Last week covered how it all started. This week, Dwayne and Heather brought it home.
They kicked off with Europe, the Swedish band most Americans only know for “The Final Countdown” and “Carrie,” and made the case for their heavier roots and their surprisingly great second act. From there it was Whitesnake’s 1987 album, a record that took six studios and more than a year to make, and a guitarist who never actually toured behind it. Plus Tawny Kitaen, two Jaguars, and a whole lot of cartwheels.
Then came the late wave. Winger, Skid Row, Warrant, and the story of how Jani Lane ended up stuck with “Cherry Pie.” Heather made the case for the underrated club bands that never got the airplay they deserved, and they talked about how too many bands with the same look and the same sound, plus grunge, country, and pop all fighting for radio time, brought the whole era crashing down. FireHouse got special attention as the band that beat Nirvana for an American Music Award and kept charting after everyone said hair metal was dead.
They wrapped up with where they are now: Mötley Crüe’s backing track controversy, Bret Michaels stepping away to recover, Jon Bon Jovi’s vocal struggles, Def Leppard putting their new album on hold for Vivian Campbell, and a whole lot more. Along the way, they shared a few personal moments about the musicians the genre has lost.
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Untitled – September 26, 2026
00:00:00 Dwayne: Hey everyone. Welcome back to whatever. I’m Dwayne
00:00:06 Heather: and I’m Heather.
00:00:08 Dwayne: And together we’re reliving some of the most epic things that Gen X has ever got to experience. Last week, we spent the entire episode talking about some of our favorite hair bands, and we realized that we really loved that era so much so, in fact, that we needed to split that episode into two parts. Last week, we talked about the beginning of the era and some of the bands that inspired the whole thing. This week, we’re going to continue that conversation and bring it all home to see where they are today. Before we get into that, we’d like to remind you to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’d like to support the show, there’s plenty of info on our website. You’ll find links to all of that in the show notes or at whatever dot com. All right, let’s set the Delorean’s time circuits back to about 1986 and pick up our conversation.
One of the bands I want to talk a little bit about is because Heather and I are both super excited about this part. Here is the band Europe. Now I know most of our American audience is going to know Europe. From this song right here. Europe’s ” The Final Countdown ” for a while there, this band was opening their concerts and closing their concerts with that song, because it was the one that everyone knew. And then there’s Carrie. This song was huge.
00:01:31 Heather: Talk about a power ballad.
00:01:33 Dwayne: Nineteen eighty-eight. This song was everywhere.
00:01:38 Heather: And Joey’s voice is so good. And he had the look, the hair, the voice.
00:01:52 Dwayne: I just love Joey’s voice. These guys are from Sweden. One thing most people forget, though. or Americans just never knew. Is before the final countdown. They were a much heavier band. They were heavily influenced by bands like Thin Lizzy and were closer to Sweden’s version of Iron Maiden than to anything on the Sunset Strip.
00:02:12 Heather: Yeah, they were much different than what was coming out of Sunset Strip.
00:02:15 Dwayne: I thought the final countdown, though, it was really what made them, uh, famous worldwide. Uh, for most Americans, that keyboard riff there and carry the big hair, that’s the box that they put Europe in. Uh, they did come out this song.
00:02:37 Dwayne: Came out a couple years later, I believe it was 88, 89 when this one came out, I think it did fairly well in the States. I was in Europe by then.
00:02:45 Heather: Time.
00:02:46 Dwayne: It came out. It was it was really big. There were several songs off of this album in nineteen ninety two. The band’s kind of. they didn’t split, they just went on hiatus. And by two thousand and three, they got back together. They did not come back together as a nostalgia act. They came back together as essentially a new band. They released this album, Start From the Dark in 2003. This is the opening track from that Gotta Have Faith.
00:03:26 Heather: It’s a great workout album.
00:03:29 Dwayne: Yeah, this is one of my favorite albums to put in for working out. It really is. It is really, really good.
00:03:33 Heather: Can you guys tell that Europe is one of his favorite bands?
00:03:41 Dwayne: Just a couple years later, they came out with Secret Society, which gave us this amazing track here, always the Pretenders. Which this doesn’t sound anything at all. Like the same band that does the countdown.
00:03:56 Heather: Yeah.
00:03:57 Dwayne: This isn’t Carrie. No, not at all.
00:04:08 Heather: And we have tickets to go see them in Stuttgart, Germany, on October sixteen.
00:04:13 Dwayne: Yes we do. They are releasing their twelfth album, Come This Madness is coming out on September the twenty fifth, just two days after my birthday. It’s their first new record in nine years. They’ve already released two singles on YouTube. They’re working with. So the producer for this is Tom Dalgety, who has worked with Ghost and Opeth. Neither one of these are, you know, minor indie rock bands. These are both some major bands that are out there. They’ve got Tobias Forge from ghost is subbing in with them, doing some guest vocals. Michael Akerfeldt from Opeth is a guest on it as well. On September the thirtieth, they kick off their final countdown fortieth anniversary tour. That hurts in Scotland. Yeah, forty years since the final countdown came out. Holy crap. The way they’re doing this show is the first half of the show is going to be, um, their newer music. The second half of their show is going to be the complete album, the final countdown album from.
00:05:14 Heather: Start.
00:05:15 Dwayne: To end.
00:05:20 Heather: But let’s move on to Whitesnake.
00:05:32 Heather: Their self-titled nineteen eighty seven album is the album that proved a band could completely reinvent itself and win.
00:05:39 Dwayne: Yeah, this band have been around since like seventy eight. They started around the time when Van Halen started out. David Coverdale had been with Deep Purple. They were a British blues rock band, and by nineteen eighty five they were on their eighth lineup. David Coverdale burned through a lot of his previous band mates, but when he started working with John Sykes, who had been with Thin Lizzy and those two, those two came together and wrote some amazing songs. They started recording in Vancouver in September of eighty five and yeah, things kind of went sideways. Coverdale got a serious sinus infection, lost his voice. Uh, but that album took over a year to make. They wound up working in six different studios, and by the time it was finished, Coverdale and Sykes would refuse to tour together. Everything you hear on that nineteen eighty seven Whitesnake album is John Sykes on guitar. Incredible, incredible guitar work. But if you went and saw him on saw them in concert, you did not see John Sykes on that stage.
00:06:42 Heather: Yeah, Coverdale had a little bit of an ego problem and temperament problem and, well, artists.
00:06:50 Dwayne: Creativity.
00:06:51 Heather: Creativity. Mhm. It came out in the first week of April in nineteen eighty seven, and the states, it was self-titled in Europe and Australia. It was called nineteen eighty seven with two extra tracks and a different running order. And then in Japan, it came out as Serpens Albus, which is Latin for white snake.
00:07:08 Dwayne: White snake had to look that up. It stalled at number two on the Billboard chart, but it just sat there for months. This album was. The songs from this album were everywhere on MTV at that time.
00:07:21 Heather: Everywhere.
00:07:22 Dwayne: The album itself went eight times platinum in the US.
00:07:35 Heather: A great song. Love it.
00:07:36 Dwayne: The videos.
00:07:38 Heather: Yeah. Tawny Kitaen shaking her ass on the hood of Whitesnake’s car.
00:07:43 Dwayne: Yeah. Uh, they got married at one point.
00:07:46 Heather: They did. They were married for a while. She died a few years ago.
00:07:50 Dwayne: I know that those videos of her like doing cartwheels across the hood of two jaguars out there. That’s what I think of every time I hear this song. The the two are very inseparable.
00:08:01 Heather: Yeah, but they were also very volatile together. Really? Yeah. It was not a great relationship. And, you know, it was the eighties. She was a jealous girl.
00:08:12 Dwayne: I’ve never heard any of Whitesnake’s music before. The album, which was right before the nineteen eighty seven album Slide It In. And that that one had, you know. Yeah, slide it in. Had slide it in on it. It had love Ain’t No Stranger.
00:08:26 Heather: Slow and easy.
00:08:27 Dwayne: And slow and easy on there.
00:08:31 Heather: That they have some good songs on each album. But I wouldn’t say the whole album is great.
00:08:41 Dwayne: Now this one, like I said, it had two or three good songs on it. The nineteen eighty seven album is essentially a greatest hits album from beginning to end. I could probably recite the lyrics to every song, just.
00:08:56 Heather: Sure.
00:08:57 Dwayne: And who could write, who couldn’t? And then slip of the tongue in eighty nine came out and it had fool for Your loving on it and.
00:09:07 Heather: Kitten’s Got Claws was good.
00:09:08 Dwayne: Yeah.
00:09:19 Heather: To me, this is one of their best ballads they ever did.
00:09:22 Dwayne: It’s a really good one. I love sailing ships off of this one as well.
00:09:27 Heather: And the Deeper the Love is.
00:09:29 Dwayne: Also, this was their big. That was their big hit.
00:09:31 Heather: But Now You’re Gone was one of my favorites.
00:09:39 Dwayne: And this is when they brought in the great Steve Vai
00:09:42 Heather: Yeah, Steve Vai was awesome. To me, Whitesnake was king of power ballads. They had some really good power ballads out there. David Coverdale’s voice is meant for power ballads.
00:10:03 Dwayne: Yeah. And as we heard from last week’s episode, if you go back and listen to it, there’s a clip from their farewell single that he released. Yes, that’s and Coverdale.
00:10:11 Heather: Actually, really.
00:10:12 Dwayne: It’s a power ballad to the fans.
00:10:14 Heather: Yes, it’s really good.
00:10:15 Dwayne: I’m not going to bring it up here right now, but if you go back and listen to last week’s episode, we touch on it there and I played a clip from it there.
00:10:23 Heather: Very good song.
00:10:24 Dwayne: So we have pretty much worked our way now up to nineteen eighty seven, nineteen eighty eight.
00:10:29 Heather: Where it gets real good.
00:10:31 Dwayne: Well, it’s where it gets to be really good, but it’s also truly the beginning of the End. Every label, every record label out there had to have one to ten of these artists playing this kind of music, because that’s what sold.
00:10:46 Heather: Oversaturation at its peak.
00:10:49 Dwayne: Absolutely.
00:10:51 Heather: That’s where so many bands that got caught in this era that could have done so well. They just came in at the wrong time.
00:11:01 Dwayne: Some of them, in all fairness, did continue to do well.
00:11:05 Heather: Sure, sure.
00:11:21 Dwayne: This is winger here. Their self-titled debut came out in nineteen eighty eight, peaked at twenty one on the Billboard chart, set there for sixty three weeks and went platinum. Kip winger was an amazing vocalist.
00:11:35 Heather: I thought he did not get the credit he deserved. He was really such a good vocalist. If you actually listen to him. Sure. Seventeen was a little.
00:11:49 Dwayne: Yeah.
00:11:49 Heather: Inappropriate, maybe, but he was only like twenty four at the time.
00:11:52 Dwayne: When they do get mocked a bit, but Kip Winger and Rob Reb Beach from the band, they. These guys were serious musicians and you can hear it if you go back and listen to that album. There was some serious musical chops.
00:12:04 Heather: I think a lot of the bands that came in later winger, firehouse, they had Skid Row. Yeah, they had some serious, um, musical backgrounds. They just didn’t get the airplay they deserved.
00:12:17 Heather: Skid Row. I mean, come on.
00:12:28 Dwayne: This debut album came out in January of eighty nine. Uh, it was produced by or they were formed. I’m sorry. They were formed by Rachel Bolan and Dave the Snake Sabo, who’d been in Bon Jovi. They had doc McGhee managing them.
00:12:44 Heather: Who Had also managed Bon Jovi.
00:12:46 Heather: Who wasn’t the most upstanding guy in the business. No.
00:12:51 Dwayne: He also, uh, yeah, Didn’t Doc have a lot to do with kiss as well.
00:12:56 Heather: Um, I don’t know. He had he was just he was, you know, one of those guys he was with Motley Crue, you know, brought in all the drugs and yeah, it was just not a good situation for them.
00:13:12 Dwayne: Skid row also gave us this classic here.
00:13:14 Heather: The anthem.
00:13:15 Dwayne: The Youth Gone Wild. Loved it. Absolutely loved.
00:13:19 Heather: It. This was like our anthem when we were younger.
00:13:25 Heather: And another great power ballad.
00:13:29 Dwayne: Yeah, I Remember You. This was one that you saw a lot in heavy rotation as well on MTV.
00:13:35 Heather: This album was really heavily.
00:13:38 Dwayne: This album is really kind of a greatest hits album as well. Every song on the album you can. You can pull up and it’s like, oh, I remember that one. Oh, I remember this one.
00:13:47 Heather: And Sebastian had a good, unique voice. I don’t know how it is anymore. I know he still tours, but he’s also not known as being the easiest to get along with.
00:13:59 Dwayne: Yeah, there’s there’s been a lot of talk amongst fans in recent years with them getting back together, getting back together. But my understanding is the members of Skid Row want nothing to do with Sebastian Bach. Well, yeah. And so he’s been touring solo. I don’t know if they’re touring without him. If someone else is out there.
00:14:16 Heather: I know he’s very active on social media still to this day.
00:14:21 Dwayne: He’s another band that came out of this era was, uh, warrant, warrant signed to Columbia in January of eighty eight, put out dirty, rotten, filthy, stinking Rich a year later.
00:14:32 Heather: Such a good album. This was really good.
00:14:38 Dwayne: But it was carried on.
00:14:42 Dwayne: This song right here.
00:14:43 Heather: Yes.
00:14:44 Dwayne: Another power ballad.
00:14:47 Heather: Janie had such a good voice. He did not get the credit he deserved.
00:14:53 Dwayne: Well, he became known as the Cherry Pie Guy, which apparently was the song he hated. Crazy.
00:14:59 Heather: He hated it.
00:15:02 Heather: Funny story. I dressed up as Bobbyie Brown for a Halloween dance for school.
00:15:10 Dwayne: Outstanding.
00:15:13 Heather: Yeah, nobody expected that one.
00:15:18 Dwayne: And supposedly, the story behind this song is that, uh, the record executives had listened to this whole album here. This is nineteen nineties album, their second or third album. They didn’t hear a hit single on it at all, and the producers kept going back. You know, you need to write a hit single, you need to write a hit single. So he went back and just picked the most bubbly poppy thing that he could come up with, and that became Cherry Pie. For the longest time, Janey hated doing that song.
00:15:48 Heather: I can get old after a while.
00:15:57 Dwayne: And yeah, Janey was much more into this song. So it is what should have been the lead single. Yeah, this is Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
00:16:04 Heather: This is actually a really good song.
00:16:06 Dwayne: And lyrically, it’s not just a love song. It’s not some cheesy story.
00:16:11 Heather: It’s a story story about murder.
00:16:14 Dwayne: Murder. And this was personally one of my favourite songs of theirs. Yeah, just because it takes a while, you actually have to listen to it and see, you know, this is a song about heartbreak.
00:16:26 Heather: Yeah.
00:16:40 Dwayne: Great song. Go back and listen to it.
00:16:42 Heather: Fabulous. The whole album was good. Let’s. Let’s be honest.
00:16:44 Dwayne: Yeah. So this all take place in nineteen eighty eight, eighty nine. By this time, as you as you can hear, there’s a lot of music, a lot of bands coming out that are starting to have the same look and sound to them, though.
00:16:58 Heather: Yeah. In eighty nine you got self debut albums from danger, danger out of New York.
00:17:15 Heather: Got dangerous toys out of Austin.
00:17:28 Heather: Enough. And enough is enough. Out of Chicago.
00:17:48 Heather: And then you got Tora, Tora. Out of Memphis, Tennessee.
00:18:14 Heather: All those bands just did not get what they should have. And we also got Shotgun Messiah.
00:18:31 Heather: And pretty boy Floyd, one of my faves.
00:18:43 Dwayne: I swear. This guy sounds like Vince Neil to me.
00:18:46 Heather: Yeah, a lot of these later bands, they. They played heavily on the glam. They. It’s like they went back. Yeah.
00:18:55 Dwayne: Well, it was that that was the formula that sold.
00:18:59 Heather: Yeah. They were trying to. Everyone was get on the shirt tail of that.
00:19:03 Dwayne: There were so many bands that sounded like they were trying to get. They were trying to capitalize on the look again.
00:19:10 Heather: Yeah. Around this time I found myself really leaning towards these more unknown bands.
00:19:16 Dwayne: Right.
00:19:17 Heather: Um, just because they were really good and they were so underrated. They just didn’t get the airplay. They weren’t, you know, at the time they weren’t radio quality music.
00:19:30 Dwayne: And then by this time as well, we also you have to remember now. So this is nineteen ninety to ninety two ninety three time frame. This was about the same time that we had the breakout of grunge had started because.
00:19:44 Heather: It had just begun.
00:19:45 Dwayne: All these other things sound alike. You had an increasing rise in the popularity and crossovers of country. And we had some serious pop acts that were making waves as well. So there just was only so many hours in the day, so much radio time.
00:20:01 Heather: And there were just so many bands up and coming. It was just complete oversaturation. In nineteen ninety you had slaughter Stick It to You and it hit number eighteen and sold over two million copies. Another band, I did not think they got near enough airplay or credit.
00:20:30 Heather: There’s an interesting story behind this song. He was asking about this girl, and she had literally just died, like the day before. Oh, that. She had asked a friend about how so and so doing. And she literally died the day before.
00:20:47 Dwayne: Literally just passed away. Yeah, yeah. That’s right. And I remember hearing that.
00:20:52 Heather: Mark slaughter has a great voice.
00:20:55 Dwayne: Now, to me, there was one band, though, that did kind of break the the mold. Probably the exception to prove the rule of there being too many hair bands, too much hair. And that is one of our personal favorites of firehouse. So their self-titled debut came out on September the eleventh of nineteen ninety on Epic Records. It hit number twenty one and went double platinum off of uh, Don’t treat me bad.
00:21:38 Dwayne: And of course it also had love of a lifetime on it.
00:21:59 Heather: In nineteen ninety two, uh, firehouse won. Favorite heavy metal rock, new artist. They beat out Nirvana and Alice in Chains.
00:22:09 Dwayne: This was at the American Music Awards. And this was. Yeah, like you said, this was in.
00:22:13 Heather: The middle of when we were talking about grunge. They came out and won new heavy metal.
00:22:18 Dwayne: Yeah, this was Nirvana’s first album, came out in ninety one and Smells Like Teen Spirit was on the radio everywhere and was eating up all of our airtime and making some of us feel sick to our stomachs. But firehouse come along and still won Best New Artist. They didn’t just fade away though. After when grunge came out, they kept on going. They. They released Hold Your Fire in June of ninety two. That one went to number twenty three, went gold and had. When I look into your eyes on it, that one went up to number eight in the top ten.
00:22:50 Heather: And these guys are huge in Japan and Asia and they love them over there.
00:22:55 Dwayne: This is top ten in a year. When everyone else was saying that hair metal is dead by now.
00:23:00 Heather: Yeah. No it wasn’t. He kept it alive.
00:23:04 Dwayne: They sold over seven million albums worldwide during that time as well.
00:23:09 Heather: That’s crazy. And we’ve seen them what, five times?
00:23:11 Dwayne: We’ve seen them five times. Met them twice. Such nice guys. Amazing group of guys. Rest in peace there. We lost C.J. snare a couple years ago. Uh, but he hand-picked his replacement. The band is still out there touring today.
00:23:25 Heather: I have not listened.
00:23:26 Dwayne: I, I can’t yet. I, I have trouble listening to any of their albums right now. Uh, just because it felt really personal. All right. So let’s start wrapping some of this up here. And we’ve covered some great pans, some some great music throughout this whole time here. But yeah, I mean, listening to that little montage we did there of the bands that did come along later, they there is a lot of, there’s a lot to be said for the thinking that they sounded a lot alike and that the airways were just oversaturated. Yeah, there was too many, too many bands that sounded too similar at the same time, and that kind of killed it off. And there was there were other choices to be had at that time. You had, you know, we haven’t even touched on. There were other bands that were just, you know, shoved, I say, shoved down our throats at that time. These were these were good bands. They had some talented musicians in them, but there was like bourgeois, Tagg, faster, Pussycat, Bang Tango. These are all ones I mentioned last week. I got to.
00:24:25 Heather: Them. White Lion.
00:24:26 Dwayne: White lion is to me is another one of these that they had the look of the hair band, but they had the musicianship of Van Halen.
00:24:34 Heather: Yeah.
00:24:34 Dwayne: Uh, so I, I don’t, I don’t really want to shove them into the hair band. I don’t know, do you think they were.
00:24:41 Heather: A hair band?
00:24:42 Dwayne: Yeah.
00:24:44 Heather: Not really.
00:24:45 Dwayne: They were and they weren’t. They two came around late.
00:24:48 Heather: Okay. They had the hair at that time. They had the hair for the hair bands. And musically they were.
00:24:57 Dwayne: Lyrically their their music was not lyrically in the same, same genre either.
00:25:02 Heather: Uh, it’s more cerebral.
00:25:03 Dwayne: Yeah, very much so.
00:25:04 Heather: We still haven’t talked about my favorite band of the eighties.
00:25:08 Dwayne: Which.
00:25:08 Heather: Def Leppard. They’re not hair. Well at the time they. They were, but they weren’t. They had the hair of hair band. They had the big stadium shows of hair bands.
00:25:18 Dwayne: But they had that before hair band.
00:25:19 Heather: Was.
00:25:20 Dwayne: You.
00:25:20 Heather: Know, but.
00:25:22 Dwayne: They, they when hysteria came out in eighty six, eighty seven.
00:25:26 Heather: eighty six.
00:25:27 Dwayne: Yeah. It had, it had been like three or four years. You listen to them before that.
00:25:30 Heather: They were very, yeah, very heavy.
00:25:32 Dwayne: They were another band that calls bands like Thin Lizzy and Black Sabbath. Those were their big influences. They weren’t. Their influences weren’t Bowie and Slade and Sweet. Their influences were Thin Lizzy and Black Sabbath. So when hysteria came around, I think there was the hair with them. The look with them was more a something that was pushed by MTV, uh, so that they could be very video friendly.
00:25:58 Heather: Because they didn’t keep that look, not for very long.
00:26:01 Dwayne: Not at all. And then they went grunge.
00:26:04 Heather: Yeah. Which was kind of upsetting to me.
00:26:07 Dwayne: Yeah, we covered that last week, but then they went back to their hard rock roots. Yeah, more so with their later albums after that. So.
00:26:15 Heather: And of course, they’re the nicest guys because of course we’ve met them.
00:26:18 Dwayne: Of course. But they, they too, they’re like one of the hardest working bands from any era. Uh, they’ve been doing stadium tours recently with Journey and Motley Crue. They’re still putting out new material. Um, Vivian Campbell there, uh, who was the, the most recent member to join the band? Viv’s been with the band for thirty years now, though, so he’s.
00:26:39 Heather: A long time.
00:26:40 Dwayne: He’s not the new guy.
00:26:41 Heather: No, it took me a long time, though, to. He’s the.
00:26:43 Dwayne: Nicest.
00:26:44 Heather: Guy. Yeah, it took me a long time to accept him. But of course, he is also very nice.
00:26:49 Dwayne: He is? Yeah. He’s extremely. He’s a big sweetheart. But Viv has recently announced that he’s come down with cancer again or his cancer has reappeared.
00:26:57 Heather: Yeah.
00:26:58 Dwayne: So he’s going to be taking a little bit of time off to go get treatments and, uh, hopefully heal himself. The band has been working on a new album again. They last came out with Diamond Star Halos and what twenty twenty two twenty three somewhere like that. Uh, they are working on a new album right now. They supposedly have seventeen eighteen songs in the bag already, but, uh, the final touches and everything, they were going to release it in twenty twenty seven. Joe just came out just last week and said, it’s not going to be till twenty eight now because of this having to go, and they’re not going to do it without him.
00:27:33 Heather: So which is.
00:27:34 Dwayne: Awesome. Bless him for that. Yeah, absolutely.
00:27:41 Heather: So where are these guys now? Where were all these bands?
00:27:44 Dwayne: Well, Motley Crew, we mentioned them earlier. They’re still out there.
00:27:47 Heather: Everybody knows they’re still out there. They they’ve been pushing themselves on social media like crazy.
00:27:54 Dwayne: They are. For twenty twenty six, they launched their return of the Carnival Carnival of Sins tour back in July. They were playing thirty three dates all across North America with Tesla. And this is another band we didn’t even get. We didn’t even talk.
00:28:07 Heather: About talk about Tesla, man. They are. They were so underrated. It is ridiculous. They put on amazing shows and they sound spectacular.
00:28:18 Dwayne: We saw them two years ago. Yeah, it was two years ago. We saw them and they were in an incredible band. That was the last time we saw them. We saw.
00:28:26 Heather: Them. Yeah, we’ve seen them two thousand and nine and yeah, a couple years ago. But you know, going back to Motley Crue, there have been a lot of controversies lately with them and people saying they’re using backing tracks, backing tracks, and.
00:28:38 Dwayne: Everyone uses backing tracks, but when that’s your primary track, then it becomes a problem.
00:28:43 Heather: There was just a video of Nikki Sixx out there and talking about the backing tracks and oops, he wasn’t doing it right.
00:28:50 Dwayne: He wasn’t doing it right. I just I was never the biggest Motley Crue fan myself. You have to understand, I grew up in extremely Christian, conservative, backwoods West Virginia. And when you’ve got albums out there like shout at the devil. Um, yeah, it was one of those things that was, you know, kind of forbidden fruit to listen to him, but I honestly wasn’t that impressed with them either. And I still I don’t understand what everyone sees in Tommy Lee’s drumming.
00:29:19 Heather: Well, so now I grew up in the Midwest and I always liked them lyrically. Yeah, they’re not the best musically. There’s nothing spectacular.
00:29:28 Dwayne: Musically.
00:29:29 Heather: Sound. It was Vinci’s voice back in the day. Not now. Back in the day, it was Vinci’s voice that made them who they are. I mean, you got to face it. Vince had a great voice, meaning past tense. He had. Yeah. Musically, they’re not Tommy Lee. Yeah.
00:30:00 Dwayne: He can keep a beat. That’s all I’m gonna give him.
00:30:03 Heather: I mean.
00:30:03 Dwayne: It’s just the simple stuff. Yeah, he’s. He’s right up there with Peter Criss for me. Yeah, he’s a drummer. He could sit behind the kit and not hit the wrong things.
00:30:13 Heather: But they put on a show. You know, they put again, it’s the show.
00:30:18 Dwayne: That they do. But but I did love Vince Neil’s voice.
00:30:21 Heather: Vince Neil had a really good voice.
00:30:23 Dwayne: It’s very distinctive, you know.
00:30:24 Heather: Then he had a lot of problems. He was in that.
00:30:26 Dwayne: Well, supposedly they’re going to take off after this tour, uh, their contracts up. And, uh, Nikki has said they’re going to take some time off to figure out really what’s next. I mean, these guys announced their farewell tour, like in.
00:30:38 Heather: ten years ago.
00:30:39 Dwayne: Yeah, they’ve been on. They’re doing the kiss thing. Yeah, we’re right around the world until people will refuse to stop throwing money at us.
00:30:46 Heather: But honestly, you know, they’ve this band has been through a lot. You know, Nikki died, what, twice? Yeah. Came back.
00:30:53 Dwayne: Mhm.
00:30:53 Heather: Seems to be doing great.
00:30:55 Dwayne: What about poison?
00:30:57 Heather: Poison? They’re still out there touring Brett’s.
00:31:00 Dwayne: Well. Brett.
00:31:01 Heather: Brett. So. Well. Not anymore. Brett just announced that he’s taking off the rest of twenty twenty six because he is having some, like, kidney surgeries. Oh. Um, he’s he’s type one diabetic, so he’s had a lot of issues with that. Um, and then just recently he had I don’t it’s never said what surgery, I’m assuming it’s like PCA pcnl surgery that’s like for kidney stones.
00:31:31 Dwayne: Kidney stones, kidney stones.
00:31:33 Heather: But he has to take off the rest the rest of twenty twenty six to recover. Bon Jovi.
00:31:38 Dwayne: Yeah. There’s still one of the they could have been or were up until just this past year, one of the biggest touring acts in the world. John’s had some bad vocal cord issues. He had surgery last year. There was a documentary they put out about it.
00:31:52 Heather: Yeah. He wasn’t even sure he was going to be able to come back.
00:31:55 Dwayne: And then when he did come back, he’s kind of strained it. I think he’s he’s finally struggling that he’s struggling. And he might he might need to hang it up. There was a just about a month or so ago, they did some shows at Madison Square Garden. And who was. It had to come up and fill in for him.
00:32:12 Heather: Train frontman Pat Monahan stepped in to help sing livin on a Prayer.
00:32:16 Dwayne: That’s right. Yeah. And supposedly he helped with several other songs as well.
00:32:20 Heather: Yeah, he was struggling with that. Jon Bon Jovi was struggling with a sinus infection during the concert, but.
00:32:25 Dwayne: I mean, that song.
00:32:27 Heather: Has.
00:32:27 Dwayne: Got some really high stuff in it as well, you.
00:32:29 Heather: Know? And when you can’t perform at that level anymore, I know it’s hard. It’s hard. It’s hard to move on.
00:32:35 Dwayne: I would hang it up, but I know ego is what drives a lot of.
00:32:38 Heather: Oh yes.
00:32:38 Dwayne: Lead singers, you know, they they talk about there’s this thing called lead singer syndrome, where they all have where the person who’s out in front of in the band tends to take on this persona, that they are the band and that they are everything about the band.
00:32:51 Heather: The band would be nothing without.
00:32:52 Dwayne: The band would be nothing without them. It’s all a lot of. It is very ego driven and there are very few lead singers who haven’t suffered from that. I was reading some stuff the other day where they were talking about this, and the only one I could see who could come up with, who truly doesn’t seem to have ever suffered from lead singer syndrome, is probably Robin Zander from Cheap Trick.
00:33:13 Heather: Oh yeah.
00:33:13 Dwayne: He doesn’t speak during the shows. Robin just sings. It’s always the guitarist Rick Nelson who does all the talking for everything. Robin just sings, stays back. He doesn’t do a whole lot of interviews or anything either.
00:33:28 Heather: Whitesnake, as we said, David Coverdale hung it up this past year. Yeah, he announced he was he was done. He put out that last song, which was actually really good. Um, Ratt, Stephen Pearcy, Warren DeMartini have been playing shows together again recently.
00:33:45 Dwayne: Yeah.
00:33:46 Heather: That’s amazing.
00:33:48 Dwayne: That’s awesome though, just having those two back together on a stage. I saw some YouTube clip of it just the other day and it was really good. Uh, Cinderella, we know they’re pretty much done. Tom Keifer had some serious vocal cord problems that, uh, pretty much ended his career. He has been touring under his own name.
00:34:05 Heather: For quite some time.
00:34:06 Dwayne: For a while.
00:34:06 Heather: Now. Yeah.
00:34:07 Dwayne: But his, like I said, everything does.
00:34:09 Heather: Sound bad, though.
00:34:09 Dwayne: He doesn’t sound bad. Everything’s just a lot lower than it was then, and he doesn’t have that super gravelly voice. It’s not nearly as powerful as it used to be.
00:34:18 Heather: But, you know, these guys are in their sixties and pushing seventy.
00:34:22 Dwayne: So yeah, you know.
00:34:25 Heather: That’s what happens. Skid row they’re still active but unsettled. You know nobody likes Sebastian anymore.
00:34:34 Dwayne: Yeah. The band is not going to reform. I don’t I do not see that happening. Warrant uh warrants still touring. They’ve got a different lineup. Uh, one of our kids went and saw them perform, uh, just last month or month before, uh, so it was a pretty good show.
00:34:49 Heather: And I haven’t listened to him since Janie died. To be honest, Yeah.
00:34:53 Dwayne: It’s hard. It’s hard.
00:34:55 Heather: Uh, Kip Winger, uh, he’s had a whole second career as a composer of orchestral and classical music. Who knew?
00:35:03 Dwayne: Right. Wouldn’t have expected that out of the guy who put out the seventeen.
00:35:07 Heather: Right. But then again, I think probably seventeen probably isn’t his favorite song. He was much yeah, much, much more than that song.
00:35:18 Dwayne: I thought my understanding too, was it came out to seventeen because they needed that many syllables to fill the the song out there. Anyway, firehouse, as we said before, they’re still out there. C.J. snare died in April of twenty twenty four. Nate Peck has been fronting the band since then. Uh, Nate was picked by C.J.. Uh, Bill Leverty and Michael Foster been there since the beginning. Uh, they swept out the bassist a couple of times. Yeah. But, uh, the band, you know, the, uh, those two guys, they’re still carrying the torch pretty heavily.
00:35:50 Heather: Quiet Riot still touring. Kevin Dubrow died in two thousand and seven, and drummer Frankie Banali kept the band going, but he died in twenty twenty.
00:35:59 Dwayne: Europe. As we talked about them earlier, they are having the biggest year they’ve had in a decade. They’re still out there, and a lot of these other bands, um, they’re still we’ll see them pop up every now and then on like these big festivals that what will happen out there?
00:36:15 Heather: Pretty Boy Floyd, they are actively touring right now in clubs. Yeah.
00:36:19 Dwayne: Hey, nice.
00:36:21 Heather: Um, slaughter. I haven’t heard much. I haven’t heard anything.
00:36:24 Dwayne: About slaughter in a long, long.
00:36:26 Heather: Time. But yeah, a lot of these guys are, you know, still out there, sixty five, seventy years old, like we said, um, some of them still have it. Some of them need to hang it up.
00:36:37 Dwayne: Some of them used to have it and will never have it again. And these need to face that fact.
00:36:41 Heather: Yeah. Like, I mean, you like Axl, like you, you can’t get back to those octaves that you had when you were twenty five years old, at sixty and seventy years old. It’s just not possible.
00:36:54 Dwayne: Well, two and a lot of guns N roses. Uh, appeal was Axl. Uh, the way he moved and carried himself on stage. And he can’t.
00:37:02 Heather: Do that anymore.
00:37:03 Dwayne: Yeah, my hips couldn’t do that anymore if I wanted to.
00:37:06 Heather: Yeah.
00:37:06 Dwayne: No way. Yeah. But that’s okay. That’s all right. So if you haven’t figured it out yet. Uh, Heather and I both could probably ramble on about a lot of bands for a long time.
00:37:16 Heather: Forever.
00:37:17 Dwayne: A lot. Uh, as we were prepping for this episode, uh, every night we like to go for a walk, uh, for a couple of miles. And for the last few nights, it’s been all we’ve talked about is various bands and where they’re at and what they’re doing and what they’re up to. And oh yeah, don’t forget, we got to talk about these guys. We could literally talk about this stuff forever. And we really hope that you guys have enjoyed it. Okay, folks, that’s going to wrap it up for this week. Not to worry though. We’ve got plenty more next week and a whole lot more to discuss. If you enjoyed this week’s episode, we invite you to subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen. We’re available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all the other podcast outlets. You can even listen on your smart speaker. Just ask it to play the most recent episode of Whatever the Gen podcast. We also invite you to follow us on the socials. We’re on Facebook and Instagram at whatever pod and show notes, guest information and sponsorship opportunities are on our website at w w w dot dot com. You can even leave us comments or a voice message. Some of our listeners have asked how they can support the show, so we’ve set up a link on the website. Just click on the support link to learn how you can help keep us in ibuprofen to help relieve some of the aches and pains of growing older without growing up. If you can’t support us that way, we ask that you spread the word about the podcast and invite your friends. It’s free, it’s easy, and it really helps us out a lot. This is a labor of love that isn’t exactly free or cheap to produce, and we truly appreciate everyone who’s reached out to show some support. You can’t believe how much. Just a little bit helps. Until next week.
00:38:44 Heather: Okay, bye.
00:00:00 Dwayne: Hey everyone. Welcome back to whatever. I’m Dwayne
00:00:06 Heather: and I’m Heather.
00:00:08 Dwayne: And together we’re reliving some of the most epic things that Gen X has ever got to experience. Last week, we spent the entire episode talking about some of our favorite hair bands, and we realized that we really loved that era so much so, in fact, that we needed to split that episode into two parts. Last week, we talked about the beginning of the era and some of the bands that inspired the whole thing. This week, we’re going to continue that conversation and bring it all home to see where they are today. Before we get into that, we’d like to remind you to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’d like to support the show, there’s plenty of info on our website. You’ll find links to all of that in the show notes or at whatever dot com. All right, let’s set the Delorean’s time circuits back to about 1986 and pick up our conversation.
One of the bands I want to talk a little bit about is because Heather and I are both super excited about this part. Here is the band Europe. Now I know most of our American audience is going to know Europe. From this song right here. Europe’s ” The Final Countdown ” for a while there, this band was opening their concerts and closing their concerts with that song, because it was the one that everyone knew. And then there’s Carrie. This song was huge.
00:01:31 Heather: Talk about a power ballad.
00:01:33 Dwayne: Nineteen eighty-eight. This song was everywhere.
00:01:38 Heather: And Joey’s voice is so good. And he had the look, the hair, the voice.
00:01:52 Dwayne: I just love Joey’s voice. These guys are from Sweden. One thing most people forget, though. or Americans just never knew. Is before the final countdown. They were a much heavier band. They were heavily influenced by bands like Thin Lizzy and were closer to Sweden’s version of Iron Maiden than to anything on the Sunset Strip.
00:02:12 Heather: Yeah, they were much different than what was coming out of Sunset Strip.
00:02:15 Dwayne: I thought the final countdown, though, it was really what made them, uh, famous worldwide. Uh, for most Americans, that keyboard riff there and carry the big hair, that’s the box that they put Europe in. Uh, they did come out this song.
00:02:37 Dwayne: Came out a couple years later, I believe it was 88, 89 when this one came out, I think it did fairly well in the States. I was in Europe by then.
00:02:45 Heather: Time.
00:02:46 Dwayne: It came out. It was it was really big. There were several songs off of this album in nineteen ninety two. The band’s kind of. they didn’t split, they just went on hiatus. And by two thousand and three, they got back together. They did not come back together as a nostalgia act. They came back together as essentially a new band. They released this album, Start From the Dark in 2003. This is the opening track from that Gotta Have Faith.
00:03:26 Heather: It’s a great workout album.
00:03:29 Dwayne: Yeah, this is one of my favorite albums to put in for working out. It really is. It is really, really good.
00:03:33 Heather: Can you guys tell that Europe is one of his favorite bands?
00:03:41 Dwayne: Just a couple years later, they came out with Secret Society, which gave us this amazing track here, always the Pretenders. Which this doesn’t sound anything at all. Like the same band that does the countdown.
00:03:56 Heather: Yeah.
00:03:57 Dwayne: This isn’t Carrie. No, not at all.
00:04:08 Heather: And we have tickets to go see them in Stuttgart, Germany, on October sixteen.
00:04:13 Dwayne: Yes we do. They are releasing their twelfth album, Come This Madness is coming out on September the twenty fifth, just two days after my birthday. It’s their first new record in nine years. They’ve already released two singles on YouTube. They’re working with. So the producer for this is Tom Dalgety, who has worked with Ghost and Opeth. Neither one of these are, you know, minor indie rock bands. These are both some major bands that are out there. They’ve got Tobias Forge from ghost is subbing in with them, doing some guest vocals. Michael Akerfeldt from Opeth is a guest on it as well. On September the thirtieth, they kick off their final countdown fortieth anniversary tour. That hurts in Scotland. Yeah, forty years since the final countdown came out. Holy crap. The way they’re doing this show is the first half of the show is going to be, um, their newer music. The second half of their show is going to be the complete album, the final countdown album from.
00:05:14 Heather: Start.
00:05:15 Dwayne: To end.
00:05:20 Heather: But let’s move on to Whitesnake.
00:05:32 Heather: Their self-titled nineteen eighty seven album is the album that proved a band could completely reinvent itself and win.
00:05:39 Dwayne: Yeah, this band have been around since like seventy eight. They started around the time when Van Halen started out. David Coverdale had been with Deep Purple. They were a British blues rock band, and by nineteen eighty five they were on their eighth lineup. David Coverdale burned through a lot of his previous band mates, but when he started working with John Sykes, who had been with Thin Lizzy and those two, those two came together and wrote some amazing songs. They started recording in Vancouver in September of eighty five and yeah, things kind of went sideways. Coverdale got a serious sinus infection, lost his voice. Uh, but that album took over a year to make. They wound up working in six different studios, and by the time it was finished, Coverdale and Sykes would refuse to tour together. Everything you hear on that nineteen eighty seven Whitesnake album is John Sykes on guitar. Incredible, incredible guitar work. But if you went and saw him on saw them in concert, you did not see John Sykes on that stage.
00:06:42 Heather: Yeah, Coverdale had a little bit of an ego problem and temperament problem and, well, artists.
00:06:50 Dwayne: Creativity.
00:06:51 Heather: Creativity. Mhm. It came out in the first week of April in nineteen eighty seven, and the states, it was self-titled in Europe and Australia. It was called nineteen eighty seven with two extra tracks and a different running order. And then in Japan, it came out as Serpens Albus, which is Latin for white snake.
00:07:08 Dwayne: White snake had to look that up. It stalled at number two on the Billboard chart, but it just sat there for months. This album was. The songs from this album were everywhere on MTV at that time.
00:07:21 Heather: Everywhere.
00:07:22 Dwayne: The album itself went eight times platinum in the US.
00:07:35 Heather: A great song. Love it.
00:07:36 Dwayne: The videos.
00:07:38 Heather: Yeah. Tawny Kitaen shaking her ass on the hood of Whitesnake’s car.
00:07:43 Dwayne: Yeah. Uh, they got married at one point.
00:07:46 Heather: They did. They were married for a while. She died a few years ago.
00:07:50 Dwayne: I know that those videos of her like doing cartwheels across the hood of two jaguars out there. That’s what I think of every time I hear this song. The the two are very inseparable.
00:08:01 Heather: Yeah, but they were also very volatile together. Really? Yeah. It was not a great relationship. And, you know, it was the eighties. She was a jealous girl.
00:08:12 Dwayne: I’ve never heard any of Whitesnake’s music before. The album, which was right before the nineteen eighty seven album Slide It In. And that that one had, you know. Yeah, slide it in. Had slide it in on it. It had love Ain’t No Stranger.
00:08:26 Heather: Slow and easy.
00:08:27 Dwayne: And slow and easy on there.
00:08:31 Heather: That they have some good songs on each album. But I wouldn’t say the whole album is great.
00:08:41 Dwayne: Now this one, like I said, it had two or three good songs on it. The nineteen eighty seven album is essentially a greatest hits album from beginning to end. I could probably recite the lyrics to every song, just.
00:08:56 Heather: Sure.
00:08:57 Dwayne: And who could write, who couldn’t? And then slip of the tongue in eighty nine came out and it had fool for Your loving on it and.
00:09:07 Heather: Kitten’s Got Claws was good.
00:09:08 Dwayne: Yeah.
00:09:19 Heather: To me, this is one of their best ballads they ever did.
00:09:22 Dwayne: It’s a really good one. I love sailing ships off of this one as well.
00:09:27 Heather: And the Deeper the Love is.
00:09:29 Dwayne: Also, this was their big. That was their big hit.
00:09:31 Heather: But Now You’re Gone was one of my favorites.
00:09:39 Dwayne: And this is when they brought in the great Steve Vai
00:09:42 Heather: Yeah, Steve Vai was awesome. To me, Whitesnake was king of power ballads. They had some really good power ballads out there. David Coverdale’s voice is meant for power ballads.
00:10:03 Dwayne: Yeah. And as we heard from last week’s episode, if you go back and listen to it, there’s a clip from their farewell single that he released. Yes, that’s and Coverdale.
00:10:11 Heather: Actually, really.
00:10:12 Dwayne: It’s a power ballad to the fans.
00:10:14 Heather: Yes, it’s really good.
00:10:15 Dwayne: I’m not going to bring it up here right now, but if you go back and listen to last week’s episode, we touch on it there and I played a clip from it there.
00:10:23 Heather: Very good song.
00:10:24 Dwayne: So we have pretty much worked our way now up to nineteen eighty seven, nineteen eighty eight.
00:10:29 Heather: Where it gets real good.
00:10:31 Dwayne: Well, it’s where it gets to be really good, but it’s also truly the beginning of the End. Every label, every record label out there had to have one to ten of these artists playing this kind of music, because that’s what sold.
00:10:46 Heather: Oversaturation at its peak.
00:10:49 Dwayne: Absolutely.
00:10:51 Heather: That’s where so many bands that got caught in this era that could have done so well. They just came in at the wrong time.
00:11:01 Dwayne: Some of them, in all fairness, did continue to do well.
00:11:05 Heather: Sure, sure.
00:11:21 Dwayne: This is winger here. Their self-titled debut came out in nineteen eighty eight, peaked at twenty one on the Billboard chart, set there for sixty three weeks and went platinum. Kip winger was an amazing vocalist.
00:11:35 Heather: I thought he did not get the credit he deserved. He was really such a good vocalist. If you actually listen to him. Sure. Seventeen was a little.
00:11:49 Dwayne: Yeah.
00:11:49 Heather: Inappropriate, maybe, but he was only like twenty four at the time.
00:11:52 Dwayne: When they do get mocked a bit, but Kip Winger and Rob Reb Beach from the band, they. These guys were serious musicians and you can hear it if you go back and listen to that album. There was some serious musical chops.
00:12:04 Heather: I think a lot of the bands that came in later winger, firehouse, they had Skid Row. Yeah, they had some serious, um, musical backgrounds. They just didn’t get the airplay they deserved.
00:12:17 Heather: Skid Row. I mean, come on.
00:12:28 Dwayne: This debut album came out in January of eighty nine. Uh, it was produced by or they were formed. I’m sorry. They were formed by Rachel Bolan and Dave the Snake Sabo, who’d been in Bon Jovi. They had doc McGhee managing them.
00:12:44 Heather: Who Had also managed Bon Jovi.
00:12:46 Heather: Who wasn’t the most upstanding guy in the business. No.
00:12:51 Dwayne: He also, uh, yeah, Didn’t Doc have a lot to do with kiss as well.
00:12:56 Heather: Um, I don’t know. He had he was just he was, you know, one of those guys he was with Motley Crue, you know, brought in all the drugs and yeah, it was just not a good situation for them.
00:13:12 Dwayne: Skid row also gave us this classic here.
00:13:14 Heather: The anthem.
00:13:15 Dwayne: The Youth Gone Wild. Loved it. Absolutely loved.
00:13:19 Heather: It. This was like our anthem when we were younger.
00:13:25 Heather: And another great power ballad.
00:13:29 Dwayne: Yeah, I Remember You. This was one that you saw a lot in heavy rotation as well on MTV.
00:13:35 Heather: This album was really heavily.
00:13:38 Dwayne: This album is really kind of a greatest hits album as well. Every song on the album you can. You can pull up and it’s like, oh, I remember that one. Oh, I remember this one.
00:13:47 Heather: And Sebastian had a good, unique voice. I don’t know how it is anymore. I know he still tours, but he’s also not known as being the easiest to get along with.
00:13:59 Dwayne: Yeah, there’s there’s been a lot of talk amongst fans in recent years with them getting back together, getting back together. But my understanding is the members of Skid Row want nothing to do with Sebastian Bach. Well, yeah. And so he’s been touring solo. I don’t know if they’re touring without him. If someone else is out there.
00:14:16 Heather: I know he’s very active on social media still to this day.
00:14:21 Dwayne: He’s another band that came out of this era was, uh, warrant, warrant signed to Columbia in January of eighty eight, put out dirty, rotten, filthy, stinking Rich a year later.
00:14:32 Heather: Such a good album. This was really good.
00:14:38 Dwayne: But it was carried on.
00:14:42 Dwayne: This song right here.
00:14:43 Heather: Yes.
00:14:44 Dwayne: Another power ballad.
00:14:47 Heather: Janie had such a good voice. He did not get the credit he deserved.
00:14:53 Dwayne: Well, he became known as the Cherry Pie Guy, which apparently was the song he hated. Crazy.
00:14:59 Heather: He hated it.
00:15:02 Heather: Funny story. I dressed up as Bobbyie Brown for a Halloween dance for school.
00:15:10 Dwayne: Outstanding.
00:15:13 Heather: Yeah, nobody expected that one.
00:15:18 Dwayne: And supposedly, the story behind this song is that, uh, the record executives had listened to this whole album here. This is nineteen nineties album, their second or third album. They didn’t hear a hit single on it at all, and the producers kept going back. You know, you need to write a hit single, you need to write a hit single. So he went back and just picked the most bubbly poppy thing that he could come up with, and that became Cherry Pie. For the longest time, Janey hated doing that song.
00:15:48 Heather: I can get old after a while.
00:15:57 Dwayne: And yeah, Janey was much more into this song. So it is what should have been the lead single. Yeah, this is Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
00:16:04 Heather: This is actually a really good song.
00:16:06 Dwayne: And lyrically, it’s not just a love song. It’s not some cheesy story.
00:16:11 Heather: It’s a story story about murder.
00:16:14 Dwayne: Murder. And this was personally one of my favourite songs of theirs. Yeah, just because it takes a while, you actually have to listen to it and see, you know, this is a song about heartbreak.
00:16:26 Heather: Yeah.
00:16:40 Dwayne: Great song. Go back and listen to it.
00:16:42 Heather: Fabulous. The whole album was good. Let’s. Let’s be honest.
00:16:44 Dwayne: Yeah. So this all take place in nineteen eighty eight, eighty nine. By this time, as you as you can hear, there’s a lot of music, a lot of bands coming out that are starting to have the same look and sound to them, though.
00:16:58 Heather: Yeah. In eighty nine you got self debut albums from danger, danger out of New York.
00:17:15 Heather: Got dangerous toys out of Austin.
00:17:28 Heather: Enough. And enough is enough. Out of Chicago.
00:17:48 Heather: And then you got Tora, Tora. Out of Memphis, Tennessee.
00:18:14 Heather: All those bands just did not get what they should have. And we also got Shotgun Messiah.
00:18:31 Heather: And pretty boy Floyd, one of my faves.
00:18:43 Dwayne: I swear. This guy sounds like Vince Neil to me.
00:18:46 Heather: Yeah, a lot of these later bands, they. They played heavily on the glam. They. It’s like they went back. Yeah.
00:18:55 Dwayne: Well, it was that that was the formula that sold.
00:18:59 Heather: Yeah. They were trying to. Everyone was get on the shirt tail of that.
00:19:03 Dwayne: There were so many bands that sounded like they were trying to get. They were trying to capitalize on the look again.
00:19:10 Heather: Yeah. Around this time I found myself really leaning towards these more unknown bands.
00:19:16 Dwayne: Right.
00:19:17 Heather: Um, just because they were really good and they were so underrated. They just didn’t get the airplay. They weren’t, you know, at the time they weren’t radio quality music.
00:19:30 Dwayne: And then by this time as well, we also you have to remember now. So this is nineteen ninety to ninety two ninety three time frame. This was about the same time that we had the breakout of grunge had started because.
00:19:44 Heather: It had just begun.
00:19:45 Dwayne: All these other things sound alike. You had an increasing rise in the popularity and crossovers of country. And we had some serious pop acts that were making waves as well. So there just was only so many hours in the day, so much radio time.
00:20:01 Heather: And there were just so many bands up and coming. It was just complete oversaturation. In nineteen ninety you had slaughter Stick It to You and it hit number eighteen and sold over two million copies. Another band, I did not think they got near enough airplay or credit.
00:20:30 Heather: There’s an interesting story behind this song. He was asking about this girl, and she had literally just died, like the day before. Oh, that. She had asked a friend about how so and so doing. And she literally died the day before.
00:20:47 Dwayne: Literally just passed away. Yeah, yeah. That’s right. And I remember hearing that.
00:20:52 Heather: Mark slaughter has a great voice.
00:20:55 Dwayne: Now, to me, there was one band, though, that did kind of break the the mold. Probably the exception to prove the rule of there being too many hair bands, too much hair. And that is one of our personal favorites of firehouse. So their self-titled debut came out on September the eleventh of nineteen ninety on Epic Records. It hit number twenty one and went double platinum off of uh, Don’t treat me bad.
00:21:38 Dwayne: And of course it also had love of a lifetime on it.
00:21:59 Heather: In nineteen ninety two, uh, firehouse won. Favorite heavy metal rock, new artist. They beat out Nirvana and Alice in Chains.
00:22:09 Dwayne: This was at the American Music Awards. And this was. Yeah, like you said, this was in.
00:22:13 Heather: The middle of when we were talking about grunge. They came out and won new heavy metal.
00:22:18 Dwayne: Yeah, this was Nirvana’s first album, came out in ninety one and Smells Like Teen Spirit was on the radio everywhere and was eating up all of our airtime and making some of us feel sick to our stomachs. But firehouse come along and still won Best New Artist. They didn’t just fade away though. After when grunge came out, they kept on going. They. They released Hold Your Fire in June of ninety two. That one went to number twenty three, went gold and had. When I look into your eyes on it, that one went up to number eight in the top ten.
00:22:50 Heather: And these guys are huge in Japan and Asia and they love them over there.
00:22:55 Dwayne: This is top ten in a year. When everyone else was saying that hair metal is dead by now.
00:23:00 Heather: Yeah. No it wasn’t. He kept it alive.
00:23:04 Dwayne: They sold over seven million albums worldwide during that time as well.
00:23:09 Heather: That’s crazy. And we’ve seen them what, five times?
00:23:11 Dwayne: We’ve seen them five times. Met them twice. Such nice guys. Amazing group of guys. Rest in peace there. We lost C.J. snare a couple years ago. Uh, but he hand-picked his replacement. The band is still out there touring today.
00:23:25 Heather: I have not listened.
00:23:26 Dwayne: I, I can’t yet. I, I have trouble listening to any of their albums right now. Uh, just because it felt really personal. All right. So let’s start wrapping some of this up here. And we’ve covered some great pans, some some great music throughout this whole time here. But yeah, I mean, listening to that little montage we did there of the bands that did come along later, they there is a lot of, there’s a lot to be said for the thinking that they sounded a lot alike and that the airways were just oversaturated. Yeah, there was too many, too many bands that sounded too similar at the same time, and that kind of killed it off. And there was there were other choices to be had at that time. You had, you know, we haven’t even touched on. There were other bands that were just, you know, shoved, I say, shoved down our throats at that time. These were these were good bands. They had some talented musicians in them, but there was like bourgeois, Tagg, faster, Pussycat, Bang Tango. These are all ones I mentioned last week. I got to.
00:24:25 Heather: Them. White Lion.
00:24:26 Dwayne: White lion is to me is another one of these that they had the look of the hair band, but they had the musicianship of Van Halen.
00:24:34 Heather: Yeah.
00:24:34 Dwayne: Uh, so I, I don’t, I don’t really want to shove them into the hair band. I don’t know, do you think they were.
00:24:41 Heather: A hair band?
00:24:42 Dwayne: Yeah.
00:24:44 Heather: Not really.
00:24:45 Dwayne: They were and they weren’t. They two came around late.
00:24:48 Heather: Okay. They had the hair at that time. They had the hair for the hair bands. And musically they were.
00:24:57 Dwayne: Lyrically their their music was not lyrically in the same, same genre either.
00:25:02 Heather: Uh, it’s more cerebral.
00:25:03 Dwayne: Yeah, very much so.
00:25:04 Heather: We still haven’t talked about my favorite band of the eighties.
00:25:08 Dwayne: Which.
00:25:08 Heather: Def Leppard. They’re not hair. Well at the time they. They were, but they weren’t. They had the hair of hair band. They had the big stadium shows of hair bands.
00:25:18 Dwayne: But they had that before hair band.
00:25:19 Heather: Was.
00:25:20 Dwayne: You.
00:25:20 Heather: Know, but.
00:25:22 Dwayne: They, they when hysteria came out in eighty six, eighty seven.
00:25:26 Heather: eighty six.
00:25:27 Dwayne: Yeah. It had, it had been like three or four years. You listen to them before that.
00:25:30 Heather: They were very, yeah, very heavy.
00:25:32 Dwayne: They were another band that calls bands like Thin Lizzy and Black Sabbath. Those were their big influences. They weren’t. Their influences weren’t Bowie and Slade and Sweet. Their influences were Thin Lizzy and Black Sabbath. So when hysteria came around, I think there was the hair with them. The look with them was more a something that was pushed by MTV, uh, so that they could be very video friendly.
00:25:58 Heather: Because they didn’t keep that look, not for very long.
00:26:01 Dwayne: Not at all. And then they went grunge.
00:26:04 Heather: Yeah. Which was kind of upsetting to me.
00:26:07 Dwayne: Yeah, we covered that last week, but then they went back to their hard rock roots. Yeah, more so with their later albums after that. So.
00:26:15 Heather: And of course, they’re the nicest guys because of course we’ve met them.
00:26:18 Dwayne: Of course. But they, they too, they’re like one of the hardest working bands from any era. Uh, they’ve been doing stadium tours recently with Journey and Motley Crue. They’re still putting out new material. Um, Vivian Campbell there, uh, who was the, the most recent member to join the band? Viv’s been with the band for thirty years now, though, so he’s.
00:26:39 Heather: A long time.
00:26:40 Dwayne: He’s not the new guy.
00:26:41 Heather: No, it took me a long time, though, to. He’s the.
00:26:43 Dwayne: Nicest.
00:26:44 Heather: Guy. Yeah, it took me a long time to accept him. But of course, he is also very nice.
00:26:49 Dwayne: He is? Yeah. He’s extremely. He’s a big sweetheart. But Viv has recently announced that he’s come down with cancer again or his cancer has reappeared.
00:26:57 Heather: Yeah.
00:26:58 Dwayne: So he’s going to be taking a little bit of time off to go get treatments and, uh, hopefully heal himself. The band has been working on a new album again. They last came out with Diamond Star Halos and what twenty twenty two twenty three somewhere like that. Uh, they are working on a new album right now. They supposedly have seventeen eighteen songs in the bag already, but, uh, the final touches and everything, they were going to release it in twenty twenty seven. Joe just came out just last week and said, it’s not going to be till twenty eight now because of this having to go, and they’re not going to do it without him.
00:27:33 Heather: So which is.
00:27:34 Dwayne: Awesome. Bless him for that. Yeah, absolutely.
00:27:41 Heather: So where are these guys now? Where were all these bands?
00:27:44 Dwayne: Well, Motley Crew, we mentioned them earlier. They’re still out there.
00:27:47 Heather: Everybody knows they’re still out there. They they’ve been pushing themselves on social media like crazy.
00:27:54 Dwayne: They are. For twenty twenty six, they launched their return of the Carnival Carnival of Sins tour back in July. They were playing thirty three dates all across North America with Tesla. And this is another band we didn’t even get. We didn’t even talk.
00:28:07 Heather: About talk about Tesla, man. They are. They were so underrated. It is ridiculous. They put on amazing shows and they sound spectacular.
00:28:18 Dwayne: We saw them two years ago. Yeah, it was two years ago. We saw them and they were in an incredible band. That was the last time we saw them. We saw.
00:28:26 Heather: Them. Yeah, we’ve seen them two thousand and nine and yeah, a couple years ago. But you know, going back to Motley Crue, there have been a lot of controversies lately with them and people saying they’re using backing tracks, backing tracks, and.
00:28:38 Dwayne: Everyone uses backing tracks, but when that’s your primary track, then it becomes a problem.
00:28:43 Heather: There was just a video of Nikki Sixx out there and talking about the backing tracks and oops, he wasn’t doing it right.
00:28:50 Dwayne: He wasn’t doing it right. I just I was never the biggest Motley Crue fan myself. You have to understand, I grew up in extremely Christian, conservative, backwoods West Virginia. And when you’ve got albums out there like shout at the devil. Um, yeah, it was one of those things that was, you know, kind of forbidden fruit to listen to him, but I honestly wasn’t that impressed with them either. And I still I don’t understand what everyone sees in Tommy Lee’s drumming.
00:29:19 Heather: Well, so now I grew up in the Midwest and I always liked them lyrically. Yeah, they’re not the best musically. There’s nothing spectacular.
00:29:28 Dwayne: Musically.
00:29:29 Heather: Sound. It was Vinci’s voice back in the day. Not now. Back in the day, it was Vinci’s voice that made them who they are. I mean, you got to face it. Vince had a great voice, meaning past tense. He had. Yeah. Musically, they’re not Tommy Lee. Yeah.
00:30:00 Dwayne: He can keep a beat. That’s all I’m gonna give him.
00:30:03 Heather: I mean.
00:30:03 Dwayne: It’s just the simple stuff. Yeah, he’s. He’s right up there with Peter Criss for me. Yeah, he’s a drummer. He could sit behind the kit and not hit the wrong things.
00:30:13 Heather: But they put on a show. You know, they put again, it’s the show.
00:30:18 Dwayne: That they do. But but I did love Vince Neil’s voice.
00:30:21 Heather: Vince Neil had a really good voice.
00:30:23 Dwayne: It’s very distinctive, you know.
00:30:24 Heather: Then he had a lot of problems. He was in that.
00:30:26 Dwayne: Well, supposedly they’re going to take off after this tour, uh, their contracts up. And, uh, Nikki has said they’re going to take some time off to figure out really what’s next. I mean, these guys announced their farewell tour, like in.
00:30:38 Heather: ten years ago.
00:30:39 Dwayne: Yeah, they’ve been on. They’re doing the kiss thing. Yeah, we’re right around the world until people will refuse to stop throwing money at us.
00:30:46 Heather: But honestly, you know, they’ve this band has been through a lot. You know, Nikki died, what, twice? Yeah. Came back.
00:30:53 Dwayne: Mhm.
00:30:53 Heather: Seems to be doing great.
00:30:55 Dwayne: What about poison?
00:30:57 Heather: Poison? They’re still out there touring Brett’s.
00:31:00 Dwayne: Well. Brett.
00:31:01 Heather: Brett. So. Well. Not anymore. Brett just announced that he’s taking off the rest of twenty twenty six because he is having some, like, kidney surgeries. Oh. Um, he’s he’s type one diabetic, so he’s had a lot of issues with that. Um, and then just recently he had I don’t it’s never said what surgery, I’m assuming it’s like PCA pcnl surgery that’s like for kidney stones.
00:31:31 Dwayne: Kidney stones, kidney stones.
00:31:33 Heather: But he has to take off the rest the rest of twenty twenty six to recover. Bon Jovi.
00:31:38 Dwayne: Yeah. There’s still one of the they could have been or were up until just this past year, one of the biggest touring acts in the world. John’s had some bad vocal cord issues. He had surgery last year. There was a documentary they put out about it.
00:31:52 Heather: Yeah. He wasn’t even sure he was going to be able to come back.
00:31:55 Dwayne: And then when he did come back, he’s kind of strained it. I think he’s he’s finally struggling that he’s struggling. And he might he might need to hang it up. There was a just about a month or so ago, they did some shows at Madison Square Garden. And who was. It had to come up and fill in for him.
00:32:12 Heather: Train frontman Pat Monahan stepped in to help sing livin on a Prayer.
00:32:16 Dwayne: That’s right. Yeah. And supposedly he helped with several other songs as well.
00:32:20 Heather: Yeah, he was struggling with that. Jon Bon Jovi was struggling with a sinus infection during the concert, but.
00:32:25 Dwayne: I mean, that song.
00:32:27 Heather: Has.
00:32:27 Dwayne: Got some really high stuff in it as well, you.
00:32:29 Heather: Know? And when you can’t perform at that level anymore, I know it’s hard. It’s hard. It’s hard to move on.
00:32:35 Dwayne: I would hang it up, but I know ego is what drives a lot of.
00:32:38 Heather: Oh yes.
00:32:38 Dwayne: Lead singers, you know, they they talk about there’s this thing called lead singer syndrome, where they all have where the person who’s out in front of in the band tends to take on this persona, that they are the band and that they are everything about the band.
00:32:51 Heather: The band would be nothing without.
00:32:52 Dwayne: The band would be nothing without them. It’s all a lot of. It is very ego driven and there are very few lead singers who haven’t suffered from that. I was reading some stuff the other day where they were talking about this, and the only one I could see who could come up with, who truly doesn’t seem to have ever suffered from lead singer syndrome, is probably Robin Zander from Cheap Trick.
00:33:13 Heather: Oh yeah.
00:33:13 Dwayne: He doesn’t speak during the shows. Robin just sings. It’s always the guitarist Rick Nelson who does all the talking for everything. Robin just sings, stays back. He doesn’t do a whole lot of interviews or anything either.
00:33:28 Heather: Whitesnake, as we said, David Coverdale hung it up this past year. Yeah, he announced he was he was done. He put out that last song, which was actually really good. Um, Ratt, Stephen Pearcy, Warren DeMartini have been playing shows together again recently.
00:33:45 Dwayne: Yeah.
00:33:46 Heather: That’s amazing.
00:33:48 Dwayne: That’s awesome though, just having those two back together on a stage. I saw some YouTube clip of it just the other day and it was really good. Uh, Cinderella, we know they’re pretty much done. Tom Keifer had some serious vocal cord problems that, uh, pretty much ended his career. He has been touring under his own name.
00:34:05 Heather: For quite some time.
00:34:06 Dwayne: For a while.
00:34:06 Heather: Now. Yeah.
00:34:07 Dwayne: But his, like I said, everything does.
00:34:09 Heather: Sound bad, though.
00:34:09 Dwayne: He doesn’t sound bad. Everything’s just a lot lower than it was then, and he doesn’t have that super gravelly voice. It’s not nearly as powerful as it used to be.
00:34:18 Heather: But, you know, these guys are in their sixties and pushing seventy.
00:34:22 Dwayne: So yeah, you know.
00:34:25 Heather: That’s what happens. Skid row they’re still active but unsettled. You know nobody likes Sebastian anymore.
00:34:34 Dwayne: Yeah. The band is not going to reform. I don’t I do not see that happening. Warrant uh warrants still touring. They’ve got a different lineup. Uh, one of our kids went and saw them perform, uh, just last month or month before, uh, so it was a pretty good show.
00:34:49 Heather: And I haven’t listened to him since Janie died. To be honest, Yeah.
00:34:53 Dwayne: It’s hard. It’s hard.
00:34:55 Heather: Uh, Kip Winger, uh, he’s had a whole second career as a composer of orchestral and classical music. Who knew?
00:35:03 Dwayne: Right. Wouldn’t have expected that out of the guy who put out the seventeen.
00:35:07 Heather: Right. But then again, I think probably seventeen probably isn’t his favorite song. He was much yeah, much, much more than that song.
00:35:18 Dwayne: I thought my understanding too, was it came out to seventeen because they needed that many syllables to fill the the song out there. Anyway, firehouse, as we said before, they’re still out there. C.J. snare died in April of twenty twenty four. Nate Peck has been fronting the band since then. Uh, Nate was picked by C.J.. Uh, Bill Leverty and Michael Foster been there since the beginning. Uh, they swept out the bassist a couple of times. Yeah. But, uh, the band, you know, the, uh, those two guys, they’re still carrying the torch pretty heavily.
00:35:50 Heather: Quiet Riot still touring. Kevin Dubrow died in two thousand and seven, and drummer Frankie Banali kept the band going, but he died in twenty twenty.
00:35:59 Dwayne: Europe. As we talked about them earlier, they are having the biggest year they’ve had in a decade. They’re still out there, and a lot of these other bands, um, they’re still we’ll see them pop up every now and then on like these big festivals that what will happen out there?
00:36:15 Heather: Pretty Boy Floyd, they are actively touring right now in clubs. Yeah.
00:36:19 Dwayne: Hey, nice.
00:36:21 Heather: Um, slaughter. I haven’t heard much. I haven’t heard anything.
00:36:24 Dwayne: About slaughter in a long, long.
00:36:26 Heather: Time. But yeah, a lot of these guys are, you know, still out there, sixty five, seventy years old, like we said, um, some of them still have it. Some of them need to hang it up.
00:36:37 Dwayne: Some of them used to have it and will never have it again. And these need to face that fact.
00:36:41 Heather: Yeah. Like, I mean, you like Axl, like you, you can’t get back to those octaves that you had when you were twenty five years old, at sixty and seventy years old. It’s just not possible.
00:36:54 Dwayne: Well, two and a lot of guns N roses. Uh, appeal was Axl. Uh, the way he moved and carried himself on stage. And he can’t.
00:37:02 Heather: Do that anymore.
00:37:03 Dwayne: Yeah, my hips couldn’t do that anymore if I wanted to.
00:37:06 Heather: Yeah.
00:37:06 Dwayne: No way. Yeah. But that’s okay. That’s all right. So if you haven’t figured it out yet. Uh, Heather and I both could probably ramble on about a lot of bands for a long time.
00:37:16 Heather: Forever.
00:37:17 Dwayne: A lot. Uh, as we were prepping for this episode, uh, every night we like to go for a walk, uh, for a couple of miles. And for the last few nights, it’s been all we’ve talked about is various bands and where they’re at and what they’re doing and what they’re up to. And oh yeah, don’t forget, we got to talk about these guys. We could literally talk about this stuff forever. And we really hope that you guys have enjoyed it. Okay, folks, that’s going to wrap it up for this week. Not to worry though. We’ve got plenty more next week and a whole lot more to discuss. If you enjoyed this week’s episode, we invite you to subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen. We’re available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all the other podcast outlets. You can even listen on your smart speaker. Just ask it to play the most recent episode of Whatever the Gen podcast. We also invite you to follow us on the socials. We’re on Facebook and Instagram at whatever pod and show notes, guest information and sponsorship opportunities are on our website at w w w dot dot com. You can even leave us comments or a voice message. Some of our listeners have asked how they can support the show, so we’ve set up a link on the website. Just click on the support link to learn how you can help keep us in ibuprofen to help relieve some of the aches and pains of growing older without growing up. If you can’t support us that way, we ask that you spread the word about the podcast and invite your friends. It’s free, it’s easy, and it really helps us out a lot. This is a labor of love that isn’t exactly free or cheap to produce, and we truly appreciate everyone who’s reached out to show some support. You can’t believe how much. Just a little bit helps. Until next week.
00:38:44 Heather: Okay, bye.
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