Great White
Recover (Deadline)
by Scott Hefflon
This might just be the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard some pretty unbelievably awful records in my eight years at Lollipop and the decade or so prior, dating back to early records I bought with the money saved by bagging groceries for $3.37 an hour. In my second sentence, I’d like to reiterate how amazed I am at how absolutely, mind-boggling fuckin’ terrible this piece of shit is. It may take a few more sentences to accurately convey just how shiveringly clueless, how depressingly outdated, clunky and awful this record is. Wait for it… OK, so you might vaguely remember Great White from that one song they had, “Once Bitten, Twice Shy,” back in ’89 (it’s on the one-sheet, along with one or two other useful pieces of information: kudos to Deadline/Cleopatra for writing one and, gasp!, spelling everything correctly! Oops, but they forgot a track in the track listing), but then again, ya might not remember it too well cuz that whole time period is best left a blur of models who pretended to be girlfriends for the video and the rock star who paid them.
Covers. This record is all covers. Great White has always been a cover band. Their main hit, the aforementioned “Once Bitten, Twice Shy,” was a cover, though they did an admirable job on it. But now they’re the tired old house band playing the shitty dive out in shitkickerville that you go to cuz the drinks get stronger the drunker the bartender gets, so you can tolerate the bleached-blonde “rocker chicks” in their mid-thirties with bad skin from all the make-up and poor dental hygiene from all the… Well, let’s not go there… But ya still go to the shithole even though sweaty, hairy, delusional Jack Russell swaggers through classic rock tunes with heavy-handed antics, and then makes out with a couple of the nasty rock “chicks” who really oughtta’ve stopped wearing short skirts a decade ago, but after a night of Jack shots and Jack’n’Coke chasers (now consisting of a shot of Coke filled to the rim with whiskey cuz the bartender’s taken a liking to ya, and yer kinda not so sure ya like where that’s heading), the swirling hips and tree-trunk legs kicking around is reminding you of dinosaur death pits where fearsome, muscle-bound, scaly-looking beasts paw the ground with clawed hooves and circle one another, sizing each other up, snarling and ugly, throwing their heads from side to side, all the meat’n’muscle bending and flexing in a display of gruesome horror that doesn’t go away, even after you close your stinging eyes and breathe in a few long, try-not-to-panic breaths of sweat-stinking, smoke-saturated air.
Painful. This is one of the reasons I’m afraid to move to L.A… Someone out there thought this was a good idea. And various others agreed and helped bring this project to fruition. And nowhere along the line did anyone say, “Hey, uh, guys… This thing kinda sucks. No, actually, I take it back: This thing is awful. First off, the ’80s are long over, and you were barely a footnote anyway… An also ran, a kinda tacked-on, ‘Yeah, and then there was Great White’ sentiment. Like all the rock-steady crap Whitesnake did that no one remembers and when they do, they get a good chuckle and remember how bad the band was at one point. But you guys never got beyond that point. I mean, your best song was a cover, for fuck’s sake, what does that tell you?!? Wake up you dim old dumbfucks, geez!”
Bands covered, just for the sake of kicking ’em one more fuckin’ time (all tunes have seen far better daze, believe me): The Cult, AC/DC, the Rolling Stones, X, Bad Company, and more than I can bear to recite…
(13428 Maxella Ave. #251 Marina Del Rey, CA 90292)
