In Bull Durham, Kevin Costner’s character Crash Davis chides Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) for his laziness and lack of focus on the game of baseball. “You got a gift,” he says. “When you were a baby, the gods reached down and turned your right arm into a thunderbolt. You got a Hall-of-Fame arm, but you’re pissing it away.”
Likewise, when Michael Bolotin (later, Bolton) was born, the gods reached down and gave him lungs of reech Coreenthian leather—a multi-octave range, filtered through a gruff, almost sandpaper-like delivery. But saying Bolton can sing is like saying George Bush can speak English: big deal, what’s he done with it? The issue is context. His early solo work in the 70s was crap—miscast as a Joe Cocker wannabe, he tried his hand crooning stuff like “These Eyes” and “Time is on My Side,” with no particular distinction. His two-album stint as the lead singer of Blackjack was similarly underwhelming—muddy production and faceless instrumentation (by Bruce Kulick, Sandy Gennaro, and Jimmy Haslip, all of whom would go on to more distinctive work elsewhere) left the listener feeling damaged in some significant way.
No, it was shortly after Blackjack, 1983 and ‘84 to be exact, when Bolton found a niche that worked—that of the arena rock god. On both his self-titled ‘83 album and Everybody’s Crazy, which followed the next year, he was backed by flashy, hairsprayed sidemen, who provided the echoed drums and WEE-diddly-diddly gee-tar that helped put Bolton on the road, opening for Ozzy, Loverboy, and their corporate rawk brethren. In arena rock, he found a musical backdrop where his tendency toward histrionics fit, where it was even encouraged. Had he stayed with that style, who knows what might have become of him? He could be co-headlining with Poison this summer, or releasing a Journey-like comeback record through Wal-Mart. (more…)
Two years later, armed with a new vision of an R&B/rap hybrid that could take over the pop charts, Farian assembled a crack lineup of expatriate-American vocalists in his studio outside Frankfurt. He named his new act Milli Vanilli, and later claimed the phrase meant “positive energy” in Turkish. (In fact, the phrase translates directly as “National Vanilli.”) Forsaking glamour in his search for the ideal marriage of voices and songs — he even released the group’s album in a plain black-and-white sleeve, to preserve an air of mystique — Farian emerged with an irresistible sound that dominated first the European charts, and then American pop radio for much of 1989.
Epic was probably feeling bulletproof at the time. They had forced the band into accepting songs from outside sources, or else they’d be dropped. The band, grudgingly, agreed, and the first single, the non-Cheap Trick-written “The Flame,” was a Number One smash. Epic played it even safer with the second single, a cover of Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel,” and were rewarded with yet another Top Five hit. (To be fair, this was the obvious choice for second single.) However, with two consecutive Top 5 singles under their belts, Epic clearly thought that this outside writer’s thing was what Cheap Trick needed all along, and so when it came to the third single, they went with a song written by one of the most successful – and most hated – factory writers of all time: Diane Warren.