Here it is: The song that killed the power ballad.

There were bands who had hits with power ballads after Steelheart killed the genre to death with “I’ll Never Let You Go (Angel Eyes)” (download), but not many, and in the months A.S. (After Steelheart), this type of song was increasingly regarded as a novelty. (Firehouse’s noxious “Love of a Lifetime,” for instance. Feh.)

Look, every genre, sub-genre, and sub-sub-genre has a lifespan, and they all follow pretty much the same arc:

1. Some genius reinvents the wheel
2. A few more geniuses perfect said reinvention
3. The lemming stampede begins
4. Whatever anybody loved about the new genre is lost to endless, crass repitition

“I’ll Never Let You Go (Angel Eyes)” is Step Four in a nutshell. Technically, there’s really nothing wrong with it, as far as power ballads go, but in the context of the ten years of rock & roll that came before it, it’s nothing more than a craftily engineered tracing of a ditto of a mimeograph of a Xerox. Where was anybody supposed to go from here?

(The answer, in case you really wanted to know, is “To the store to buy a copy of Nevermind.”)

I mean, shit, check out this video. You can almost picture a young Scott Stapp wearing out his VHS dub:

Steelheart’s lead singer, Mike Matijevic, would pay dearly for his crimes against rock music, as outlined in the below paragraph, which I swear to God I cut and pasted directly from the band’s Wikipedia entry:

The show took place on Halloween night, a night which will forever be remembered by Steelheart fans. While performing, “Dancing in the Fire,” a hit from the “Tangled in Reins” album, Matijevic decided to climb a lighting truss, which was inproperly secured. Matijevic tried to dodge the massive rig, but without success. The 1000 pound truss hit Matijevic on the back of the head, driving one of the greatest vocalists of all time, face first into the stage, breaking his nose, cheekbone, jaw and twisting his spine. Matijevic miraculously found the strength to walk off the stage and he was immediately taken to a hospital. “Steelheart” ended that night, after a very impressive career.

But wait! Don’t cry for Matijevic, tender readers! Like any other singer with half a hit under his belt, he ended up reforming “the band” a few years later, and is presumably still big in Monaco and/or Japan. I have no idea whether he can still hit those terrifying notes at the end of this song — I searched in vain for recent live performances on YouTube — but hey, either way, he’ll always have the summer of 1991, and he’ll always be the guy who murdered the power ballad.

Criminy, it’s already the 22nd? I’ve still got a list of power ballads a mile long. Where did the time go?

Well, I promised some controversial picks, so here’s one for you: the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” (download).

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Calm down, people. I know that many of you — like that bothersome asscrack Jason — think that power ballads began and ended in the ’80s, and were recorded only by a very specific type of band, blah blah blah. I disagree. It’s about the song, not the band — and even if it is about the band, hey, here’s a group that was rocking out in a drunken stupor not three years prior to this horrible song’s release, and next thing you know, wham! They’re growing tits and crying about love.

I do believe that the power ballad seemed to die for awhile — in fact, I think it was killed by one song in particular, which we’ll cover here tomorrow — but if there was ever a band poised to resurrect it, that band was the Goo Goo Dolls. Rocking out convincingly sure wasn’t selling them any records, and when they managed to put together an honest-to-God great hard pop album in 1993’s Superstar Car Wash, the world yawned, hit the snooze button, and rolled over. The band was on its last legs when it scored a surprise hit with 1995’s “Name” (also a ballad, but lacking the cartoonish melodrama of “Iris”), and when the time came to follow it up, there was really only one way they could go.

We’ve seen that way, and it sucks, a lot. But it’s hard to begrudge the Goo Goos their “artistic choices” over the last ten years, and they do still eke out a passable single once in awhile. Heavy rotation on VH1 might not be what the boys from Buffalo were aiming for when they started out, but it sure beats working at a car dealership.

Any month-long discussion about power balladry would be incomplete without some mention of today’s pack of melodic rockers. Night Ranger did, after all, help bring the power ballad to the MTV masses, what with “Sister Christian” and all; they did it so effectively, in fact, that some of us still can’t listen to “Sister Christian” without retroactively wishing hot death on Martha Quinn and/or Mark Goodman. (J.J. Jackson, however, will always be okay in my book.)

So. No “Sister Christian” today. But even minus that song, Night Ranger’s catalog is riddled with power ballads. The band always knew it existed mostly outside the hard rock Venn diagram, often joking that its music was more “stainless steel” than heavy metal, and perhaps as a result, its power ballads tended to be more agreeable than most.

We focus today on the last three releases of Night Ranger’s major-label career: 1985’s 7 Wishes, 1987’s Big Life and 1988’s Man in Motion. Even as its chart stock plummeted, the band continued to bring the p-ball goodness. Witness: In 1985, p-ball fans were treated to “Goodbye” (download), in which a sparkling web of shittily miked acoustic guitars collides with squealing electrics, big drums, and Kelly Keagy’s earnest vocals. Goodbye, RIAA certifications! Goodbye!

Two years later, the band served up “Hearts Away” (download), which retained the Keagylicious vocals, big guitars, and thundering drums, but — this being 1987 and all — swapped out the acoustic guitars for a pillowy bed of synths. Dig the faux-baroque bit in the middle!

Finally, for its MCA swan song, the band pulled out all the stops with “I Did It for Love” (download). All bets are off here: Keagy Keagies as he’s never Keagied before over a wall of hideous gated drums, the synths crash and squeedle, the guitars tastefully buzz, and the lyrics smartly presage George Costanza’s “It’s not you, it’s me” speech, still nearly a decade away:

I did it
I did it
I did it for love
Now you wanna know
Why I let you go
I did it for love

They were prophets, really.

Speaking of John Kalodner John Kalodner, here’s a band he entered in the American power-ballad sweepstakes at exactly the right moment. We all like to think of David Coverdale (and Tawny Kitaen) as having sprouted like mushrooms from the fetid depths of an album-rock station in Cleveland, but in reality, Coverdale had been kicking around with Whitesnake since the late ’70s, after leaving Deep Purple. Initially Whitesnake was sort of an electric blues band, but over time, Coverdale started to realize where his bread could be buttered, and by the early ’80s, the band was releasing albums with titles like Slide It In.

And then along came Kalodner (Kalodner), who shepherded the band through its Geffen debut, a re-recorded version of Whitesnake. (Technically speaking, the band was pretty much Coverdale at this point, as he had recently fired everyone, something he seems to enjoy doing every few years; in this case, Coverdale’s pink slip frenzy necessitated the hiring of guitarist Adrian Vandenberg, who, I assure you, we will someday be meeting over at Cutouts Gone Wild!.)

Anyway, uh, Whitesnake sucked, or sucks — it’s hard to tell, because Coverdale has been breaking up and reforming the band on a regular basis since 1994 — and so do “Here I Go Again” (download) and “Is This Love” (download). I submit that, were it not for Kitaen’s participation in both of the songs’ videos, they would not have been nearly as popular; rock listeners would have thought that Robert Plant was just having an off day and changed the station.

But they were big hits. In fact, “Here I Go Again” had been a big it before, in Britain, during one of Whitesnake’s six dozen earlier incarnations. I know this not because I am a Whitesnake scholar, but because of Wikipedia, where I also learned the following:

The song was written by lead singer David Coverdale and former Whitesnake guitarist Bernie Marsden. The most notable differences between the original and revamped version are the style of the music (blues vs. rock) and a slight change in the lyrics. The chorus of original version features the lines:

“An’ here I go again on my own
Goin’ down the only road I’ve ever known
Like a hobo I was born to walk alone”

whereas the newer version is:

“Like a drifter I was born to walk alone”

The change was made because even before finishing writing and recording the 1987 album, Coverdale had decided to release a new version of “Here I Go Again” as one of the singles. He was afraid an American audience might think he was singing “Like a homo I was born to walk alone” so he had the lyrics changed.

Wikipedia isn’t always a reliable source of information, so the above might not be true, but I’m praying it is.

Popular rock mythology says the great shift from hair metal to grunge happened the week Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous out of the top spot on Billboard’s Top 200, but this isn’t entirely accurate — not only because Dangerous, Slash cameo notwithstanding, isn’t a hair metal album, but because the genre had been winding down for some time. In any dying industry, mergers aren’t uncommon, and so it was with so-called “melodic rock” in the late ’80s; witness Night Ranger’s Jack Blades, Styx’s Tommy Shaw, and Ted Nugent’s Ted Nugent, who joined together under the guidance of John Kalodner John Kalodner to form the hard rock accountant’s wet dream, Damn Yankees.

Like most supergroups, DY was never more than the sum of its parts; both of its albums were long on volume and short on brains. The band always had Blades and Shaw’s vocal blend going for it, but their songs were essentially parking lot rock by numbers. Give them credit for leading off their first album with a hard-rocking single, “Coming of Age”; dock them points for crafting said single into a witless paean to pedophilia.

And then there’s “High Enough” (download), a thunderbolt of AOR bombast that took the power ballad very near to its logical conclusion. Predictably, it was a bigger hit than Blades, Shaw, or Nugent had enjoyed in years, but it really hasn’t aged well, unless you consider androgynous harmonies, unnecessary strings, and thermonuclear guitar solos to be primary ingredients in a timeless rock song. (And hey, given how well certain bands continue to sell, maybe they really are timeless.)

I digress. In order to fully appreciate this song, you need to see the video. Yes, Virginia, there was a time when Jack Blades’ ten-dollar sunglasses and Michael Cartellone’s beehive mullet were cool — and a time when Ted Nugent could kick down a door and deliver a hysterical solo in a hail of bullets, all while wearing one of Bea Arthur’s housecoats, and no one blinked an eye:

The Yankees scored another power ballad hit two years later with “Where You Goin’ Now” (download), essentially a retooled “High Enough” with cleaner guitars and a less humorous video. Again, give ‘em credit — this was the fall of ‘92, and rockers from Warrant to Bad Company were discovering they were past their sell-by dates, but Damn Yankees managed to retain a foothold on pop radio playlists into early ‘93.

Still, though, when Blades and Shaw returned to their respective bands, and Nugent went back to his full-time gig as a reality television star in waiting, few tears were shed. Damn Yankees were the AOL Time Warner of rock — sort of fun for a minute, but never meant to last.

Today’s Power Ballad was chosen in honor of Matt Nathanson, whose new record, Some Mad Hope, was released this week. Don’t understand what Matt Nathanson has to do with power ballads? Read on.

About seven years ago, I had the privilege of opening for Matt. The “band” was an acoustic power(less) trio — me on vocals and my good friends Pete and Fred on rhythm and lead guitars, respectively. The show was in Berkeley; unfortunately, Pete was in Napa and Fred was in Nashville, so rehearsal time? Not so much. The show was a train wreck. Pete broke two strings and decided to switch to electric bass mid-set, Fred didn’t know some of the material, and I was my usual uninspired/uninspiring self. I ended by telling the audience that I was going to go and drown myself in the toilet.

Matt Nathanson, on the other hand, was flawless. Say what you will about his songs, but as a performer, he’s terrific. He had the crowd eating out of his hand for the duration of his set — a set he finished with a rousing singalong cover of “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” (download). Which is why I sort of like that song now, against my will. Fortunately for me, he didn’t perform “Something to Believe In” (download).