#super group

Brian Johnson from the Great band ( AC / DC ) 😎.

Brian Johnson joined as lead singer of AC / DC in 1980 after the death of former lead singer Bon Scott . Johnson had been recommended by a fan from Ohio. Apparently he sent them a sample from Johnson's band Geordie and the rest's part of Rock'n'roll history. His first song with the group was ( Back in Black ) . I think both singers did a fantastic job ( Rock on ) 😎😎.

May 11, 1989

35 years ago today Badlands released their debut album. The band included Jake E. Lee, who had recently been fired from Ozzy Osbourne’s band, Ray Gillen, Eric Singer who had recently left Black Sabbath, and bassist Greg Chaisson.

Check out my interview with Greg:

https://youtu.be/5SJdAS3nfqY

What are your favorite songs on this album?

Handle With Care - Traveling Wilburys - 1988

Mr. Big: Lean into It (1991)

As hair metal’s phony empire finally started to crumble in the late ‘80s, countless supergroups sprung up from the mounting wreckage, cherry-picking the most talented players from a bankruptcy-bound scene, and aligning their plans to pull off at least one more musical heist. 

Thus was minted ‘valuable specie’ like Badlands, Blue Murder, Damn Yankees, and today’s subject, Mr. Big, featuring former Talas and David Lee Roth bass wizard Billy Sheehan, erstwhile Racer X shredder Paul Gilbert, ex-Impellitteri drummer Pat Torpey, and failed solo artist Eric Martin.

The quartet’s self-titled debut was evidently thrown together in haste and owed much of its success to the musicians’ virtuosity, rather than well-crafted songs, but the band did their best to remedy this a couple years later for 1991’s sophomore Lean into It. (*)

And I’d say they managed a golden triptych in the frantic and funny “Daddy, Brother, Lover, Little Boy (The Electric Drill Song)” (**), the psychedelic-flavored “Green-Tinted Sixties Mind,” and an all-purpose radio confection called “CDFF-Lucky this Time” (anyone remember what “CDFF” stands for?), though the latter was credited to one Jeff Paris. (***)

Unfortunately, Mr. Big’s decision to put money over musos yielded another half-dozen, second-rate iterations (“Alive and Kickin’,” “Never Say Never,” “Just Take My Heart,” “My Kinda Woman,” “Road to Ruin” -- ugh!) of those same old corporate rock templates with clichéd lyrics.

Maybe worse, when the boys even bothered to veer slightly left of center, it was to indulge in other period gimmicks like the funk metal of “Voodoo Kiss” and the sub-sub-sub-Zeppelin heavy blues of “A Little too Loose.”

Crazy thing was: thanks to the impossibly low standards of pop metal’s dying days, even the safest, most spineless material recorded by a Mr. Big, Tesla, or Skid Row seemed significantly superior to the grotesque flagellations of a Warrant, Poison, or Britny Fox.

Get behind me Satan!

That being said, Lean into It saved its worst offender for last, via “To Be With You” -- the unplugged smash-hit that was obviously and calculatingly patterned on Extreme’s crossover hit of the previous year, “More than Words,” and, just like said track, morphed from cute to insufferable after precisely one-and-a-half listens.

But, it fulfilled its malevolent mission, holding on to the Billboard charts’ No. 1 spot for three weeks and pushing the album to platinum status, while its deceitfully inexpensive (yeah right!) black-and-white music video (also shamelessly based on Extreme’s example) throttled MTV air time and made all of us want to put our fists through Martin’s adorable little teeth.

I’m sure we’d all Lean into It, too.

Of course I jest, not least because the alt-rock revolution promptly took down Mr. Big and countless other, even more deserving hair metal offenders in the next few years, rendering subsequent repetitions of these once-successful formulas like ‘93’s Bump Ahead not just dated or less popular, but utterly irrelevant.

* That cover image wasn’t fabricated, by the way; it was real and depicts an 1895 accident at Paris’ Gare Montparnasse train station.

** Before you accuse Mr. Big of copping this idea from Van Halen’s For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, know that Lean into It beat that album to the racks by a couple of months -- I checked!

*** Jeff Paris, in case you’re wondering, was born Geoffrey Brillhart Leib and recorded a handful of solo albums for various labels between 1986 and ‘98.