re: Cinderella
Love the band. I agree with bosk1 that Heartbreak Station is where the "drop off" feeling occurred. Night Songs and Long Cold Winter were excellent, but it felt like they were starting to lose steam a bit. I like it a lot, but it hit me the same way. I never got around to getting Still Climbing until about seven or eight years ago, and stupidly sold it during a CD purge. I still have it digitally, but need to find it again on CD and put back in the collection.
p.s. I thankfully got to see them live on Aug. 1, 2010, opening for the Scorpions. So glad I did, given that it doesn't look like they will reform any time soon.
Re: Dokken
I get the appeal, but was never a big fan for whatever reason. I'm still not. And not really interested any longer in seeing them without that classic lineup. I've seen Lynch Mob, and George Lynch solo, but never Dokken (or Don Dokken). I was supposed to, but a winter storm in 2003 prevented a flight that would have gotten me there (it was a package tour with Whitesnake, I believe).
Re: Def Leppard
Ya know, like most, I found out about the band during the Pyro/Hysteria years. I became a fan and followed them though Euphoria (which had a couple of tracks, Promises, and most importantly, Paper Sun) that I loved. After that...pass. But it's hard to deny Hysteria and the era it was in. Def Leppard was a borderline stadium act then, before 80s metal bands played stadiums...
Re: Winger
Winger is an incredible band, regardless of era. I was very disappointed in their last release, because it was co-written with some 80s songwriter whose name I can't recall. But before that, starting with Pull and going through Karma, the band really developed some great progressive songwriting. And that's not surprising, given my previous post about the individual members of the band and just how incredible they are.
That said, you can't deny the self-titled (Sahara) and In the Heart of the Young albums' marketing...Kip went the sex symbol route...and it worked. LOL.
Re: Extreme
Being a Long Islander, a diehard Yankees fan, and a proud overall New Yorker, I hate Boston. (No offense to some of the great people I know from there.) I even turned down a scholarship to attend a prominent law school in Boston because I didn't want to live in the city.
That said, Extreme was one of the best things to ever come out of Beantown. They were and are such a dynamite band. The key thing about Extreme was the complexity of their music flew over the heads of so many people. Everyone knows how deep Three Sides is, but not many realize that Pornograffiti is a concept album. Nuno has talked about that over the last few years when they celebrated its anniversary. They sort of patterned some of it after The Who. Queen, and Queensryche.
Sure, they got the "hair band" stigma because of the image from the first record (which is grossly underrated), the flamboyance of Cherone, and of course, the big ballad with More Than Words. But they weren't singing about tits and ass to sing about tits and ass. There was a story involved.