2024 Rock & Roll HOF screechfest

I was just going to come here and defend Boston. Tom Scholz is OUT THERE, but the guy could and can fucking PLAY guitar like few others before or since. He basically fucked around with that debut record until he had the exact sound he wanted. He ended up founding a company that manufactured music technology products. As @swingline noted, Boston may be an automatic channel-changer for a lot of people. But you know, in the first two notes, that that's a song by Boston and no one else. There's not too many bands you can say that about.

He is also an iconoclast in a business that demands conformity. He took eight years to do the third record, a span in which there were about 15 different genres that came and went, and Third Stage still hit no. 1 out of the box and "Amanda" hit no. 1 on the singles chart without, I believe, a music video. The ironic thing is even if you want to argue Boston is a RRHOF act (which I am!), he's surely a guy who hasn't given the RRHOF a second thought and will be completely content to never ever think about it.

 

FUCK. YOU. ASSHOLE.

 

People either conveniently forget or are blissfully unaware of how some of the biggest bands of the grunge era began as hair metal bands before pivoting dramatically when Nirvana blew up the musical world. Pantera's first three records were pure hair metal. @QYFW definitely has those 8-tracks! Their first lead singer ended up in the band Lord Tracy, which is the epitome of one-record wonders from that era. Alice In Chains had teased hair and formed out of a band called Sleze. They also opened for Poison in the summer of '91. Poison!

I think Stone Temple Pilots were legit, though. They definitely got marketed as grunge out of the box to capitalize on Pearl Jam's budding fame, but those guys could do anything in any genre. "Lady Picture Show" is such a gorgeous song. Weiland was nuts but he was the closest thing to a modern Bowie, yet he also ended up fronting Velvet Revolver. I wish I'd seen classic-era STP live...they were playing locally on what ended up being Weiland's last tour but tickets were outrageously priced. Bummer, I should have gone.

 

STP blows chunks. There were bands that could shit out better songs than anything STP made. And his voice sucks.

 

Stone Temple Pilots were great.

 

I liked Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart.

 

Stereogum's Tom Breihan succinctly covered Foreigner's genesis in his "Number Ones" column on "I Want to Know What Love Is." (Side note: Breihan's "Number Ones" -- he's writing about every Hot 100 No. 1, in order -- is almost always great, and he spun off the idea into a recently released book.) Though their best-known output was (in my eyes, no shame if you think otherwise) straight-down-the-middle late-70s arena rock, they weren't a record-company creation. Mick Jones had been kicking around the industry for ages and got the band together after moving to NYC to do session work, and Jones produced all their albums himself.

Fun trivia: Foreigner holds the somewhat dubious honor of having the song that stayed at No. 2 on the Hot 100 for the longest time without ever reaching No. 1. "Waiting for a Girl Like You" was No. 2 for a full 10 weeks in 1981-82, kept out of the top spot by Olivia Newton-John and then Hall and Oates.

https://www.stereogum.com/2098428/t...to-know-what-love-is/columns/the-number-ones/

 

Junkie, that passage stopped me for about 10 solid seconds of out-loud laughter, then I completed reading one hell of a good post.

(Damn, I loved me some good '70s corporate bullshit rock.)

 

They were labeled a "supergroup" at the time, although that's debatable. They had guys from King Crimson, Spooky Tooth and Black Sheep, plus some decently well-traveled other guys.

 

I mean, I like Stone Temple Pilots just fine. They had some very good songs and I think are a little underrated for reasons they couldn't do much about. But this...

Good God, man. No.

 

INXS >> Foreigner. Their songs still rock.

 

I'm not sure anyone in the '80s had a 1-2 punch like Listen Like Thieves/Kick. The back end of Kick would be the perfect A side of any record.