Deep Cuts

Music writing for the long play

Tag

1980s rock

  1. Backwards: The Crusade Against Rock Music and the Artists Who Defied It

    Between 1979 and 1990, a small coalition of evangelical preachers, congressional spouses, and concerned parents convinced substantial portions of the American public that rock music was a deliberate satanic recruitment operation. They held album-burning ceremonies. They published books decoding backward-masked demonic messages in mainstream radio hits. They got the U.S. Senate to hold hearings. They sued Judas Priest for two suicides. The bands, watching the panic unfold around them, eventually started recording actual backward messages in their songs — sometimes as satire, sometimes as defiance, sometimes as a kind of dark joke at the panic's expense. The inaugural Era essay.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 05 · · 15 min read

  2. Hanging On a Heart Attack: Holly Knight's Device and the Album That Was Almost the One She Wanted

    In 1986, one of the most accomplished songwriters of the MTV era assembled a band as her own creative vehicle, recruited a Mormon ex-missionary as lead vocalist, made a record at Cherokee Studios with Mike Chapman producing, watched the lead single reach number 35 on the Hot 100, and lost the project before the second single had finished its commercial cycle. A look at Device's 22B3 — the album where Holly Knight tried to be the artist rather than the writer, and the structural reasons the attempt did not produce the second album she had assumed would follow.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 05 · · 22 min read

  3. Hit Me with Your Best Shot: Pat Benatar, Neil Giraldo, and the Twenty-Two-Year Hall of Fame Wait

    She was eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. She was inducted in 2022. The twenty-two-year delay was not, by her own subsequent account, an accident — she had been turning down individual induction since the institution first became willing to consider her, refusing to accept the honor unless her musical partner and husband of forty years was inducted alongside her. The standard rock-history vocabulary has consistently positioned her as a solo MTV pop-rock vocalist whose commercial peak ended around 1985 and whose subsequent career has been a slow nostalgia-circuit decline. The accurate version is more interesting, substantially better documented, and centers a creative partnership the broader rock-criticism vocabulary has spent four decades failing to recognize.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 05 · · 17 min read

  4. The Quietest Disappearance: White Lion, Vito Bratta, and the Career That Ended When It Was Just Beginning

    Their second album sold two million copies and produced a number-three Hot 100 single. Their guitarist appeared on the cover of Guitar World and was widely positioned as the successor to Eddie Van Halen. Their fourth album was a substantial creative achievement that the marketplace declined to receive. The lead singer continues to perform their material into 2026. The guitarist has played in public exactly twice since 1991 — at a Brooklyn club reunion show in April 2007 — and has otherwise lived quietly on Staten Island for thirty-five years. A retrospective on White Lion, and on the fact that the band's most interesting story is what the guitarist did not do after September 1991.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 05 · · 15 min read

  5. After Kyrie: Mr. Mister and the Album That Could Not Be Welcome to the Real World

    Their previous album had spent two weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 and produced two consecutive number-one Hot 100 singles. The follow-up, released twenty-two months later, peaked at number 55, generated one Top 30 single, and effectively ended the band's commercial career. The standard rock-history vocabulary calls Go On... a flop. The accurate framing is more complicated, and substantially more interesting.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 04 · · 13 min read

  6. Signal Lost: The One-Album Career of an AOR Band That Arrived Two Years Too Late

    In April 1989, four working Los Angeles musicians finished recording one of the most accomplished AOR albums of the decade at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. Their producer believed it was the best work he had ever done. Their label dropped them within months of its release. The lead vocalist — already established through King Kobra, soon to be established through Unruly Child — would later transition and lose access to the music industry that had built her career. A retrospective on Signal's Loud and Clear, the album that should have sold millions, and on Marcie Michelle Free, the singer who carried its eight months of work into the rest of her life until her death in October 2025.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 04 · · 14 min read

  7. The Band She Built: Vixen, Jan Kuehnemund, and the Limits of the Female Bon Jovi

    She started the band in 1973 in a Saint Paul high school. She moved it to Los Angeles in 1981. She fought for it across four decades, through three substantially different lineups and one lawsuit she filed to keep the name. She died of cancer in 2013. The body of work she built — two commercial peaks separated by years of structural difficulty — represents one of the more under-credited careers in late hair metal. A retrospective on Vixen, the band that almost everyone called the female Bon Jovi, and on the guitarist whose forty-year creative project the band actually was.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 03 · · 14 min read

  8. Don't Know What You Got: Cinderella and the Voice That Disappeared Overnight

    In four years, they made three records that travel further than almost any of their commercial peers managed in entire careers — from teased-hair glam metal to dustbowl blues-rock, with one of the genre's strongest songwriters at the center of the journey. Then his voice stopped working, and the journey ended. A featured retrospective on the Philadelphia band whose creative trajectory was one of the cleanest of the era and whose ending was one of its quietest tragedies.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 03 · · 20 min read

  9. The Singer the Label Wanted: Femme Fatale and the One Album That Wasn't Supposed to Be the Only One

    MCA Records signed them. MTV played them. Cheap Trick took them on tour. Their manager developed brain cancer mid-promotion and the label decided they'd rather keep the singer than the band. A look at Femme Fatale's 1988 debut — the album that should have been the start of a career and instead became the entirety of one — and at the singer who has spent thirty-six years building a different kind of music life around the eighteen months when the major-label commercial infrastructure briefly noticed her.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 03 · · 14 min read

  10. Cut from the Same Cloth: Rough Cutt and the Bands That Outgrew Them

    Mentored by Dio, managed by his wife, signed to Warner Bros., opening arenas for the biggest metal acts in America. Rough Cutt had every advantage a 1980s Los Angeles hard rock band could have, and almost none of the success. By the time the band dissolved in 1987, the catalog of musicians who had passed through their ranks read like a list of who actually made it in mid-1980s metal. A retrospective on a band whose history is mostly the history of the bands that emerged from it.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 02 · · 14 min read