Nelson on Hair-Metal Past, Finding Nashville and Honoring Their Father
It’s been 25 years since Nelson, the twin brother glam-metal duo of Gunnar and Matthew Nelson, rocketed to fame, blond manes blowing behind them on MTV, with the Number One hit “(Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection.” Their story was akin to those of most successful bands of that genre around that time: fast fame met an even faster decline as pop-metal fell out of favor. But Nelson always had an ace in the hole: the musical and lyrical chops passed on to them by their father, Ricky Nelson. While their image may have been outlandish and instantly dated — a flashing Logan’s Run of an expiration date — the songs underneath all that studio polish were not.
Fed up with the Sunset Strip scene in L.A., or what was left of it in the wake of the grunge revolution, the siblings decamped for Nashville after crossing paths with songwriter Gary Burr at a festival in Indonesia in 1995. He encouraged them to visit Music City, convinced the tunesmiths would fit right in. After playing a songwriters round at the Bluebird Café, the duo agreed Burr was right. Gunnar moved almost immediately, while Matthew split his time between Los Angeles and Tennessee.
Right around that time, Nelson signed to Warner Reprise and began recording their first country album. A full decade before Eighties/Nineties peers Bon Jovi released “Who Says You Can’t Go Home,” the brothers were already mining the new Nashville sound — it just never saw the light of day.
“A lot of people don’t know this, but we made half an album with Josh Leo producing. It was the tail end of the Garth and Shania boom. We had been in town a while, writing with Victoria Shaw, Gary Burr, Gary Nicholson and had a pretty amazing repertoire of good country songs with great writers,” says Matthew. “We made half the album and were taken out to dinner by the head of marketing at Warner. Halfway into the appetizers, he said, ‘I have you here because I’m going to be dropping you from the label.’ We thought it was a joke. We said, ‘Did you not like the music?’ He said, ‘I haven’t heard a note. But nobody would think it was real, so we’re dropping you.'”
Gunnar says it’s the same treatment the brothers’ famous father received when he tried to do anything that wasn’t in line with his teen idol past, including forming the Stone Canyon Band, his group merging country and rock.
“We’ve experienced the same kind of bias our father always had to overcome,” says Gunnar of their TV star dad, who rose to fame on the family sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet before becoming a pop singer with blue-eyed covers like “I’m Walkin’.” “He was always a guy who, by the critical press, was treated guilty until proven innocent. He always had to fight for respect. He’d be in crowds of 10,000 people but only paying attention to the one critic flipping him the bird.”