Showing posts with label Heart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heart. Show all posts

"I am the Swiss!": 'That Metal Show' returns

A list of my five favorite moments in the show's glorious history
By Peter Lindblad

The hosts of 'That Metal Show' Jim
Florentine, Eddie Trunk and
Don Jamieson
It was one of those magical, unscripted moments of television.

During a segment of "Stump The Trunk" on VH1 Classic's "That Metal Show," this lovably goofy metal fan in a flag of Switzerland t-shirt enthusiastically declared, "I am the Swiss!" when asked by host Jim Florentine where he was from.

Everybody chuckled. I still do every time I think of of my favorite Swiss.

And when news today broke of "That Metal Show" returning to the air in February for its 14th season, having started in 2008, memories of episodes past came flooding back.

The new season starts Saturday, Feb. 21, with a new broadcast time of 9 p.m. Eastern Time. It'll be repeated at 11 ET. There will 12 episodes, all of them shot at Metropolis Studios in New York City on Tuesday nights for broadcast the following Saturday.

To be part of the audience, tickets are available through Gotham Casting at http://gothamcasting.com/gothamrsvp/. So far, nothing has been announced regarding guests. That'll come in due time. Meanwhile, how about a look back at some of my favorite moments in TMS history?

Marilyn Manson makes everyone blush: Ostensibly there to share his love of absinthe and talk about his sexual exploits, shock-rocker Marilyn Manson seemed bombed out of his gourd when stating that he'd been "clean and sober ... for the last five minutes." While sipping from his own stash, a product he called Mansinthe, Manson discussed among other things – in a conversation that can only be described as "rambling" – reverse erectile dysfunction, embracing deviance, and a threesome he once had, and everybody had a good nervous laugh about it. It smelled like this wasn't exactly a show for children, and it was uncomfortable. Then Manson went on "Talking Dead" and did it all over again.

Brian Johnson tastes "Lemmy's plums": Was there ever a funnier guest on TMS than the AC/DC singer? The three hosts almost did a collective spit take when, in critiquing new wines from the Motorhead vineyard, Johnson was questioned about whether he could detect notes of plum or other such flavors and responded by saying, in a deadpan voice with perfect timing, "I can taste Lemmy's plums." Then there was that lurid tale of some masked intruder with a rubber glove going around tour buses sticking his finger where the sun never, ever shines and then, in dramatic fashion, saying, "You know you love it!" And we all shook with jolly laughter all night long.

"Ego ramp": Full confession ... I never knew they called that long, slim stage extension that runs straight into the middle of a concert crowd – perfect for rock-star posing – an "ego ramp" until Heart appeared on TMS. Ann Wilson came off a little catty towards Def Leppard, didn't she, talking about the pop-metal band's extravagant stage show? The implication being that Def Leppard was, perhaps, a little shallow and desperate for audience validation. And then there was the little jibe about Leppard's backstage "health room with cigarettes and full bar." Evidently, Wilson made similar disparaging comments in the book "Kicking and Screaming: A Story of Heart, Soul and Rock and Roll." Vivian Campbell was not amused, expressing his disappointment on the Def Leppard website in the aftermath. And there was poor Lita Ford, coming on later with Heart and trying ever so hard to smooth the waters just a bit. It was textbook rock 'n' roll diplomacy.

"I am the Swiss": Eddie Trunk may hate it, but the "Stump The Trunk" segment is absolute comic gold – unpredictable, sometimes embarrassing and one of these days, I swear Trunk's head is literally going to explode on air. The " ... Swiss" guy is my favorite. And what about Gregg Guiffria's twin brother? Oh, those flowing locks of long, white hair. Somewhere there's a unicorn missing its mane. Remember when Clutch's Neil Fallon was on, and that woman got Trunk on some obscure question – who cares what the answer was – and she stuck her hand into the "Box of Junk" and pulled out Clutch's Earth Rocker album? The forlorn look on her face was priceless, and a bemused Fallon, being Fallon, remarked, "She looks over the moon." Zing! That Fallon is one droll bastard.

In Living Colour: There was hardly anybody in the audience for Living Colour's appearance, and yet, up into the stands went Corey Glover, handing out high fives to everybody within reach as Vernon Reid grabbed him down so they could get on with the rest of the show. The day of the taping a huge snowstorm brought New York City and basically the entire East Coast to a standstill. Some girl drove all the way from Pennsylvania or some such place, and if memory serves, her car broke down or something and her boyfriend called TMS to make sure she was all right. God, if that isn't metal, I don't know what is. Anyway, Reid and Glover proceeded to bicker like an "old married couple" – their words, not mine – and hilarity ensued, but when Glover talked about seeing James Brown perform at the Apollo, everyone was riveted. I'm thinking of joining their cult of personality, or at least reading the literature.

Eric Clapton pulls the plug on Player?


Well … not exactly
By Peter Lindblad

Player: Peter Beckett and Ronn Moss 2013
Others might have been intimidated by the prospect of opening up for guitar god Eric Clapton, but not Player.

After all, they had a No. 1 song to their credit in the blue-eyed soul ditty “Baby Come Back” – released in late 1977 – and in the grand tradition of giving audiences what they want to hear, Player decided to muscle up sonically for their 1978 album Danger Zone.

“We had to, because we were plucked from Boz Scaggs’s ‘Silk Degrees’ tour,” says Peter Beckett, one of the founding member of Player. “And we were still a young band. And they stuck us on Eric Clapton’s ‘Slowhand’ tour supporting Clapton for a month to [play to] like a 30,000 mainly male audience, so we couldn’t go on and be a little pop band. That’s when we started injecting more hard rock [into our sound], and it’s been that way ever since.”

In February, Player will release Too Many Reasons, its first album in 20 years. Around 35 years ago, Player was riding high, having been chosen as the support act for Clapton’s 1978 North American tour. Mixing tracks from Danger Zone into an eclectic set list that ran the gamut from pretty soft-rock ballads to melodic hard rock, Player did more than just win over Clapton’s audiences.

How were they received on that tour?

“Excellent … in fact, a little too good,” says Beckett, the lead guitarist and singer for Player.

While Beckett was being coy about what happened, Player bassist Ronn Moss – better known worldwide as the actor who’s played Ridge Forrester for 25 years on the massively successful soap opera “The Bold and The Beautiful” – expanded on Beckett’s statement.

“We had a wonderful little thing happen to us at the Aladdin Theatre in Las Vegas,” relates Moss. “Player had a No. 1 record, and in the middle of ‘Baby Come Back,’ there’s a silence before the last chorus starts. Well, right at that downbeat to that chorus, after the silence, we all came in … and, no power. The power had gone out. There was nothing but drums.”

The possibility of a citywide blackout was immediately dismissed, since the lights didn’t go out … “just the power to our amplifiers,” says Moss. “So we all looked around, and they finally got it up and rolling, running …”

Adds Beckett, “… but, we’d finished (laughs)."

So, what happened exactly? As Moss recalls, the guilty party, or parties, didn’t step forward right away.

“It took several days for somebody backstage to finally fess up,” says Moss. “And it turned out to be Eric Clapton’s crew who fessed up and said, ‘Yeah, we pulled the plug on you guys.’ We were going down too well, and initially, we were really pissed. [I said] ‘Why would you do that?’ and the guy said, ‘It’s because you were going over a little too well.’”   

Beckett cautions, “The truth of it was, Eric Clapton knew nothing about it. It was just an uppity roadie. You know how those roadies are (laughs).”

They can joke about it now, but at the time, they were apoplectic.

“We were just pissed about it, and then I thought, ‘Wait a minute. Eric Clapton pulled the plug on us?’” says Moss. “They fessed up. They fessed up. And [Clapton] came in the dressing room a couple of weeks later with a bottle of Jack Daniels, and he never really admitted anything, but he said, ‘Are you guys okay?’”
Clapton wasn’t the only massive ‘70s rock act that took Player out on the road. There was Heart, who was promoting 1978’s Dog and the Butterfly LP. And, of course, there was Boz Scaggs.

“Well, you know, the Boz Scaggs tour wasn’t chopped liver, either,” says Beckett. “So we’d already done about two months of 30,000-seat arenas, and then we went back and did the Danger Zone album. We knew we were going on the ‘Slowhand’ tour, so we made the Danger Zone album harder edged so that we were able to go out and support Eric Clapton and have the right kind of music under our belts. So, it all turned out great.”

Too Many Reasons is due out Feb. 26 on Frontiers Records, and it was written and produced by Beckett. Look for a more expanded interview with Beckett and Moss in this blog in the coming weeks. In the meantime, visit www.player-theband.com and www.ronnmoss.com for more information and check out the track listing for Too Many Reasons:

* Photo by Devin DeVasquez-Moss

Too Many Reason track listing:
1. Man on Fire
2. Precious
3. I Will
4. Tell Me
5. The Sins of Yesterday
6. My Addiction
7. Too Many Reasons
8. To the Extreme
9. The Words You Say
10. Life in Color
11. A Part of Me
12. Nothin’ Like You
13. Baby Come Back