Holy shit, there was actually a story behind them, and a little bit of feeling. Songs like Poison’s “Something To Believe In”, or even Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home” were not half bad when you really sit down and listen to them. It’s an interesting observation that a band like Mötley Crüe would make sure to include a few songs of substance on their records so they could release them to radio and justify the rest of their wankery, while in modern country it’s the opposite: they bury any substance in “album cuts” so they have something to point to and say their music is not all fluff, and release the most horrifying examples of their sound to your local FM transmitter. Somehow this is all supposed to bowtie with Mötley Crüe’s farewell tour, and actually, it might do so well since mainstream country is the last bastion of pliable music fans who are gullible enough to worship whichever golden boys corporate America puts up on stage in tight pants and charges $75 to see from the nosebleeds.īut as fun as it is to hoot on mid 80’s hair metal, the simple truth is when you delve into some of the ballads of these bands-and each of their albums can be good for one or two of them-they were not terrible, and can still translate to the modern ear to some extent. Still left wanting after his own hair metal band Burning Hearts went down in a blaze of glory, Borchetta has wrangled his Big Machine roster into living out his spandex and aqua-net dream for him since he’d strain a hammy trying to do the splits off of a drum riser these days. This Nashville Outlaws tribute is the country music equivalent to the 1982 flick The Toy, with Mötley Crüe as Richard Pryor, and Scott Borchetta as Jackie Gleason. Oh how I wax nostalgic for the days in country when the worst ails you had to worry about were the encroachment of reality stars and Keith Urban’s nude photos in Playgirl. And yes I know, Carrie Underwood covered “Home Sweet Home” in 2009, but that that was more of a one-off deal for American Idol’s “send-off song” (whatever that means) and was for pop radio, not country. If this was 2007, no “country” tribute to Mötley Crüe would even be conceived of getting made, especially one with the combination of pugnacity and ignorace to call itself Nashville Outlaws, let alone release a single to country radio.
First rule here ladies and gentlemen is let’s not be fooled by the illusion of diminishing returns.