Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Tuesday Tuneage
Badlands - "Winter's Call"
1989

Badlands' Wikipedia page reads like a combination of Behind The Music and This Is Spinal Tap. To wit:

- Their unreleased third album finally found light of day … in a 1998 release, in Japan.

- The guitarist and vocalist traded barbs in separate issues of Kerrang! magazine, and at one show the vocalist interrupted the show to pull out the Kerrang! issue with the guitarist's shots and shouted: "There's two sides to every story!" While he did this, the guitarist mouthed: "It's all true."

- Also, a reference to Desmond Child (of course); "working on one of his muscle cars"; and the fact that the band was made up of various former members of Ozzy Osbourne's band, Dio-era Black Sabbath, and a future member of Kiss. (And some of these were the same person.)

A Badlands fanboy (there was one?) obviously pirated part of this page, with such gushing sentiments as:

With melodic sensibilities and solid chops, each member of the band proved a cornerstone creatively, while presenting energetic live shows with flawless musicality.

Despite all the tensions in the band, they proved ever a 'Musician's Favourite' (*Tuesday Tuneage Editor's note: Brit spelling of "Musician"? Hmmmm.*) group, prompting all with musical talent to attend as many of their shows as possible, due to their 'jam it out' live shows, never offering the same show twice.

The truly impressive thing about Badlands' Wikipedia page is that if you look at the "years active", there are NO GAPS. Hardly any band formed ten years ago or more contains no such gaps in its Wikipedia page, because rock bands always reunite, and always to score nostalgia bucks. See, NO GAPS = NO REUNIONS. Good for you, Badlands, way to stick to your principles. (Then again, there's the very real probability that nobody is clamoring for a Badlands reunion, aside from the British fan who gushed about them on Wikipedia.)

After hearing Badlands, I can tell why on listens to Z-Rock I gravitated towards the like of Sabbath-heads/proto-stoner-rockers Trouble. I would have written about them instead, but their Wikipedia page just isn't funny.