When you ask people what they remember about Winger, basically only two things come up. One is their hugely successful single, “Seventeen”, which seems to validate statutory rape. The other is that the show Beavis and Butthead mercilessly slagged on the band. Stewart, the fat kid next door who was the target of the duo’s wrath, always wore a Winger shirt. That association pretty much killed the short run of bassist and frontman Kip Winger’s short little experiment in the metal world of the late eighties.

Kip Winger, a music and dance prodigy (he was actually a member of the Colorado State Ballet after dropping out of high school and finishing a GED to study music early), toured with Alice Cooper while seeking to start a metal band. He hooked up with Berklee school of music alum and guitarist Reb Beach and keyboard player Paul Taylor in New York City, with every intention to create the next big thing. Instead of just being a couple of teenagers growing out their hair, getting blown backstage, and drinking a lot of Jack Daniel’s, they wanted to create a hit machine, carefully crafting the songs with their knowledge of music theory. The band got writing in 1987, and in 1988, this self-titled debut came out.

I know everyone dismisses this album as trite hair metal. These guys all do have hairdos out of Lorael commercial, with lots of leather, mesh, and snakeskin apparel. I’m sure at least part of their popularity at the time were that the girls all wanted a piece of them, and I’m also sure their image was carefully groomed in order to utilize this as much as possible. But when you set that aside and listen to the album, you find eleven tracks of carefully crafted songs. And I guess you’d call this heavy metal, bordering on hard rock, but it’s almost like pure pop with very metal overtones on top of it. I think if the band Winger never would have happened, Beach and Winger could have made serious bank pulling a Diane Warren and penning a slew of songs to be performed by Aerosmith, Bryan Adams, and Celine Dion.

The first thing I always notice about this album is the guitar work of Reb Beach. He has a frighteningly distinct tone, and his playing warbles and sweeps through songs, forming a very solid texture. Beach reminds me of Dokken axeman George Lynch in his style and approach, except he’s a bit smoother and more accessible. I think there’s a certain line where if you cross it, a lot of non-metal people will think it’s pure noise, and the art is getting as close to that line as possible while doing really sick stuff on the fretboard. Lynch is always a little over that line, which always kept Dokken off the radio and charts. I like George Lynch’s playing a lot, but Reb Beach manages to get all of the intricate playing in there, while still making it very accessible. (And oddly enough, Beach replaced Lynch in Dokken for part of the late 90s. He was also in Alice Cooper, and is currently a member of Whitesnake. What’s even more weird is that his brother John is a very successful voice actor, and you’ve probably heard him a million times on TV.)

About the songs: they’re all, for the most part, about women and relationships, but they aren’t all-out “hey baby, you’re so hot” songs or anything. The best of them are a bit more torn and conflicted, and that probably makes them even more likeable. Their other big hit, the ballad “Headed for a Heartbreak”, is absolutely desultory in the way it lays out the words. And of course, it’s got so many hooks in the way it just pulls you through this misery. And right at the peak of it, Beach takes off in a lopsided and sorrowful guitar solo. It’s engineered so perfectly, it’s no wonder it climbed the charts.

There’s the song “Seventeen”, and yeah, it’s a little weird, but it’s also pretty catchy. I think a lot of it has to do with the riffing up to the chorus and the way Winger carefully stumbles the verse a bit before leading up to the totally harmonized chorus. Winger’s lyrics in general are just a few shades below total saccharine, but everything is either harmonized or tied to a perfectly carved synth line or in front of some strings that hit the guitar in such a way that you think these guys listened to a lot of Beatles records between music theory lessons.

There are a couple of things that don’t work. “Higher and Higher” is the bonus track (that is, of course, on every version of the album) and it doesn’t exactly fit. The album would have worked better if “Headed for a Heartbreak” faded to black. There’s also a forgettable cover of “Purple Haze” that has really odd phrasing and isn’t either metal-aggressive or true to the original as much as it is just weird. It does feature a guest solo by Dweezil Zappa, though, so that’s not bad. What is bad is that it probably influenced a lot of really bad garage bands to cover the song, like Motley Crue inspired a lot of bad covers of “Helter Skelter” by kids who thought they originally wrote it.

I’m not trying to be a Winger apologist here. I think this is a great debut, but their other stuff fell flat, and I have no idea why they’re currently touring. (I do feel bad that Winger’s wife got killed in a 1996 auto accident, and he had to deal with an incredible amount of shit there, on top of being the butt of every hair metal band joke ever.) But I do know that the songs on here rate high in the guilty pleasure department, and this CD ends up in the player a lot, especially when I’m depressed. Probably my best Winger story is that the night before I left for college, I got dumped by my girlfriend, and of course it was one of those world-ending depression things. The next morning, when I woke up early to load up the truck and leave, the alarm came on, and the song “Headed for a Heartbreak” immediately came on the clock radio. It was such a fucked-up coincidence, and the music fit so well right then. The song’s haunted me ever since. And regardless of Stewart’s t-shirt, I’ll still always enjoy listening to this disc.