OK Boys! IT IS ON!!!!!!!THE WINGER ROUND!!!A lot of people have asked me what's the deal with Winger. My name is TAC and this is my story.
OK..Hope you guys won’t find this too long, but I have to start the Winger Round with my true discovery of Alice Cooper.
I happened to be home from college on the weekend of Halloween 1986. It was my Freshman year. MTV was airing Alice’s show from Detroit that night. Now I wasn’t into Alice at the time. In fact, this was his comeback after being out of the spotlight for 5 years. Anyway, not sure why, but I just had to watch. You might call it Special Forces at work.
I was blown away, not just by Alice, but by his incredible band of top notch metal musicians. This was Heavy Metal Alice, and the metalized versions of Welcome To My Nightmare, Billion Dollar Babies, and The Ballad Of Dwight Fry and others were incredible. Found out they were playing a couple of weeks later in Worcester and I bought tickets. Saw the show. Mind blown.
I bought his new album Constrictor. Going through the album credits, I see among others, the bass player’s name is Kip Winger. Yup, he’s the bassist in the touring band too. Among the touring band (which also included Kane Roberts and Ken Mary!), was a keyboard player name Paul Taylor.
Alice came back to the area again, playing the Providence Civic Center on 2/17/87. I snapped some great pics of this show, including one this of his bass player:
A few months later, Alice’s new album, Raise Your Fist And Yell, was released. Again, the band on the album is Roberts/Mary/Winger/Taylor. This album is incredible, and if you’ve never heard it, check out Roses On White Lace. Saw Alice at the Boston Garden on 11/17/87. The 3rd time seeing him in a year.
This time, he had another bassist playing, but essentially had the same band. Got this shot with Paul Taylor at the after show party:
(For the record, I’m 19 in this picture. I actually had a can of Heineken in my other hand.)
Now I went full bore on Alice Cooper while in college, but I’ve always been fascinated about the incredible talent he always puts around him.
So a year or so later, I read that Kip Winger and Paul Taylor would be teaming up with Rod Morganstein (who I already know is a beast) and a hot shot new guitarist named Reb Beech, I was teeming with anticipation. This will have to be great, I though.
As soon as the album is released I run out and buy the tape. OK it has a cheesy cover, but there’s no way this is going to suck, could it?
As soon as I started listening, I thought the manufacturer put the wrong tape in the cassette. WTF was this horseshit? I was just getting back into thrash, listening to Helloween, Slayer, Metallica a lot during this time. Not to mention Iron Maiden, Queensryche..
But this is such cheesy and fake hair metal. Say what you want about Poison, and yes I think they sucked too, but at least I felt a certain genuineness about them. With Winger, it was so fake. Such posing. They simply became the poster children for all that was wrong in music at that time. Hair Metal, to me, jumped the shark with Winger. I felt they made a complete mockery of the whole scene. I KNEW they were better musicians than this. And I didn’t appreciate the expectations and the money I spent on this piece of shit.
Winger’s first album was literally the most disappointed I have ever been in an album. For the first time I felt truly let down by music. It made a scar.
To me, they just would always represent all that was wrong in music. I know through time, they would make a number of albums. And there are people I respect on this forum and others that like them and say they have some great music. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. I’ll never know. That is, until now.
Topic: The TAC Roulette- Final Results!!! (Read 102946 times)
