Jack Russell's Great White: When 'Letting The Audience Sing' Makes Sense and Rocks

Today's post is from our friend HIM. 

 

Let’s get one thing straight: no one comes out of this story smelling like a rose. So don’t stab and jab when a caveat is in place.

 
That said, Jack Russell and Great White are a train wreck of potential and success, hubris and failure, disingenuousness and sincerity. Pick a side and then make sure you get ready to move. Then again, this isn’t a Queensryche tale. It isn’t a pitched battle between a singer who lost it (sadly) and a band who gained it back (purportedly).

What it is is far more nuanced: an addict who is always going to be an addict and an addict who now isn’t. One, Mark Kendall, controls the band that the other once claimed. The other, Russell, claims a version of that band that is now his showcase. In between, there were heart-wrenching tragedies. Questions of intent. Notes of regret. And some of the most graphic displays of “helping a friend while hurting him too” that have ever been splashed across media outlets. I won’t pick sides save to say this: hurting a friend to help him is one thing. Harming him to help yourself is quite another. I let others decide how that shakes out with Great White (now a band split in two).

That's Jack Russell’s Great White. Not Great White. Even if most people, even on this site, probably don’t give a passing glance to the difference. I don’t think a lot of people really care. Both versions operate in a shadow world that bumps up against the newest version of Ratt and the next “big thing” that packs the house in your local bar. They are scraping by while doing so on the laurels of their time as one band. But now they are two.

 

So why bother with that exegesis? Especially when I consider most of Great White’s catalog to be Zep-lite in a world where Page already did that with far more (though less) results? It doesn’t help that they were cheesy-sleazy when it didn’t matter. Nor does their success equate to quality. I always found them to be “middling” at a point when metal was already trending down. Hard earned success? Sure. Glommed on fads ill-suited to their style? Yup. They were a cover band, doing Zep via ZZTop, while the Fabulous Thunderbirds drove past them and they, White as they were, tried to “hook” fans on the idea of blues-meet-metal-meets-rock. Not novel. But it did land. For a while.

 

A more simple answer to the same question? Russell inspired fans in a way I still can’t quite figure out. And I witnessed it years ago, when Great White was still singular and still featured him. Then, as now, it was tragic: a fallen hero, oddly shaped after years of abuse, sounding amazing. When he opens his mouth, and when he is not drunk or medicine-addled, he defies what constitutes reason. That person, on that stage, should not sound like that. Yes, it is a bit shriller. But I submit for your consideration: David Lee Roth. Don Dokken. Mark Slaughter. How does Russell make sense?

 

In a sense, he doesn’t. But that is the magic. When he is on, he is on. When he isn’t sliding (he did recently), he gives the lie to his former bandmates. He actually makes them look sad, pathetic. The new and still-named Great White has a great singer in former XYZ leader Terry Ilous. Russell has at least one former member of the still-named band and a few others to round out his version. Who wins? No one really.

 

Here’s the thing though: when Russell holds out his mic and let’s the fans sing, they do it because they have to do it. When others do it, it often feels forced. Russell is no angel. His former bandmates are not evil. I wish them all the best. But I will sing for Russell because I want to do so, not because I have to do so. He is no idol. He is no poster boy. And yet, he embodies so much of what we love—and hate—about music.

 

Long live rock. Long live the sing-a-longs that move you. And respect to mere mortals, flaws and all, who still inspire us to be better than them and equal to what their music makes us feel.