Monthly Archives: March 2026

A to Z of Making It, Derivative Works, Influenced, Music, My Stories, Unsung Heroes

Ross The Boss – Heyday: The Record That Refused to Belong Anywhere

Ross the Boss is gone.

Most people will stop the story at Manowar. Big sound, bigger mythology. Steel, leather, and volume turned into identity.

But that’s only half the truth.

Because in 1994, when rock was busy cannibalising itself into subgenres and scenes, Ross dropped “Heyday”. One album. No follow-up. No safety net. And now… not even on streaming.

Which makes it dangerous.

Because you can’t casually consume it. You have to commit to it.

Ross wrote a manifesto in the liner notes:

“When I started playing guitar, it didn’t matter what type of Rock ‘N’ Roll you played, it was all just called ROCK! It hadn’t yet become so segregated into so many labeled categories.

Now, after twelve allums, I find myself, once again, going against the grain of the “mainstream”, playing the music that I choose to – and just having a great time with it.

So whether the mainstream becomes the underground; or the underground becomes the mainstream, Heyday is going to ROCK!”

That’s not nostalgia. That’s defiance.

By ’94, rock had fractured into tribes, grunge, metal, alternative, punk revival and let’s not mention how many labels hard rock and metal went into, each one building fences to keep the others out.

And Ross? He walks straight through all of them.

Blues rock. NWOBHM. New York punk. Glam attitude.

No permission. No alignment.

If the world narrows, you widen.

This wasn’t a solo indulgence. This was a unit: Ross the Boss on guitar, Charlie Cayte on vocals, Richie Fazio on drums and Erik Boyd on bass.

Charlie Cayte is the ghost in this machine. One of those singers who should’ve been everywhere… but got caught in the wrong year.

Because by 1994, the industry had already decided what rock shouldn’t sound like.

Mine Tonight

It starts with a riff that doesn’t ask, doesn’t build, doesn’t tease, it arrives.

Immediate. Violent. Alive.

“Now I’m aware of mine, are you aware of yours?”

That line hits because most people aren’t.

They hesitate. They soften. They hide behind ambiguity.

This song doesn’t.

Know what you want. Say it. Most people never do, and that’s why they never get it.

Mother Mary

This should have been massive. Arena chorus. Built for thousands.

Instead, it got buried.

“Mother Mary did you make the people, or did we make you?”

That’s not rebellion, it’s interrogation.

We build belief systems, then kneel to them. Religion, careers, identities. We forget we created them in the first place.

“I’ve been prayin’ for so long, to someone I don’t know…”

That’s existential drift.

If you don’t choose your beliefs consciously, you’ll spend your life serving them unconsciously.

A Matter of Time

Blues creeps in. Not as a genre, as a truth.

“To wait for the right moment was my first mistake.”

There is no right moment.

There’s only the moment you either take, or lose.

“I was born too early, and you were born too late.”

Timing isn’t romantic. It’s ruthless.

Hesitation doesn’t protect you, it erases you.

Brown Eyed Girl

A Van Morrison classic, dragged through a louder, dirtier filter.

Less nostalgia. More movement.

It’s not trying to improve the original, it’s reclaiming it. Making it live in this band’s world.

And that’s the point of covers when they work: not tribute, transformation.

Private Hell

This is where the album turns inward.

“I built the inferno…”

That’s the line.

Because people love blaming the fire, but not building it.

“Now a key’s been handed down my way…”

Recognition is the key. Not escape.

The moment you admit you built the problem is the moment you gain the power to dismantle it.

Movin’ On

This one swings.

You can hear echoes of Van Halen swagger and AC/DC punch. It’s reckless, fast, borderline unhinged.

“When push comes to shove, I’m gone.”

That’s freedom, but also avoidance.

There’s a fine line between movement and escape.

Reinvention is powerful, but if you never stay, you never build anything that lasts.

The Letter

The emotional core channeling Hendrix and “Little Wing”.

No metaphor. No disguise.

“What’s done is done and it can’t be changed.”

That’s it.

No modern spin. No redemption arc baked in.

Then the dagger:

“If I could call back father time… things would be the same.”

That’s self-awareness at its most brutal.

It’s not about wishing for a redo. It’s about understanding you weren’t ready to choose differently.

Don’t chase second chances. Build the mindset that wouldn’t need one.

Pack of Lies

Anger, but focused.

“You’re the first to sign the card, but the last to write the check.”

That line lands in any era.

Performative virtue. Empty signalling. Talking big, doing nothing.

Integrity is measured in action, not alignment.

Search and Destroy

A cover of Iggy Pop, but stripped of subtlety and pushed into hard rock aggression.

It’s less art-punk, more street fight.

And it works, because the band commits fully. No irony. No distance.

Back Where I Belong

Back to that EVH stomping groove. Back to weight.

“No way to know what feels right until you give it a try.”

Simple. True. Rarely followed.

People want certainty before action. Life doesn’t work that way.

Experience is the only real teacher, and it charges upfront.

It’s not just a “lost album.”

It’s a contradiction: Too late for the scene it belonged to. Too early for the nostalgia cycle that would’ve saved it. Too honest to reshape itself for trends

So it disappeared.

But that’s also why it still works.

Because it’s not tied to anything external.

It’s tied to a mindset: Play what you believe. Say what you mean. Accept the consequences.

No compromise. I called it:

“A perfect slab of hard rock.”

And it is.

But underneath that? It’s a manual.

On desire. On belief. On regret. On consequence. On owning your life, even when you get it wrong.

Most albums chase relevance. Heyday rejected it. And that’s exactly why it still matters. If you find the CD at a used store, buy it.

Rest in peace, Ross the Boss.

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Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Influenced, Music

Why Critics Never Understood Big Game

There’s something almost adorable about old rock criticism when you look at it now. Not insightful. Not prophetic. Just… something.

The review of “Big Game” isn’t really about the music. It’s about positioning. It opens by framing factions at “Kerrang!” as if championing White Lion were some kind of cultural crime. That’s the tell. The verdict is written before the riffs are even considered.

This is the late-’80s critic dilemma: if it’s melodic, if it’s polished, if it dares to aim for arenas instead of alleyways, it must be shallow.

Meanwhile, the comparison to Guns N’ Roses floats through the piece like a purity test. As if grit is automatically depth. As if sneer equals substance. It’s a false binary that rock journalism loved to sell. You’re either dangerous or disposable. Pick a side.

But melody is not the enemy of meaning. Craft is not the opposite of authenticity.

The review leans hard into the “sheen” complaint. Arena gloss. Radio ambition. The kind of production that dares to sound expensive. Bands like Van Halen get name-checked like it’s an indictment. As if clarity and scale are somehow moral failings.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: polish is a decision. In that era, it was architectural. Choruses were built to lift bodies off concrete floors. Guitars were layered to widen emotional impact. That’s not emptiness. That’s intent.

Calling the album “candy floss” is easy. It sounds clever. It’s dismissive in a way that signals superiority.

But where’s the structural breakdown?

Where’s the analysis of chord movement, the dissection of lyrical framing, the conversation about guitar phrasing? There isn’t one. It’s vibe critique. Aesthetic judgment passed off as depth.

And here’s the part critics rarely admit: they’re playing status games too. In 1989, to defend melody-forward hard rock was to risk being seen as uncool. So you preemptively strike. You align yourself with danger. You contrast, you diminish, you posture. It reads less like a musical autopsy and more like someone trying to future-proof their reputation.

Meanwhile, the record just sits there. Unbothered.

Because albums aren’t think pieces. They’re time capsules. They capture aspiration. Big choruses. Wide guitars. Earnest hooks. The desire to connect with more than a hundred sweaty bodies in a club. You can dislike that ambition. But dismissing it because it doesn’t crawl through broken glass? That’s a taste preference, not a universal law.

What’s fascinating is how often history quietly corrects critics. Hooks outlive hot takes. Melodies survive think-pieces. People return to records not because they won debates, but because they felt something when the chorus hit.

You liking this album isn’t contrarian. It’s independent. It means you’re responding to what you hear, not what you were told you should hear. That’s rarer than it sounds.

Critics optimize for the moment. Records optimize for memory.

And memory has a much longer half-life.

P.S

Everybody remembers the mythology of the 80s guitar hero.

The fast fingers. The impossible bends. The solo that feels like a lightning strike. The moment where the guitarist steps forward and the rest of the band becomes scenery.

And on “Big Game”, Vito Bratta is absolutely doing that.

The problem is… guitar hero moments don’t sell millions in records.

Songs do.

That’s the tension at the heart of White Lion’s third album. It arrived after “Pride”, which wasn’t just successful, it was culturally successful. Because it had a crossover song. Not just a metal hit, but a song that escaped the genre gravity well.

“Wait” didn’t succeed because it had the most technical guitar playing. It succeeded because everything in the song lined up: the hook, the melody, the tension in the verses, the lift in the chorus, the MTV rotation. The solo wasn’t the point, it was the emotional payoff.

That’s the thing musicians often get wrong.

Players listen for moments.

Listeners remember songs.

On “Big Game”, Bratta is arguably playing at an even higher level. His phrasing is sophisticated. The tone is surgical. There is genius tucked all over the record, little harmonic turns, fluid legato runs, those violin-like vibrato bends he was famous for.

If you’re a guitarist, it’s a feast.

But the average listener isn’t grading technique. They’re asking a simpler question:

What’s the song I play again tomorrow?

And “Big Game” never quite lands that one undeniable, gravity-defying track. It has good songs. Solid songs. But not the song.

In pop history, the pattern repeats endlessly.

The audience isn’t looking for more complexity. They’re looking for connection.

Listen carefully to his playing and you’ll hear it: he’s not shredding randomly. His solos sing. They’re constructed like vocal lines.

But albums live or die by the three-minute emotional detonations at their center.

“Pride” had one.

“Big Game” had brilliance.

And history shows us which one sells more records.

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Music, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit

The Night Axl Rose Chose Ego Over Fans: The Eastern Creek Guns N’ Roses Disaster

I’ll never watch Guns N’ Roses again. Eastern Creek was enough.

For those who weren’t there, January 30, 1993 at Eastern Creek Raceway should have been legendary. A sea of people standing in 40-degree heat. Depending on who you believe it was anywhere from 20,000 to maybe close to 100,000 fans. Either way, it was huge. And everyone there wanted the same thing, to see the biggest rock band in the world.

The day actually started the right way.

Pearls & Swine opened. I still wonder what ever happened to them. I’m sure a Google search would give me the answers.

Rose Tattoo came out swinging with that filthy slide guitar.

Skid Row were handing bottles of beer into the crowd, even though glass was banned, which was reckless and perfect and exactly what rock and roll used to feel like.

Everything about it felt dangerous and alive.

Until it didn’t.

Because then we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

The band were supposed to arrive by helicopter. Which sounds cool until you realise you’ve been standing in brutal heat for hours while nothing happens. Eventually the word spread through the crowd around 9pm: Axl Rose was still in Melbourne because he “wasn’t feeling it.”

Not sick. Not stranded. Not injured.

Just… not feeling it.

That’s the moment the magic died.

When the band finally hit the stage more than two hours late, the damage was already done. People were walking away from the show as they played. When “Paradise City” started it was the cue for a mass evacuation.

Thousands of people had missed their last trains home. Remember, this was a raceway miles from proper public transport. Fans were stranded because the frontman of the biggest band on earth decided the schedule was optional.

And that was the pattern.

This wasn’t an isolated rock-star mishap. This was behaviour.

Two years earlier at the Riverport Amphitheater on July 2, 1991, Rose spotted a fan filming the show. Instead of letting security deal with it, he jumped into the crowd himself, attacked people trying to grab the camera, came back onstage and announced:

“Thanks to the lame-ass security, I’m going home.”

Then he smashed the mic and walked off.

The crowd rioted. More than 60 people were injured. Fifteen arrests. The venue wrecked.

A year later came the infamous Montreal disaster at Olympic Stadium on August 8, 1992.

Metallica had already cut their set short after James Hetfield was badly burned by pyrotechnics. That night could have been Rose’s moment to be the hero, to carry the show, save the night, give fans something.

Instead he complained about his voice and walked off early.

The crowd exploded. Cars outside overturned. Fires lit. Windows smashed.

Hero moment… squandered.

And by 1992 the late starts had already become routine. Fans waiting hours was basically part of the ticket price.

Before the Sydney show there had already been the chaos of the Melbourne gig at Calder Park Raceway. The Victorian Ombudsman later produced a 100-page report describing what was arguably one of the worst concerts ever staged in Australia.

One line from that report says everything:

“The area later became a saturated and smelling swamp due to the heavy rains and the urine.”

Melbourne had 40 degree heat, violent winds and driving rain. Sydney just got the furnace, 40-degree heat.

Both crowds got the same treatment.

Because the shows were staged at remote racing venues, thousands of fans had no way out once transport shut down. Add brutal heat and suddenly water started selling for around $7 a bottle, which in 1993 was outrageous.

Meanwhile inside the band, things were falling apart. Rose had effectively isolated himself from the rest of Guns N’ Roses, especially Slash, largely over Slash’s involvement with Michael Jackson.

The divide was so deep Rose travelled on a completely separate helicopter, stayed in a different hotel, and even entered the stage from the opposite side.

That tells you everything.

Look, rock and roll has always had chaos. That’s part of the mythology. The danger, the excess, the unpredictability, that’s the electricity people pay to feel.

But there’s a difference between rock-and-roll chaos and just not giving a damn about the people who paid to see you.

That night at Eastern Creek, Axl Rose had a choice.

He could respect the crowd standing in brutal heat waiting for him. Or he could treat the fans like they didn’t matter.

He chose the second option.

And once you see that choice clearly, it’s very hard to unsee it.

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A to Z of Making It, Music, Unsung Heroes

When Trixter Thought the Party Would Never End – Guitar World June 1991

June 1991.  

Hair spray was a performance enhancing drug, MTV still played music, and four kids from Paramus, New Jersey had just hacked the suburban‑teen lottery.

Trixter weren’t supposed to “make it.” They were mall rats from a shopping town, grinding 200 shows a year, aiming no higher than the Meadowlands and maybe, if the gods were drunk, Madison Square Garden. Then the planets lined up: a grimy New York club called The Sanctuary, a label guy in the room, a contract on the table a week later, and suddenly they’re on MTV every hour pretending this is all just happening to them. 

That’s the moment frozen in this Guitar World interview: the exact second where the rollercoaster is still climbing and nobody hears the chain starting to rattle.

On the surface, it reads like standard early-’90s rock-mag candy.

Origin myth.

Garage rehearsals.

High-school sleep deprivation.

Parents pretending they’re annoyed but secretly proud.

Then the montage: endless club gigs, the one basement venue that matters, the industry guy who changes everything. Numbers follow, sales, tour slots, rotation, framed as disbelief.

And the quote. The wall-poster quote.

“All the fame and fortune… is great, but we’re just some dudes from a shopping town in New Jersey who play music.”

That line isn’t accidental. It’s the formula.

The band must be aspirational and accessible at the same time. Superheroes who still feel like kids from homeroom. Big enough to worship. Small enough to imagine becoming.

That’s the business model.

So is the GW interview a PR piece?

Of course it is. This is Guitar World, 1991. The structure is pure promo:

Build the myth (kids + garages + malls + mishaps).

Flex the numbers (MTV, tour slots, sales).

Humanize the product (parents, girlfriends, pizza on the bus).

End with some variation of, “We’re just grateful to be here, man.”

But buried under the sugar, Steve Brown keeps slipping you protein.

He admits they designed themselves as a teen band after reading about Def Leppard. He talks about carefully arranging guitar parts, thinking in terms of Desmond Child‑style songcraft instead of just riff‑vomiting. He’s obsessed with Van Halen’s first record and wants to capture that “as live as possible” energy on a big‑budget debut. He knows MTV rotation is a once‑in‑a‑lifetime weather pattern and they’re trying to build as many houses as possible before the storm passes.

That’s not just PR. That’s a 20‑year‑old already thinking like a lifer.

The tragic part is that no one knows the meteor is already in the air. Grunge is loading in at the other end of the decade while he’s still talking about opening for Poison. Everyone in the piece sounds certain they’ve cracked the code forever, when in reality they’ve rented a very small window in a very specific era.

It’s not deep journalism, but it accidentally becomes deep nostalgia: a time capsule of what it feels like to be young, ascending, and completely wrong about how long the ascent lasts.

So what happened when the lights finally came up?

The short version: the wave crested, then physics did what physics always does.

Trixter rode that first record hard. Tours, videos, magazine covers, the full package. Then the wheel turned. The second album didn’t hit the same, the climate shifted, radio and MTV moved on. The band dissolved in the mid‑’90s, another casualty of a genre that went from omnipresent to punchline in about as much time as it takes hair spray to dry.

Steve Brown didn’t vanish into the suburbs to sell insurance and tell bar stories about “that one time on tour.” He kept going. Other bands. Side projects. Session work. Cover gigs. Tribute projects. Reunion tours. New Trixter records. The guy turned being “that dude from Trixter” into a 30‑plus‑year career by refusing to treat the early ’90s as the peak.

This is what nobody tells kids in bands: the story doesn’t end when your video falls out of rotation. It keeps going, just on smaller stages with fewer free drinks and way more self‑awareness. It stops being about winning the rock‑star lottery and starts being about whether you actually like the work enough to do it without confetti cannons.

Steve clearly does.

So why did I bother digging through a yellowing Guitar World piece in 2026?

Because it’s the perfect diagram of how the machine used to work and, honestly, still does, just with different haircuts and platforms.

You can see:

The fantasy: four normal kids “accidentally” becoming rock stars.

The marketing: humble‑brag quotes, carefully curated struggle, the illusion that this is reproducible.

The truth leaking out the sides: obsessive grind, calculated image choices, a main songwriter already thinking like a producer.

It’s easy to mock bands like Trixter from the safe distance of hindsight. The clothes, the lyrics, the Aqua Net. But when you strip away the clichés, what’s left is familiar: talented kids trying to turn obsession into a life, trapped inside a trend they don’t control.

The interview captures the moment right before they discover a hard rule the industry never prints in glossy pull‑quotes:

You are not your chart position.  

You are not your MTV slot.  

You are what you keep doing after the world stops caring.

In 1991, Trixter thought the party would last forever.  

In 2026, Steve Brown is still playing guitar for a living.

Turns out that’s the better ending anyway.

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