Deep Cuts

Music writing for the long play

Tag

1990s rock

  1. 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

  2. The Math of Refresh: How CMC International Made a Record Label Work in the 1990s by Refusing to Behave Like One

    By 1993, the major labels had collectively decided that hair metal, AOR, and the broader 1980s commercial-rock catalog was structurally finished as a viable commercial proposition. The math no longer worked. A typical major-label rock album required gold certification — 500,000 units sold — just to recoup recording costs, promotional budgets, and the broader overhead the major-label commercial infrastructure required. The bands that had been generating multi-platinum sales five years earlier could no longer reach gold certification reliably. The majors began dropping them in sequence across 1992, 1993, and 1994. Tom Lipsky and Bill Cain, operating out of an office in Raleigh, North Carolina, looked at the same financial math the majors had looked at and reached a different conclusion. They built a record label whose entire structural premise was that the conventional commercial-rock business model had become incompatible with what working bands at the post-collapse commercial tier actually needed. The label was called CMC International. It existed from 1991 to 2000. It signed approximately forty veteran rock and metal acts the majors had dropped or abandoned, and it made money doing so.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 04 · · 12 min read

  3. Wrong Decade, Wrong Closet, Wrong Building: Enuff Z'Nuff, Strength, and the 1991 Album That Was a Power-Pop Classic Disguised as Hair Metal

    Their 1989 debut sold half a million copies and produced two MTV hits. Their guitarist was a virtuoso who would die of an overdose at 37. Their lead singer was a Beatles-obsessed songwriter who would spend the next three decades fighting addiction while continuing to make some of the most accomplished power-pop records of his generation. Their manager was the same one who built Journey. Rolling Stone called them the Hot Band of 1991. The album that should have made them stars peaked at number 143 on the Billboard 200, sold a fraction of what its predecessor had sold, and was eventually parodied on Beavis and Butthead. A Long Play on Strength, the album doomed by the band's own visual presentation.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 04 · · 13 min read

  4. Commercial Suicide: Def Leppard, Slang, and the Album That Refused to Be Hysteria

    In May 1996, the band that had built one of the most commercially perfect rock albums of the 1980s deliberately stopped making music that sounded like that album. They wrote in a Spanish house. They produced themselves without Mutt Lange for the first time in sixteen years. They cited Soundgarden's Superunknown as inspiration. They jokingly called the album Commercial Suicide while they were making it. They were not, in retrospect, joking. A long play on the album that broke Def Leppard's platinum streak and which the band continues to defend as one of the most important records they ever made.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 04 · · 14 min read

  5. 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

  6. After the Hit: Tuff, Stevie Rachelle, and the Singer Who Became the Historian

    In 1991, a Phoenix-by-way-of-Hollywood glam band had a power ballad that reached number three on Dial MTV, landing between Metallica and Guns N' Roses. Within eighteen months, Atlantic had dropped them, and the genre that defined their commercial existence was effectively over. The lead singer spent the next twenty-eight years doing something stranger and more lasting than the band's brief commercial moment: he became, from the inside, the single most consistent chronicler of the scene he had briefly belonged to. The first installment of One and Done.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 03 · · 15 min read

  7. Two Eclipses: Hardline and the Album That Couldn't Be Followed

    In April 1992, a Journey guitarist, two members of Bad English, and two brothers from Brooklyn released an arena-ready hard rock album into a marketplace that no longer existed. Ten years later, a different configuration of mostly the same band released the follow-up. Almost nobody heard either one. A look at Double Eclipse and II — the two albums that bracketed Hardline's actual commercial life, and the gap between them that made the second album the strange artifact it became.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 03 · · 16 min read

  8. The Hottest Cold Streak: Foreigner's Unusual Heat and the End of an Era

    After thirteen years and seven multi-platinum albums, Foreigner's voice walked out. The band that remained — Mick Jones, three sidemen, and an Atlantic Records frontman named Johnny Edwards — made a record that should have worked. It peaked at number 117 on the Billboard 200, the worst chart position of the band's career, and effectively ended Foreigner's run as a commercial force. A long play on the album that exposed exactly what Foreigner had always been — and what it could not be without Lou Gramm.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 02 · · 18 min read

  9. The Crumbling Empire: Queensrÿche After 1990

    In 1990, Queensrÿche made the album most progressive metal bands spend their careers chasing. Triple platinum, a top-ten single, Grammy nominations, and the kind of critical respect their genre rarely earned. Then, for the next two decades, they slowly came apart. A retrospective on the long unraveling of a band that did everything right at the wrong moment — and never recovered from being good enough to succeed.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 02 · · 28 min read

  10. Their Heaviest Mistake: The Story of Mötley Crüe's Self-Titled Album

    In 1994, the biggest glam metal band in America fired their lead singer, hired a stranger with a different voice, and made the most ambitious record of their career. It debuted at number seven on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold within seven weeks. Then the audience walked away, the tour collapsed into half-filled clubs, and within three years the experiment was over. A long play on the album that was supposed to save Mötley Crüe and instead got quietly written out of their own history.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 02 · · 18 min read

  11. What Warrant Did After the Party Ended

    Most hair metal bands of their tier released two or three albums in the 1990s and then disappeared. Warrant released eight, played every genre the decade offered, fought constantly, and produced one of the strangest discographies of any band that came out of the Sunset Strip. A retrospective on the post-Cherry Pie decade — and on three studio records that deserve to be heard for what they actually are, rather than for what their commercial trajectory suggested.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 02 · · 31 min read

  12. Lillian Axe and the Long Pursuit of a Hit

    They had Ratt's manager. They had Ratt's guitarist as their producer. They were nearly fronted by Warrant's Jani Lane. For seven years across four albums, Lillian Axe were the band the industry kept handing the right introductions to, and the audience kept walking past.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 01 · · 18 min read

  13. The Cockroach Problem: How Danger Danger Lost Five Years to a Lawsuit

    A gold debut, a respectable follow-up, and then the strangest stretch of legal and creative chaos in late hair metal. A retrospective on a band who recorded their third album twice, released the wrong version of it, and missed the only window they had left.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 01 · · 16 min read

  14. Vain Saw It Coming: A Band Watching the Door Close in Real Time

    They had the songs, the look, the magazine covers, and a debut album that critics still call a lost classic. Then their label collapsed, an ex-Guns N' Roses drummer walked into the picture, and the 1990s happened. A retrospective on a San Francisco band who kept making records nobody was listening for.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 01 · · 16 min read