1970s, but I don’t remember hearing it called a mullet until the 1990s.
In high school we used to call it the shlong cut. Short in the front, long in the back. I never heard “mullet” until 3 or 4 years ago.
Not that I’m innocent, back in the mid-80’s, in jr. high, in the south, mullets were quite the rage. I had one.
weeps openly, shreds jr. high school photos
In the mid-1980s, when I proudly wore mine, the style was known–at least to my so-called hairstylist–as a “bi-level.”
And I suppose that term will open up an entirely new can of worms…
Go to the Gallery at Mulletjoe.com (RogueRacer) and check out some of the captions under the photos. “Honest officer, I was just trying to help the sheep over the fence”, and others…for a good laugh.
Mullets are also a type of fish. I hear they’re quite tasty fried.
My dad pickles the mullets (fish that is) that he catches. There are too many small bones in them for frying, but the pickling process dissolves the bones.
Whuckfistle, I’ve checked out some of those photos. They’re pretty funny. Although I’ll make fun of it, I still don’t really see much wrong with the hair style though. It’s certainly better than those porn star perms that you still see some guys sporting.
I will admit that I used to have one back in high school. I still have a friend that I see a few times a year that has an awesome mullet. Of course, I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide if “awesome mullet” is an oxymoron.
Mullets… classy like pink fuzzy dice on the rear view mirror are classy! 
I had many mullet-wearing friends in junior high–but, in my school, the haircut was called a “spike” (because your hair looked all spiky on top). In high school (in a different state, and after the hairstyle started to wane in popularity), it was “hockey hair”. I also never heard the term “mullet” until well after I’d gotten internet access!