My mind's on cruise control

Why on earth did T-Ride ever end? A band this good should have gone on to rock stardom! But after one album which is out of print, the band just faded away into near obscurity.

Timing is everything in music. And no doubt the sense of rhythm that all the members of T-Ride had was nothing short of perfect. And that band was tight! I mean tighter than that snare drum you got sitting in front of you. I remember being in a band when I was first listening to T-Ride and trying to get that kind of tight syncopation that T-Ride had, and just couldn't manage. The hours of practice these guys put into their playing, practising and performance really pays off when you hear them.

So why haven't we heard a peep out of them in 16 years? Well 1991 saw the release of Nirvana's album Nevermind. Shooting grunge onto the music scene and making Seattle the hottest place on earth for every A&R man and his dog to find new talent. Sure, other grunge bands were already making some headway - Green River had been around and by all accounts are the first band to be described as Grunge. Soundgarden were the first grunge band to be signed to a major label in 1989, but Nirvana really put grunge on the map. T-Ride were not grunge. Firmly rooted in hair metal, and virtuoso playing, they almost eschewed the grunge trend of detuned guitars and simple rhythmic riffs based on the minor pentatonic scale in favour of complex syncopated music, with lush vocal harmonies and huge production.

Yes, timing is everything, and being a hair metal band in the early 90s, even one as good as T-Ride with Satriani hailing you as the "future of metal" is just bad timing. Let's face it - metal band in the bay area when all the A&R execs are after down and dirty grunge in Seattle is really the wrong place at the wrong time. And T-Ride, despite their brilliance, were destined to fade into obscurity, leaving us with one blistering album, which sounds as good today as it did when it was released.