Tuesday, March 23, 2004
March 22: Bad Company - Holy Water
Home country - England
OK, here's the complete story of how me and Matt (and the rest of 12 Pearls) met (sort of) Bad Company:
It's a little-remembered footnote in rock history now, but tons of rock bands that were popular in the '70s changed their sound, hired outside songwriters, and desperately tried to keep up with hair metal in the '80s. The most successful band to do this was obviously Aerosmith, but who remembers Alice Cooper's "Poison"? Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart"? "Crazy, Crazy Nights" or "Let's Put the X in Sex" by KISS? "The Flame" by Cheap Trick? Any Damn Yankees songs? Or, yes, "If You Needed Somebody" by Bad Company.
According to allmusic.com, Bad Company broke up in 1982 when Paul Rodgers left the band to join a supergroup called The Firm with Jimmy Page. Then the guitarist and drummer reformed the band with a new lead singer, Brian Howe, in '86. Howe used to sing for Ted Nugent's band, but not on the good stuff, on the bad early '80s stuff. The "new" Bad Company put out four hair-metal albums in the late '80s and early '90s. This one, Holy Water, was the most successful, and it's not hard to see why: every song is like a hair-metal cliché - the overly-sincere singer, the "dirty," over-produced guitar tones, the power ballad. But is it really Bad Company? Most of the songs were written by Howe and an outside producer named Terry Thomas.
Long story short, Howe got the boot in 1995 and Bad Co. hired some dude named Robert Hart to sing for them and write all their songs. Then they learned a law of rock (later to be learned by Van Halen): the fans will accept one new lead singer, but when you get a THIRD lead singer, nobody cares anymore. So Hart got the axe after two albums and Rodgers came back in. Now they tour places like Ardmore with Kansas.
So how does 12p fit into all this? In the summer of '02, we were owed a couple of favors by this club owner in Lawton who liked to book the band and then conveniently find an excuse to only pay them $20. So he calls me up and offers to let the band open for Bad Company. We said yes, we got down there, there's a big crowd, and then this band walks out there and opens the show with — not "Feel Like Makin' Love." Not "Shooting Star." "Holy Water," the title track from this album. It wasn't Bad Company at all, but Brian Howe with three backing musicians. Apparently because he wrote all those hair-metal songs for the band in the late '80s, he won the right in court to tour as Bad Company.
It was awful and awesome at the same time. And when I found this album a year later in a CD Warehouse, I had to have it.
OK, here's the complete story of how me and Matt (and the rest of 12 Pearls) met (sort of) Bad Company:
It's a little-remembered footnote in rock history now, but tons of rock bands that were popular in the '70s changed their sound, hired outside songwriters, and desperately tried to keep up with hair metal in the '80s. The most successful band to do this was obviously Aerosmith, but who remembers Alice Cooper's "Poison"? Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart"? "Crazy, Crazy Nights" or "Let's Put the X in Sex" by KISS? "The Flame" by Cheap Trick? Any Damn Yankees songs? Or, yes, "If You Needed Somebody" by Bad Company.
According to allmusic.com, Bad Company broke up in 1982 when Paul Rodgers left the band to join a supergroup called The Firm with Jimmy Page. Then the guitarist and drummer reformed the band with a new lead singer, Brian Howe, in '86. Howe used to sing for Ted Nugent's band, but not on the good stuff, on the bad early '80s stuff. The "new" Bad Company put out four hair-metal albums in the late '80s and early '90s. This one, Holy Water, was the most successful, and it's not hard to see why: every song is like a hair-metal cliché - the overly-sincere singer, the "dirty," over-produced guitar tones, the power ballad. But is it really Bad Company? Most of the songs were written by Howe and an outside producer named Terry Thomas.
Long story short, Howe got the boot in 1995 and Bad Co. hired some dude named Robert Hart to sing for them and write all their songs. Then they learned a law of rock (later to be learned by Van Halen): the fans will accept one new lead singer, but when you get a THIRD lead singer, nobody cares anymore. So Hart got the axe after two albums and Rodgers came back in. Now they tour places like Ardmore with Kansas.
So how does 12p fit into all this? In the summer of '02, we were owed a couple of favors by this club owner in Lawton who liked to book the band and then conveniently find an excuse to only pay them $20. So he calls me up and offers to let the band open for Bad Company. We said yes, we got down there, there's a big crowd, and then this band walks out there and opens the show with — not "Feel Like Makin' Love." Not "Shooting Star." "Holy Water," the title track from this album. It wasn't Bad Company at all, but Brian Howe with three backing musicians. Apparently because he wrote all those hair-metal songs for the band in the late '80s, he won the right in court to tour as Bad Company.
It was awful and awesome at the same time. And when I found this album a year later in a CD Warehouse, I had to have it.
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