Nitro is Awesomely Bad

People often use terms like "awesomely bad," "awesomely kitsch" or "so bad it's good" to describe metal. If it's a rock critic, usually he or she is struggling to appreciate something that they don't get--isn't Iron Maiden actually just awesome? Otherwise, it's VH1 describing something that just plain sucks, like Warrant. Still, as with comic books, horror movies, and even indie rock (The Smiths are easily as funny as Judas Priest), there's a lot of great campy metal out there. But there's no song that I know of that is as stratospherically awesome and terrible as Nitro's 'Machine Gunn Eddie.'

A google search of 'Nitro' turns up with almost no results about the glam metal band, and all of their records are out of print, but the individual band members have achieved notoriety on their own. Singer Jim Gillette is famous for being able to shatter glass with his larynx and for marrying Lita Ford. Guitarist Michael Angelo Batio, Nitro's best-known asset, is the designer of the 'quad,' the four-necked guitar:

Batio also is one of the only people who can compete with Yngwie Malmsteen for ludicrously over the top shredding and masturbatory riffs. Like Malmsteen, almost all of Batio's music is really, really boring.



But Batio and the gang really got it right on 'Machine Gunn Eddie,' possibly the most extraordinary ode ever made to a gangster. 'John Wesley Harding' it ain't. This post inspired me to look up the lyrics, which are far stupider than I ever could have imagined. Musically, it's just as bad, with Batio's guitar fireworks never ending on time (like when the rest of the band cuts out, or when the song ends) and the drummer running out of ideas near the song's finale. He chooses to trounce the double bass pedal as fast as he can before going back to playing the snare beat he started with, and when the doesn't work, he tries the double bass trick again. But 'Machine Gunn Eddie' will shake up a mix CD more than countless better songs could ever hope to. Believe me, there are a lot of choices.

Were it only for Gillette's wailing introduction ("Ma-CHIIINE GU-N-N-N!") and several measures of Batio's WCW-ready guitar buildup, the song would be memorable enough. If the only good thing about this song were its three-word, scream-along chorus and piercingly high rejoinder, it would still be a pretty great relic from the hair metal era. If 'Machine Gunn Eddie' were solely notable for the part where Gillette allegedly sings two notes at once (give me a break), then, well, it would still be notable. But what really makes 'Machine Gunn Eddie' impossible to forget is the scream that Jim Gillette starts around the :48 mark of this song:



Nothing else that I've heard by Nitro is nearly as exciting or as much fun 'Machine Gunn Eddie.' But is there really any good way to follow up a song like that?