Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Rocktober Hair Band Song #8: "Don't Treat Me Bad" by FireHouse

Charlotte-based FireHouse is another one of those bands that probably arrived on the hair band scene just a little too late.  But they did have some surprising success in the few years before grunge took the fun out of hard rock music.

They formed in 1989, and their eponymous debut album was released a year later.  It went to #21 on the Billboard album charts and eventually went double platinum.  The band followed that up with 1992's Hold Your Fire, which got up to #23 on the album charts, and 1995's 3, which topped out at #66.  The band did have seven songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100, including two Top 10 power ballads -- Love of a Lifetime (#5) and "When I Look Into Your Eyes" (#8) -- and two other Top 40 songs -- "Don't Treat Me Bad" (#19) and "I Live My Life For You" (#26).  The band even won the Favorite Heavy Metal/Hard Rock New Artist award at the 1992 AMAs, beating out Nirvana and Alice in Chains for the honor.  And to top it off, as far as I know, no one in FireHouse ever died because of heroin.  Suck on that, grunge!

I'm going with "Don't Treat Me Bad" because it's the first FireHouse song I ever heard, likely because it was the first single they released and it was a Top 20 song.  It's catchy as all get up, building from that chuck-a-chuck acoustic guitar in first verse to the electric release in the chorus.  And let's not forget the message, which I think some of our politicians could stand to abide by these days:  you can do anything, but don't treat me bad.

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