36 Years Later, Warrant’s Cherry Pie Still Sounds Like Being Young
By Seth Metoyer, MetalCrawlspace.com
On September 11, 1990, Warrant released their second album, Cherry Pie. That makes the record 36 years old today, which feels slightly impossible to type.
Warrant—and really that entire late-'80s/early-'90s wave of glam and hair metal—takes a lot of shit these days. The clothes were ridiculous, the videos could be absurd, and every band seemed legally required to own several cans of Aqua Net and at least one industrial wind machine. I get it. Still, some things fall under the category of: you had to be there.
When Cherry Pie hit in 1990, it landed like a lightning bolt. MTV was still one of the great cultural delivery systems of American adolescence, and a music video could turn a song into an event. A new album meant going somewhere and physically buying the damn thing. Then somebody had to unwrap the cassette, shove it into the deck and decide what everyone in the car was going to hear.
My strongest memory of Cherry Pie starts with my friend Chad getting paid on a Friday. He laid carpet for a living. He was often tired after work, but that night, he was in an exceptionally good mood. He had money in his pocket and went out and bought the cassette. He picked me up, threw the cassette into the tape deck and went driving, because that was apparently one of the primary responsibilities of being a teenager around 1990.
Chad also had one of the most offensive car-stereo philosophies I have ever encountered. He would turn the bass completely down, crank the treble all the way up, and then turn the whole thing up ridiculously loud. I hated his mixing style. Thirty-six years later, I can practically hear it.
We eventually pulled into a burger joint with the windows down. Chad rewound “Cherry Pie” several times, blasting it from the car and doing what teenage boys have attempted to do since the invention of transportation: impress girls who were probably paying absolutely no attention to us.
Strangely enough, though, “Cherry Pie” itself was never the song on that album that really got me. That was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
If you know, you know.
That acoustic opening. The atmosphere. Jani Lane’s voice. The dark storytelling. Then the moment when the electric guitars come crashing through the door. That song had everything I loved about music at the time.
There’s an interesting bit of history attached to that feeling, too. The album Cherry Pie was originally supposed to be titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Jani Lane later explained that the record was essentially finished when Columbia Records pushed him for another obvious single. Lane wrote “Cherry Pie,” the label heard the hit, and suddenly the song became the title track, the video, the image and eventually the thing Warrant would forever carry around its neck. Lane himself later named “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” among his favorite Warrant songs.
That makes perfect sense to me. “Cherry Pie” captured an era, but “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” showed how good Jani Lane actually was.
Then there was “I Saw Red.” Power ballads were serious business in those days. Every metal kid had them lurking somewhere among the heavier stuff, and “I Saw Red” absolutely made it onto one of my slow mix tapes.
Yes, a slow mix tape. Another sentence requiring the disclaimer: you had to be there.
Making a mix tape took effort. You selected the songs, figured out how much room remained on Side A, tried to stop the recording before the DJ started talking and occasionally sacrificed a song because the tape ran out with thirty seconds left. A mix tape became this weird handmade document of whatever emotional catastrophe or romantic fantasy occupied your brain that month.
“I Saw Red” earned its place on mine.
I never actually owned the album Cherry Pie back then, so most of my experience with the full album came through Chad’s cassette deck. That means I remember the record less as an object sitting in my collection and more as scenery: driving around, burger joints, Little League baseball games, friends, summer nights and Friday paychecks. I remember thinking about whatever life might look like after high school, even though none of us actually understood what “after high school” meant yet.
That may explain why arguing about whether Warrant was “good” feels almost beside the point to me now. Music becomes attached to geography, people, smells, cars, streets, relationships and versions of ourselves that disappeared decades ago.
You hear four seconds of a guitar riff and suddenly some neurological trapdoor opens beneath you. You're sixteen again, sitting in somebody else's car with the windows down while your friend has absolutely destroyed the EQ by removing all the bass. Somehow, everything ahead of you still feels enormous.
Warrant released plenty of music beyond the three songs I associate most strongly with Cherry Pie, and Jani Lane proved many times that he had considerably more depth as a songwriter than the band's most famous video suggested. Yet those three songs—“Cherry Pie,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “I Saw Red”—have stayed with me for 36 years.
At this point, I'm not sure I even hear them purely as songs anymore. They're coordinates, little markers pointing toward a place in my life that doesn't exist now except in memory.
And every once in a while, somebody hits rewind.
