Not Trashing Eric- Honest!!!

[Stephen Swann]

Steve writes:
>
> >No wonder Eric & Buck don't want to join us over here; some you are always
> >trashing them...Club Ninja was great for that point in time, and
> >Buck's Boogie is the most distiguishablly beautiful, fast, jazzy and rock-
> >in' instrumental ever written.
>
> I'm not sure Club Ninja was great, but it was certainly better than
> "Winger"- remember that moron?  He's probably leading the band in a gay
> dinner theatre right now.

One of the funniest things I ever read on alt.rock-n-roll was when
some guy referred to him as:
Kip "if I can't play my bass, at least I can dance with it" Winger

If you missed MTV's big-hair band reign of terror in the 80's, you
might not see why that joke was so funny.

> Actually- having put the old thing on the turntable and given it another
> listen after this back and forth, it seems to me that what I really hate
> about Club Ninja is not the songs- it's the production!
>
> Any thoughts on that? I worked in a studio as an engineer and I've played
> in bands and I think I can say without serious contradiction that poor
> production can ruin a good song as sure as a poorly placed turd can spoil a
> punchbowl.
> Club Ninja has that goddamn Bob Rock/Rupert Hine way too crisp let's all be
> frigid-digital sound to it.  It's like a dentist's drill in my ears.  This
> is why I like Led Zeppelin and the Smashing Pumpkins, but threw away my
> 80's heavy metal records (actually I gave them away to some High Fivin'
> Mothers)- the production techniques popular in the 80's threw thebaby out
> with the bathwater trying to make everything sound like a CD.
> Neil Young can tell you why it didn't work in the last ish of Mondo 2000-
> for anyone who can find that.

The 80's were a pretty bad period for rock music in general, I think
(despite the fact that they got off to an absolutely ripping start,
with albums like Blizzard of Oz, Heaven and Hell, Fire of Unknown
Origin, Blackout, Number of the Beast, Screaming for Vengeance, Back
In Black, etc etc etc).  Somehow, that degenerated into a big-hair
teeny-bopper metal fest that lasted until the end of the decade.  The
reason I welcomed bands like Nirvana and Alice In Chains was that
their appearance blew away the garbage that had been accumulating over
the previous 7 or 8 years.  Granted, now it's left us with just a
different smelling kind of garbage, as bands like Bush some to lick
Nirvana's plate, as sure as Winger followed AC/DC.

And yes, the cheese-metal production is probably the biggest reason
that I can't listen to Club Ninja.  I might give some (not many) of
those songs another listen if they were reproduced in more reasonable
style, one that doesn't make me feel like I'm listening to "Pour
Some Sugar On Me".

Steve