Song Review - All The Way From Memphis by Contraband

I wish there was a way for me to show exactly how disgusted I was when I first heard this dreck. There was another really crappy cover of an Ian Hunter song from around this period of time - Great White's Once Bitten Twice Shy, which was admittedly a lot worse, because nobody in that awful band had anything more than middling talent.

But Contraband? This should have been a kick-ass supergroup. Their lineup was a pretty solid one. Bobby Blotzer from Ratt on drums, Vixen's Share Pedersen on bass (say what you will about Vixen, they were talented), and the dual guitar attack of Tracii Guns from L.A. Guns and guitar legend, Michael Schenker. Also, Richard Black from Shark Island on vocals. I've never heard of him either. Unfortunately, in reality, we get a band lamer than Damn Yankees, but at least I don't have to see Ted Nugent lowering himself to playing sappy power ballads with Tommy Shaw and the guy from Night Ranger trading off lead vocals.

As a side note, I have no idea why I've never touched High Enough yet on this blog. It seems right up my alley of making fun of bad music. That's now on my to do list.

What I love is that in the opening of the video, we see the logos for the bands these members were a part of and their signiture next to them. It just comes across as desperate. It feels like they're saying "Remember us? We were relevant five years ago."

But this is by the numbers, uninspired, generic hard rock without anything special setting it apart from other crap on the rock charts in 1991, aside from the fact that it's a blasphemous cover. And as I said, there's already a much more noteworthy blasphemous Ian Hunter cover.

This is shit, but even worse than that, it's boring shit. It's shit that isn't even worth the twenty minutes it took me to write about how shitty it is. So, why did I even bother?

Hell if I know. I'm gonna go listen to some Ian Hunter.

UPDATE! - 11/22/2013

During a bit of research for another blog entry I'm sort of working on (not sure if anything will come from it) on a cover of Fleetwood Mac's The Chain by a largely forgotten band called Shark Island, I remembered this entry due to the similar concept of taking a great seventies song and turning it into shitty, generic late eighties/early nineties butt rock. Both bands also have a lead vocalist in common. The guy's butchered great songs in this style before. I figured that I might as well put a link to that cover of The Chain in here just in case I never do anything with it. I'll be fair and say that the outro to the song is actually pretty damn good when it's unrecognizable as a butchered version of The Chain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY1xs3B8BU4 

Also, the video I linked to for this entry was pulled from Youtube, so I put another copy up. I'd make some snotty remark like "no need to thank me," but a better comment would be "I'm sorry for noticing that and making it easier to find this garbage," and "Seriously, Michael Schenker's better than this."