Label paid Damn Yankees $ 1million to avoid third LP
[ad_1]
Jack Blades, frontman of Night Ranger and Damn Yankees, detailed the ’90s cultural shift that affected the Warner Bros. label.’ attitude towards his music.
Damn Yankees – the supergroup with Blades, Ted Nugent and Tommy Shaw of Styx – opened the decade with two popular albums, from the 1990s Damn Yankees and 1992 Do not walk. And after that point, Blades and Shaw ended up with a lot of outside work, writing for artists like Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Ozzy Osbourne, and Cher.
âIt was a good time of creation,â Blades told Metal Recycle Bin from the ’80s in a recent interview. âSo that was a really fun time, actually. Then our record company, Warner Bros., said, ‘Why don’t you make a record? “So we made the first Shaw Blades record [1995’s Hallucination]. “
Then the atmosphere at the label would have changed. “Just when [the album] came out, that’s when all the guys at the record company decided they had to shave their heads and be cool and stuff like that. It was the real turning point – like ’95, actually. It was the crazy time. “
Blades added that Warner had “done absolutely nothing” with the album, reflecting a broader shift in musical tastes.
“The new regime arrived, and they didn’t want to do anything [with that style of music]. And they actually paid the Damn Yankees a million dollars not to make another Damn Yankees album. We’re like, ‘Really? OK, we’ll just take the check. Why not?’ It was like that because the Damn Yankees had sold so many records and we were so recovered, so in our contract the next thing was like “we have a million dollars to do an album”, and they just paid us the million bucks do not to do the recording. It’s how nobody wanted anything to do with that era and that style of music. “
Watch Jack Blades ‘Interview with the’ 80s Metal Bin
In the story of Damn Yankees’ UCR, the band members remember coming together in 1999 for a third unreleased album, with Luke Ebbin (best known for directing Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life”) in as a producer.
âThere was a change of scene. It was just around the time that Nirvana changed everything. It was about time,â Shaw said. âBecause there started to be these spinoff bands and the producers would go up and create bands that were in the same genre, and that always means the end is near. Someone comes in and plays simple songs and all of that. one hit wipes the planks all over again, and that’s a reset. We needed a reset. “
âIt’s never going to come out,â Blades said of the project. “This will always be the long lost record. Little bits of it leaked onto my solo record. Tommy had a song on Styx’s Cyclorama record. Ted did two or three. It was hard to understand, like, âOh yeah! It was one of our songs. It’s pretty wild. This record will never see the light of day, but the ones that have come out are the best. “
This album, tentatively titled well done, featured some contributions from guitarist Damon Johnson, who recently recalled stepping in after Shaw found himself too busy to participate.
âI just don’t think there was that undeniable, mind-blowing hit⦠AL.com in February. Still, he added:â It was a great experience, I learned a lot and I have respect for all these guys. They treated me like an equal. “
Top 100 classic rock artists
Click to find out how they rank, as we count the top 100 classic rock artists.
[ad_2]