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Post by kds on May 28, 2020 14:32:43 GMT
Zakk Wylde, Dave Navarro, Brian May, Roy Thomas Baker, Adrian Belew, Sebastian Bach--who wasn't a part of the project at one time or another? If the end result were any good, it might make for a very intriguing documentary. But, other than a song or two, it's a very underwhelming album.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 14, 2020 17:15:32 GMT
For some reason, Badlands came to my mind recently. In case you forgot them--which would have been easy to do, considering their brief and mostly unnoticed career--they were a late '80s band that could almost be considered a supergroup: former Black Sabbath singer Ray Gillen, former Ozzy guitarist Jake E. Lee, former Black Sabbath and current KISS drummer Eric Singer, and bassist Greg Chaisson released a well regarded but mediocre-selling (#57) debut album in 1989.
It was over almost before it began. Singer quit after the debut album to play with Paul Stanley and then KISS. Gillen found out he had AIDS, recorded the second album, but was soon out as well. (He died in 1993.) The band kept kicking around with various personnel through the late '90s and released a third album (only in Japan) in 1998.
But I'm re-listening to that debut album. It's a really solid blues-oriented hard rock album in the Led Zeppelin-via-Whitesnake vein. In hindsight, it really doesn't sound like much of the "hair metal" that was popular at the time, and the musicianship is excellent.
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Post by kds on Jul 16, 2020 2:43:47 GMT
I feel like Badlands suffers a lot of the pitfalls as Blue Murder. Not heavy enough for the metalheads. Not commercial enough for the late 80s mainstream crowd. And no marque names. Granted, these are guys who are well respected among hard rock / metal circles, but nobody is really big enough to move the needle. Ray Gillen never even had an official studio release with Sabbath after all, who by the time he joined, was a Tony Iommi project.
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Post by Sheriff John Stone on Jul 16, 2020 11:17:00 GMT
Was Ray Gillen just another good-looking front man with great hair and a passable voice, or was he an underrated talent from that era who had it all, but never got his due, maybe because of his sad end?
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 16, 2020 12:07:34 GMT
I think Gillen was a really good blues-rock wailer in the Robert Plant tradition, right up there with David Coverdale and better than, say Mark Slaughter. Their biggest singles, Dreams in the Dark and Winter's Call, both show it off reasonably well.
It's funny, KDS, that you say no marquee names, which I guess is true to Joe Average. But I look and see Ray Gillen, Jake E. Lee, and Eric Singer and think it's damn near a supergroup! But as you said, they are all respected among fans.
In the end, I think Badlands were a good, but star-crossed, heavy blues-rock band that came about in an era that was already not big on blues-rock (with hair metal), but then obviously ran into grunge right after. So they were doubly cursed.
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Post by kds on Jul 16, 2020 18:41:09 GMT
I think Gillen was a really good blues-rock wailer in the Robert Plant tradition, right up there with David Coverdale and better than, say Mark Slaughter. Their biggest singles, Dreams in the Dark and Winter's Call, both show it off reasonably well.
It's funny, KDS, that you say no marquee names, which I guess is true to Joe Average. But I look and see Ray Gillen, Jake E. Lee, and Eric Singer and think it's damn near a supergroup! But as you said, they are all respected among fans.
In the end, I think Badlands were a good, but star-crossed, heavy blues-rock band that came about in an era that was already not big on blues-rock (with hair metal), but then obviously ran into grunge right after. So they were doubly cursed.
To people like you and me, who follow hard rock, its a supergroup. But most people would see a Sabbath replacement singer, an Ozzy replacement guitarist, and a KISS replacement drummer. A band I really liked who really came out at the wrong time was Cry of Love. Their 1992 album Brother is a great blues based hard rock album that sounds a bit like Bad Company. But, sadly, that buzzsaw known as grunge made sure that Cry of Love would pretty much get lost in the shuffle.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 16, 2020 19:47:15 GMT
Wow, I didn't know Cry of Love, but just listening to the first song on that album ("Highway Jones") and I'm impressed by the guitarist especially. Really good player, and his tone and style are very different from what was popular both just prior to and soon after it was released. Just a slightly dirty-tone Strat, like you hear out of Hendrix at times.
Another blues-hard rock band of that era that I thought deserved better than they got was George Lynch's band, Lynch Mob. That debut album, Wicked Sensation, was pretty good. Heavier rock, but still with a groove (at least far more of one than Dokken ever had!).
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Post by kds on Jul 17, 2020 3:09:32 GMT
Piece Pipe and Bad Thing got some airplay on Baltimore's active rock station in 1992.
In 2012, I attended the M3 Festival, an annual festival of 80s hard rock, and Lynch Mob & Dokken were both on the bill. Disappointingly, George and Don didn't play together. But, I did get to see one of Geoff Tate's last gigs with Queensryche.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 24, 2020 13:15:00 GMT
Earlier this week, a version of GnR's "Patience" by the late Chris Cornell was released.
I don't like it at all. I never did like Chris Cornell's voice or material to begin with. But this? Ugh. From the drum machine to the synth to the hard-plucked guitar to, yes, his voice, I don't like it. Not at all. But that said, it's a good song. I'm glad it's back in the world. Hopefully anyone who hears it will either return to, or discover, the original.
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Post by kds on Jul 24, 2020 13:22:26 GMT
I'm actually a fan of Cornell's voice. I think he was far and away the best singer to come out of the Seattle movement, especially if you listen to the earlier Soundgarden material. And I also really enjoyed the first album from Audioslave in around 2002, and he added much needed melody to the RATM noise.
But, yeah, I don't like this either. There have been a few Cornell covers that have come out recently, from Billie Jean and Nothing Compares 2U, and I don't think either are particularly good.
I also think the song he chose here loses some of its impact without the intro.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 24, 2020 13:27:27 GMT
I probably agree with you about Cornell v other Seattle guys, but that says more about them than it does about him for me.
I did hear a lot of Soundgarden back when they were breaking, as my brother was a pretty big fan of their music. It was at least interesting sometimes, I'll give them that.
It's funny in hindsight that the three biggest "Seattle bands" or "grunge bands" or whatever we want to call them were Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, and none of them really sound much alike at all. It would be like saying the "Minneapolis sound" is exemplified by Prince, Bob Dylan, and the Replacements. (OK, that's an exaggeration. But you get the point.)
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Post by kds on Jul 24, 2020 13:39:05 GMT
I probably agree with you about Cornell v other Seattle guys, but that says more about them than it does about him for me.
I did hear a lot of Soundgarden back when they were breaking, as my brother was a pretty big fan of their music. It was at least interesting sometimes, I'll give them that.
It's funny in hindsight that the three biggest "Seattle bands" or "grunge bands" or whatever we want to call them were Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, and none of them really sound much alike at all. It would be like saying the "Minneapolis sound" is exemplified by Prince, Bob Dylan, and the Replacements. (OK, that's an exaggeration. But you get the point.)
I think that they just kind of got lumped together because they all broke around the same time. Add Alice in Chains, and you have the "Big Four of Grunge." I'll admit, I unfairly lumped AiC and Soundgarden in with that movement, but I've really grown to appreciate AiC and Soundgarden more as solid hard rock groups rather than grunge bands. It's also interesting that Nirvana and Pearl Jam tend to get far more acclaim than AiC and Soundgarden.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 25, 2020 23:54:20 GMT
Oh, I forgot Alice in Chains. Certainly they were rated among those other three. (If a fifth pops up as similarly important that I've forgotten twice now, I give up...) They're another one my brother really liked (likes), but that I really didn't.
It's funny, though, I actually can admit certain things each band did that were worthwhile and could have fit into a big-tent rock and roll scene: Nirvana was led by an iconic frontman and songwriter that created important songs; Pearl Jam was a powerful almost classic-rock band; Soundgarden explored interesting time signature changes and textural things and had a wailing lead singer; and Alice in Chains brought an admittedly gloomy sound but was also interesting in its use of lead-vocal harmony.
Now, I don't personally particularly like any of them. But they all were legitimate bands that had something to say and do.
I think what I really dislike about those years and (unfairly, probably) those bands was the overall cultural and media change that followed them. Everyone and everything else, at least in the rock world, was simply wiped off the map. (RnB actually had a huge "moment" in those mid-90s years as groups like En Vogue, Boyz II Men, Salt N Pepa, TLC, for a while yet Prince, etc., had huge success.) Other than specific musical gripes, it's that cultural whitewashing and blacklisting that went on against other forms of rock and roll: no more glam, but no more anything deemed "inauthentic" ... even as the "authenticity" of most grunge bands could be seriously questioned.
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Post by kds on Jul 26, 2020 12:57:40 GMT
Yep, and I think we talked about this before, but suddenly around 1993, rock become grunge / alternative...or nothing.
When I was younger, I used to blame the bands for that, but it became clear that it was the merchants of cool, most of whom couldn't wait to rid the world of bands like Bon Jovi and Poison, who declared that grunge was now the be all, end all.
And that lead to rock music in the 21st century becoming something it should never be - boring.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 26, 2020 13:44:21 GMT
I'm definitely more of a big-tent person, myself. I'm glad to have flourishing scenes even of musical styles I don't like, because in the end I think a) it's better for people to experience music than not, and b) you never know how styles will evolve and merge and potentially become something you'll love (even if you hate their current iterations).
So for me, even just "rock" would include a kind of classic rock blues-based style, neoclassical metal, a more raw punk approach, prog, glam, anthemic arena rock, rockabilly, country or folk rock, synth-infused new wave, soft rock, funky or soulful rock, sophisticated yacht rock, dance bands...the whole gamut. All of it, all the time.
Of course all of it DOES exist all the time, but it gets so marginalized by media that can barely focus on a single thing at once, much less everything at once. In that way, it must have been nice to have experienced the late 60s through 70s, when it seems the landscape was more diverse. By 2000 it felt as if you could be (or hear) A, B, and maaayyyyybe C. But nothing else--at least not if you were trying to sell records, perform on awards shows, or get any exposure whatsoever.
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