In honor of @BubbaMc’s new Buckethead thread, I was reminded of the first solo from GnR’s song “Better” off of Chinese Democracy. It’s a pretty cool little shred moment courtesy of Buckethead on the most expensive album ever made(?)…
Buckethead’s solo starts around 2:24:
How has Mr. Big not gotten a single mention in this thread? 
@Montreal543 good call 
Here’s my favourite guitar work from the album (and surprisingly from the entire GnR catalogue), Bucket’s lengthy solo starting at 4:20:
I’m a big Racer X fan but the only Mr. Big song I ever heard was To Be With You. Is that typical of most of their songs, or were their other songs heavier?
Listen to Daddy Brother Lover Little Boy or Addicted To That Rush.
OK, I will make that a priority! Thank you!
I don’t listen to a ton of their music, to be honest, but Mr. Big had Paul Gilbert and Billy Sheehan, so you know they were going to be technical. They’re more rock than metal, IMO, and while there was always a bit of tongue in cheek to Racer X, Mr. Big seemed a lot more light-hearted to me.
“To Be With You” is a fairly simple song, but has a deceptively simple-sounding, seriously cool acoustic solo.
Interestingly (and unusually, for a “guitar rock” record), Paul only has songwriting credit on 6 of the 11 songs on their breakthrough album “Lean Into It”. Paul doesn’t have writing credit for “To Be With You”, though must have written at least the solo, because I’ve heard him tell a story about how one of the low Es (or the timing or accent of it) was a “mistake” he liked and decided to leave in. It seems like Lean Into It was a concerted effort to do put out something more accessible and commercial. The inclusion of “To Be With You” (which wiki says lead singer Eric Martin had written years earlier) seemed like a deliberate attempt to mimic Extreme’s breakthrough with “More Than Words”, which itself was an attempt to mimic the success of Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”.
I just watched the video for Addicted To That Rush. it’s not my favorite style (I preferred Paul Gilbert’s songs in Racer X) but still it’s good. One thing I do like about it is you can tell they’re all really enjoying themselves. That has a carryover effect to the audience: When the audience sees a band onstage enjoying themselves, the audience tends to feel good too. When a band onstage looks like they’re angry or upset, that often has a similar effect on the audience whether it’s in the form of vandalism, destruction of property, or violent mosh pits. I was at an Ozzfest which featured Pantera and when Pantera played their fans starting actually tearing up sections of sod from the lawn area of the outdoor venue and throwing it towards the stage. Of course most of it ended up hitting people who were in the area that had seats. I didn’t pay $70 for a ticket to be hit with flying chunks of dirt while trying to enjoy a concert. Speaking of Pantera, after Darrell Abbott was murdered onstage, Dave Mustaine was interviewed on the news. While I don’t remember word for word everything he said, the gist of it was that he said that bands in their genre needed to seriously think about their lyrics, the message they were sending to their fans and the effects they might be having on people.
There was a level of optimism in our culture in the 80s and very early 90s that I don’t think we’ve had since.
It seems to me that if you’re living your life’s dream, making your living as a musician, and a good living at that, you should be happy about it. Yet I have heard so many stories about the heroin addiction problems in 90s bands and beyond, that it does make you wonder what is it that they’re missing in their lives that makes them sound so miserable to the point that the anger and misery comes out in their lyrics and even the way they look when they’re performing. They were getting paid and paid well to play music, they often had wives and children, they had success both artistically and financially and yet there was still something in their lives they needed and didn’t have. We’ve had practically an epidemic of suicides in the music industry, starting with Kurt Cobain and continuing on, most recently with Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington from Linkin Park.
This seriously needs to be looked into. Accidental deaths have always been part of the music industry from people partying excessively, but these deaths were intentional. On average, I’d say the guys from the 70’s and 80s bands seem to be outliving the guys from 90s bands and when you do hear about a guy who was famous in the 70s or 80s dying prematurely, it tends to be accidental or something unavoidable such as cancer, but rarely is it suicide.
Do you know if Nuno Bettencourt is still part of her band?
I mean, in Kurt’s case, it was a combination of depression, an introvert suddenly being thrust under the spotlight, an optiate addiction stemming from a medical problem that he eventually decided to stop fighting, and I don’t know if you’ve ever spent any time in the rural Pacific Northwest, but he didn’t exactly have an idylic childhood that left him wanting to sing about girls and hotrods.
For me, music is supposed to express a range of emotions. I think the late 80s started to choke a bit on the excesses of the 80s hair metal party music thing, so when grunge broke, angry and depressed and sad music was hitting emotional places that popular music had been missing for most of the prior decade. Of course, THAT started to choke on its own excesses too, over time, with a whole bunch of “waah, daddy doesn’t love me, my life is so hard” stuff that in particular a lot of the worser nu metal bands were doing… Idunno. Cyclical change in popular music tastes is probably a good thing, and considering how much darker the 90s were than the 80s, a spate of suicides probably isn’t that surprising.
I’m just grateful we got some of the music we did.
To the best of my knowledge he is not. Of course, even if he’s not currently in, we have no way of knowing if that could change in the future. He speaks very positively about the experience in the interview I posted previously, but you’d expect that of any pro. Sounds like the only misgiving he had was about the level of time commitment.
If you’re referring strictly to glam metal, that’s correct. So many glam bands made so much money for record companies that it started getting to the point that if you were glam band with a good look, you’d get a record deal. The record companies stopped being vigilant about signing bands with actual talent and that led to an excess of bands who never deserved a record deal, getting a record deal. That situation was absolutely excessive.
If you want to talk about late 80s music covering not covering a wide range of emotions, there are plenty of great albums i could point out that would dispel the notion that 80s music didn’t cover a wide range of emotions and didn’t have lyrics about anything about partying. To keep this post to a reasonable size, I’ll use the example of what many people consider to be Queensryche’s masterpiece: Operation Mindcrime. There was not a “party song” to be found on it. It covered a wider range of situations and emotions and it told a good story. There certainly plenty of songs that were sad or even depressing on the Mindcrime album. If wanted anger, the type of heavy rock music that has had the most longevity is what Metallica plays and if anything, their music was angrier in the 80s than in the 90s, so I’m not sold on the 90s being a “darker” time, musically speaking, than the 90s were. “One” had about as dark a subject matter as could be imagined. If you’re saying the 90s were darker overall, as far as the economy of the nation for example, I’d agree wholeheartedly with you.
One of the great things about the 80s metal scene, which led to the incredible business the industry did during that period is that the customers had a choice. If you wanted heavy guitar music that was still party music, you could find it. If you wanted metal that covered more serious issues, and emotions, you could find it. By the 90s heavy guitar music had become much more narrow in scope. By 1994 if you want to find some party music that still had good heavy guitar riffs and guitar solos, you couldn’t find it anymore! It ceased to exist. Not surprisingly. before long, many legendary nightclubs which had done great business for decades also ceased to exist because whether some people like it or not, the typical person goes out to hear music that makes them feel good - not sad or angry.
Eh, a lot of that smacks as “MY generation’s music is better than yours,” and I can’t fully agree with you. Music evolves over time, and while we all tend to focus on the stuff we really liked in a particular era, there’s a LOT of self selection going on there. For example, you talk about 1994: here’s the Billboard #1 singles that year:
| ISSUE DATE | TITLE | ARTIST |
|---|---|---|
| January 8 | Hero | Mariah Carey |
| January 15 | ||
| January 22 | All For Love | Bryan Adams/Rod Stewart/Sting |
| January 29 | ||
| February 5 | ||
| February 12 | The Power Of Love | Celine Dion |
| February 19 | ||
| February 26 | ||
| March 5 | ||
| March 12 | The Sign | Ace Of Base |
| March 19 | ||
| March 26 | ||
| April 2 | ||
| April 9 | Bump N’ Grind | R. Kelly |
| April 16 | ||
| April 23 | ||
| April 30 | ||
| May 7 | The Sign | Ace Of Base |
| May 14 | ||
| May 21 | I Swear | All-4-One |
| May 28 | ||
| June 4 | ||
| June 11 | ||
| June 18 | ||
| June 25 | ||
| July 2 | ||
| July 9 | ||
| July 16 | ||
| July 23 | ||
| July 30 | ||
| August 6 | Stay (I Missed You) | Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories |
| August 13 | ||
| August 20 | ||
| August 27 | I’ll Make Love To You | Boyz II Men |
| September 3 | ||
| September 10 | ||
| September 17 | ||
| September 24 | ||
| October 1 | ||
| October 8 | ||
| October 15 | ||
| October 22 | ||
| October 29 | ||
| November 5 | ||
| November 12 | ||
| November 19 | ||
| November 26 | ||
| December 3 | On Bended Knee | Boyz II Men |
| December 10 | ||
| December 17 | Here Comes The Hotstepper (From “Ready To Wear”) | Ini Kamoze |
https://www.billboard.com/archive/charts/1994/hot-100
…and to choose a mid-80s year at random, here’s 1987:
| ISSUE DATE | TITLE | ARTIST |
|---|---|---|
| January 3 | Walk Like An Egyptian | The Bangles |
| January 10 | ||
| January 17 | Shake You Down | Gregory Abbott |
| January 24 | At This Moment | Billy Vera & The Beaters |
| January 31 | ||
| February 7 | Open Your Heart | Madonna |
| February 14 | Livin’ On A Prayer | Bon Jovi |
| February 21 | ||
| February 28 | ||
| March 7 | ||
| March 14 | Jacob’s Ladder | Huey Lewis & The News |
| March 21 | Lean On Me | Club Nouveau |
| March 28 | ||
| April 4 | Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now | Starship |
| April 11 | ||
| April 18 | I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me) | Aretha Franklin & George Michael |
| April 25 | ||
| May 2 | (I Just) Died In Your Arms | Cutting Crew |
| May 9 | ||
| May 16 | With or Without You | U2 |
| May 23 | ||
| May 30 | ||
| June 6 | You Keep Me Hangin’ On | Kim Wilde |
| June 13 | Always | Atlantic Starr |
| June 20 | Head To Toe | Lisa Lisa And Cult Jam |
| June 27 | I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) | Whitney Houston |
| July 4 | ||
| July 11 | Alone | Heart |
| July 18 | ||
| July 25 | ||
| August 1 | Shakedown (From “Beverly Hills Cop II”) | Bob Seger |
| August 8 | I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For | U2 |
| August 15 | ||
| August 22 | Who’s That Girl | Madonna |
| August 29 | La Bamba | Los Lobos |
| September 5 | ||
| September 12 | ||
| September 19 | I Just Can’t Stop Loving You | Michael Jackson With Siedah Garrett |
| September 26 | Didn’t We Almost Have It All | Whitney Houston |
| October 3 | ||
| October 10 | Here I Go Again | Whitesnake |
| October 17 | Lost In Emotion | Lisa Lisa And Cult Jam |
| October 24 | Bad | Michael Jackson |
| October 31 | ||
| November 7 | I Think We’re Alone Now | Tiffany |
| November 14 | ||
| November 21 | Mony Mony | Billy Idol |
| November 28 | (I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life | Bill Medley & Jennifer Warnes |
| December 5 | Heaven Is A Place On Earth | Belinda Carlisle |
| December 12 | Faith | George Michael |
https://www.billboard.com/archive/charts/1987/hot-100
You get Whitesnake and Bon Jovi doing anthemic pop-rock songs that today sound kind of like parodies of the genre, but for the most part, nary a guitar to be heard.
I’d say feel-good party music with guitars, a lot of punk and third wave ska comes to mind (“Turn the Radio Off” era Reel Big Fish even had surprisingly decent guitar solos). As far as rock, I wasn’t really listening to the “feel good party music” stuff, but I’m sure if I wanted to it was out there somewhere, and frankly, after a lot of the hair metal of the late 80s and early 90s, I think that was probably played out and people were looking for something else. But, if the night clubbs were going out of business in the 90s, it’s not because they went from playing “Faith” to playing “The Sign.”
Music just evolves over time. That’s not always a bad thing. More to the point, I suspect we can both agree that we just never really cared for whatever was topping the charts in EITHER decade. 
That’s not how I meant it. I meant it as: "The hard rock and heavy metal music of the 80s and very early 90s was more my style, more to my liking, than the music of the rest of the 90s. What music one enjoys is a subjective thing so naturally I couldn’t expect everybody to think the exact same way about what era’s music was most enjoyable.
The only thing that comes to mind that I can say on an objective basis regarding this discussion is that I saw many great, even legendary rock 'n roll nightclubs (which emphasized loud, guitar driven heavy rock) that did great business in the 700s and/or 80s and early 90s see their business drop dramatically as the grunge fad kicked in. I was working at one such club during the 90s and one night, early in my tenure there, I was speaking to one of the bouncers who had been there for many, many years tell me that in the 80s, on a good night the place was so packed that a customer might have to wait fifteen minutes just to get a beer! By the time I was there (mid 90s) the place was never that full, and was usually so empty that there was no wait at all to get a beer. The grunge bands just weren’t drawing the big crowds that the 80s metal crowds had drawn. For a short time grunge was very hot and the crowds were reasonably big (although never as big as during our peak years), but that hot period was short lived. Overall grunge proved to not have the longevity that 80s style hard rock and heavy metal, in general, had. The decline in business from the 80s and early 90s to the later 90s was a fact in our nightclub and we were far from an anomaly in the business. As a matter of fact, we didn’t shut our doors until 1998 and I saw clubs such as the legendary Rock-It Club close their doors roughly four years earlier than we did, despite the fact that in the 80s and very early 90s, they did an amount of business that we could only dream of even during our best years.
Hasn’t this been true of most styles that record companies realized they could make a buck off of? Grunge, British invasion, nu metal, pop-punk etc. Glam is one of the few which still has a bad name years later though.
@Drew I can’t help but laugh when people rail on about 2010s pop music. They forget about all the crappy boy bands in the mid to late 90s. I’d argue the 80s was the last decade of good pop music before the record companies really figured out how to turn it all into a banal product.
Though, as I understand this was right around the time that country got really hot - I have a couple metalhead buddies a bit older than me, and one in particular started to gig in a country band during this time because he could still play solos, the clubs were always packed, and all the hot girls were going to country shows and not rock shows. Basically, 80s metal was just out of favor, and while rock was still drawing OK, I think country was really where all the live action was.
I’m not an authority n all of those styles, but I’d tend to think you’re correct based upon what I do know. The general rule was once a band in a certain new style of rock made it big, the record companies would go crazy trying to sign as many clones of that bad as possible! The original was always the best though. You’re not going to do AC/DC better than AC/DC, for example. In glam metal, Motley Crue were still the kings of that style right up through their final tour which did phenomenal business. If you’re taking about party style hard rock with flashy guitar, who did it better than Van Halen? Roughy 50 years after they formed, no dorm metal band has outdone Black Sabbath - they were the pioneers of doom metal and they’re still the most respected and most influential band in the genre. That style I do know a lot about because Maryland and the Washington DC area, for some reason, became the doom metal capital of the country and maybe the world.
Glam does still have a bad reputation and although i know how it go that reputation - from all the bands that were subsequently signed when glam proved to be a hot commodity for record companies despite so many of them not being deserving of a record contract which in turn watered down the talent level of the entire genre - I don’t know why that reputation persists. There is good grunge and bad grunge, good British Invasion and bad British Invasion, good thrash metal and bad thrash metal.
The record companies made a huge mistake with how they marked grunge, however. They made monumentally large mistake in marketing in such a way that the kids felt they either had to like grunge OR heavy metal. They didn’t want the kids to like both. They made it seem as you were either in style and listening to grunge while disavowing the heavy metal you’d always loved, or you continued liking heavy metal and were no longer “cool” as a result. The had such far reaching negative effects that it almost destroyed most bands that played virtuosic guitar solos. The agenda pushed the nation that solos were somehow passe and even self indulgent, never mind that solos had been a staple of popular music since the invention of jazz and possibly earlier! Were all of those musicians who had been playing solos in jazz, rock, ad other music for over 50 years just arrogant, self-indulgent jerks who didn’t know how to play what was best for the song? I don’t think so!
Yes, I remember hearing about that. I’m sure that was a big contributing factor as well. Where the hot, young girls are is where the young guys will be, so it only stands to reason that this hurt the rock industry badly.
My buddy says it was the best 5-7 years of his life, lol. I grew up in part on old school outlaw country - Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, etc - and do love alt-country stuff like Ryan Adams and Justin Townes Earl, but I was incredibly dismissive of modern top-40 country as just being pop music with pedal steel sung by either the chick with a Nashville accent, the dude with a high voice with a Nashville accent, or the dude with a baritone with a Nashville accent, but I was clearly just being closed minded. That was before I really got the shred bug, anyway, and I was mostly playing SRV and Jimi type stuff.