Listening to Screwed…, it’s definitely got some catchy hooks here and there (“ Damned if We Do, Damned if We Don’t“, the Bon Jovi-ish “ Rock in the Western World“) but outside of two or three songs, musically and lyrically it’s the same old same old. Outside of that one song that brought you to the mall, you weren’t sure what you were going to get, and that led to a lot of tapes that would get a listen or two and then put back in the case in favor of, well, Extreme. Buying music in the late 80s was always a crap shoot – you’d hear a song on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball and go to the mall looking for the album at Camelot Music.
I bought Screwed, Blued and Tattooed (1990) solely on the strength of “ Stranger Than Paradise“, a song with an inspired chorus even if the lyrics don’t make much sense. I might’ve included the Netherlands’ Sleeze Beez in my Scandinavian (ok fine, Magnus, northern Europe) metal blog, but their name dictated my placing them here. Bands needed to grow or they died out quick. Interesting to note that another Texas metal band, Pantera, after putting out a number of standard glam metal albums through the late 80s, would release its seminal Cowboys from Hell just a year later (1990). Toys would put out a couple more albums, but like most hair metal bands couldn’t sustain a career as their sound just got tired/uninspiring. “ Bones in the Gutter“, for instance, told from the perspective of a hired killer who worked on the cheap, is somewhat forgettable beyond the ridiculous premise of the song. And what is maybe an unfair complaint: because of this strain of humor, most of the songs couldn’t be taken all that seriously. Lyrically, Toys often exhibited a deliberate sense of humor: “ Sportin’ A Woody” and “ Take Me Drunk” were drunken partiers. “ Outlaw” saw the band incorporate the western/cowboy/Texas mythos, and is probably the most standard straight up rock song on the album, though not particularly memorable (“ Ten Boots (Stompin’)“, though, has a huge bass line and may rival it). They would later release “ Scared” as another single, but nothing else matched “Teas’n, Pleas’n” for me: at the age of 17 I was of the opinion that any metal song including a deliberate tempo change (“I don’t even make my own rules…”) was an automatic winner. Plenty of 40+ year old guys walking around with tattoos of this clown on their back.Īnother band that sold a lot of copies of its first album (1989), Texas’ Dangerous Toys had one real hit, “ Teas’n, Pleas’n“, a hard rock song with a riff that made me wish I could play the guitar.
Michael, had not bought that particular shirt.ĭangerous Toys’ mascot, Bill Z. Our mom saw it a couple weeks later and read him the riot act about how when he left the house he was representing our family. My brother bought one of their concert shirts emblazoned with “WAKE THE UP, DICKHEAD!” on the back. Pussycat closed with “Babylon”, as I recall, and the frontman, Taime Down (yeah, that’s his name) came out with what I want to say was a BMW steering wheel on a big gold chain around his neck. I saw Faster Pussycat open for KISS at the Starplex Ampitheatre in 1990 (along with Slaughter, who was getting a lot of attention for their power ballad “ Fly to the Angels“). They would put out one or two more albums in the 90s, one of which I remember including an uninspired cover of Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.” Moving away from their glam rock sound, there were a few more blues-inspired tunes, including “ Tattoo” and “ Cryin’ Shame“. This album also offered up the eminently listenable “ Poison Ivy“, “ Slip of the Tongue” and their ode to sadomasochism “ Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way“, all riff-heavy party rockers with choruses meant to sing along to (yeah, I can still sing all the lyrics). Their follow-up, 1989’s Wake Me When It’s Over went gold, so there’s a real chance readers will recall this one, if for nothing else than its single “ House of Pain“, a ballad about growing up fatherless. For me though, the song I kept coming back to was “ Babylon” a rap/rock hybrid (kinda) that preceded Anthrax’s ACTUAL hybrid “ I’m the Man” by a year. OK, that’s probably a bit unfair because the catchy “ Bathroom Wall” had some airplay (why a song that contemplates fate and chance gets less attention than Tommy Tutone’s bathroom wall-inspired pop hit “ 867-5309/Jenny” is beyond me) and if you watched late night cable in 1989 you might have seen the band featured in “ The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II“. In 1987, Faster Pussycat’s self-titled first album dropped two weeks before GNR’s Appetite.
0 kommentar(er)
