Sometimes it's a bitch

[David]

Originally Posted by drzubritsky

But for the most part, my feeling is that recording a couple of hair-metal lite songs at that particular time was an incredibly ill-advised move. That genre was rapidly becoming stale in 1991 after ruling the charts for a few years. Jumping onto this bandwagon with Bon Jovi and Bret Michaels for the Timespace singles made Stevie seem even more unhip and outdated.

Plus, somebody (?) put together a touring band for her the same year that was equally ill-advised & inappropriate for her. It had a bunch more of those hair-metal lite musicians, only they didn't even have the stature of Bret Michaels & Jon Bon Jovi. But man did they play loudly. The effect of their bombast with her inability to hit tone -- as well as her clothes onstage -- was embarrassing. It was about as far as you could get from the great, sexy rock star who wrote "Dreams" fifteen years earlier in a genuinely classic rock band (I've always hated the term 'classic rock' because there's a huge difference between a classic & a stunted perennial).

Nonetheless, Stevie's fans continued to applaud her that year. They wrote concert reviews for fanzines, asserting, unbelievably, that she "had never sounded better" (indicating an inability not only to judge literature or poetry but to hear well). 1991 was Stevie's worst year -- & her fans' worst year, too. I saw the concert at Concord Pavilion. The highlight of the show was a fist & shove fight between two lesbians in the next row.