In 1987, the rock band Great White burst onto the heavy metal scene with their album Once Bitten. With music videos aired on MTV’s Headbangers’ Ball and their songs getting plenty of rotation on rock radio stations, the band quickly gained a following.
That album featured a bluesy sound that was somewhat different from what was offered by most bands of the era. Tunes like “Rock Me,” “Lady Red Light,” and “Save Your Love” were appealing to rock and roll fans. Two of the three songs made it onto the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Two years later, the band released …Twice Shy and enjoyed their most significant commercial success with the remake of the song “Once Bitten, Twice Shy.” The song peaked at number five on the Hot 100 chart. Two more songs, “House of Broken Love” and “The Angel Song,” also appeared on that chart.
Great White seems underappreciated now
In total, the band had six hits on the Hot 100, nine albums made it onto the Billboard 200, and 14 songs appeared on the Mainstream Rock Airplay chart, including seven in the top 10.
They weren’t as commercially successful as some of the other bands of their era, like Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Motley Crue, and Poison, but they had plenty of success.
Yet, the band doesn’t seem to have gotten as much run out of the hair band era revival as many of their counterparts.
In the early 1990s, the popularity of heavy metal music was in decline. Copycat bands kept popping up like dandelions, seldom offering anything better than their predecessors. People grew tired of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll themes that were so prevalent with the genre.
A new generation emerged, and they found their voice in the new grunge, or alternative, rock that emerged. Lyrically, the messages were darker, more realistic. The music had a different sound to it, and bands like Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Candlebox, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, and others took over the rock and roll world.
The music of the hair band era gained a post-'80s reputation as being shallow and lacking the same realism that alternative rock offered. While the Hair Bands did fairly earn that reputation, there was growth by many of the early Hair Band groups, both lyrically and musically, that wasn’t (hasn’t) fully recognized.
Over the next decade and a half, many groups from the hair band struggled and faded away into oblivion. Their music was considered irrelevant and outdated. Then, a funny thing happened. The music enjoyed a revitalization. Not so much that new music sounded like that from the '80s, but that fans remembered why they loved that music in the first place. Nostalgia started to kick in.
Great White never seemed to regain their popularity as other bands did. Sure, their songs were making their way onto rock radio playlists, but there was just never much buzz around them. You seldom hear about them touring. There were reasons for that.
The tragic nightclub fire involving Jack Russell’s Great White
Over the decades, there have been various versions of Great White. While some former band members toured at times under the name Great White, the former lead singer toured on his own under the name Jack Russell’s Great White.
In 2003, the latter band played in a Rhode Island nightclub called the Station. During the show, some of the band’s pyrotechnics started a horrible fire that killed 100 people, and more than 200 others were injured.
From that moment on, the band never seemed to regain the credit it deserved for their powerful, blues-infiltrated rock and roll. Yes, the tragedy was horrible and avoidable, and there was plenty of blame to go around.
This incident tainted the band's overall reputation, and it was confusing to fans that there were multiple versions of the band at any given time. These could all be reasons why Great White seems nearly forgotten now.
The story around the fire is truly saddening, but that incident, tragic as it was, doesn’t change the fact that Great White had a sound that stood out within its genre, and it can, and should, be appreciated for how good the band was in its day.