By Peter Long
If you’ve ever been to a decent karaoke bar, odds are this is in the songbook. Its catchy, easy to sing and there are so many vagina references that it could make a gynecologist cry.
“Cherry Pie” was written by Jani Lane, the now deceased former lead-singer of the band Warrant. He re-accounts the night he wrote “Cherry Pie” in this clip.
When I first saw this on VH1 I thought it was hysterical. Lane made millions upon millions of dollars because he wrote song about a vagina, and now he is overweight, balding and drunk on VH1, in that order. His life seemed like a joke. He was born John Kennedy Oswald (his mother, according to the bio he wrote himself on his website, was a “big” JFK fan and it just so happened that his father’s last name was Oswald which led him to shut down rumors that he has no connection to Lee Harvey for, evidently, the “millionth time”) and he played in a goofy band with goofy videos, with goofy wardrobe and with goofy songs. But what was once funny is now very sad.
As I look back on his death, I’ve come to the conclusion that Warrant took too much of a shellacking for being posers when there were copy-cats doing the same exact thing (in fact I can name two others both with W’s, White Snake and Winger). Looking back, Warrant was just another instrument used by big labels to make an easy buck during a time when it was guaranteed that a band could sell a million records if they wore leather pants and your lead singer looked kinda-sorta look like Bret Michaels.
Their first album, appropriately titled Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinkin’ Rich, featured the singles “Down Boys” and “Heaven” and the album went on to sell over 5 million copies. The former singles were of course accompanied by videos using the same formula that other 80’s metal bands used which included lame choreography, cheesy soundstage footage and expressions from the guys in the band that read “I’m awesome! Look at my guitar! I’m going home alone tonight!”
Cherry Pie went on to sell even more than Dirty Rotten because of the album’s title track. It was at this point in Lane’s career where things started to get shaky. He started to make an obscene amount of money off a song that The Man told him to write (see clip in second paragraph) and hence he went into a downward spiral of drug-use and alcoholism.
As the birth of grunge and the Seattle-sound dawned in the early 90’s, bands, including Warrant, were starting to become irrelevant and music fans could now see that the music that they had been listening to this whole time was over-processed and fake. Once Lane and Warrant had softened their sound, their initial audience turned their back on them, and they were left out in the cold to fend for themselves.
Lane continued to tour and record songs until his death a few days ago. In reality, he was just trying to be a normal guy who wrote normal songs because that’s what he loved to do. He wanted to be successful but he didn’t want all of the baggage to come with it. Did it help that he had to exploit himself even further as a contestant on season two of Celebrity Fit Club? Of course not. But the guy had way too many demons in the first place that he just couldn’t out-run. As long as there are decent karaoke bars around the world, Jani Lane’s magnum opus will play on and probably be destroyed by your violently drunk co-worker, and we should always appreciate life for what it is because, to quote the man himself, heaven isn’t too far away.
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