GTR and shame.

I just saw a Facebook ad for a Steve Hackett album that touts him as the guitarist in Genesis and GTR.  I was a little surprised to see the GTR moniker being mentioned as a feather in Hackett's career cap, given the many jokes that followed J.D. Considine's infamous one-word review of their album in Musician magazine: "SHT". That pithy review is the most famous of Considine's long career as a music critic and was an echo of the gag in This Is Spinal Tap where Marty DiBergi recounts to the band the two-word review for their album Shark Sandwich: "Shit Sandwich."

That's hard to get over.

GTR, active from 1985 to 1987, was a supergroup that combined the talents of legendary seventies prog rock guitar heroes Steve Howe and Steve Hackett. According to the Wikipedia article, the goal was to have a guitar and guitar synthesizer-driven band with hooky stadium hit songs. When the band went on the road, though, the late 80s guitar synthesizer technology let them down with its slow, buggy tracking of actual guitar playing and they had to add a keyboard player. GTR is coming into the picture as a hapless one-album band.

But that one album on Arista was certified gold and reached #11 on the album charts. "When The Heart Rules The Mind" was a hit single (and an oft-played MTV staple on video) that stayed on the charts for sixteen weeks. The Yes fans and Genesis fans who were the base for the live concerts were generally disappointed, though, with Max Bacon's voice and the large amount of filler on the album. The base would also have been disappointed with the slick commerciality of the music and the lack of particularly interesting guitar parts. And not long into the commercial success of GTR, Hackett left the band.  According to Wikipedia,

Subsequent to an abortive lineup change in 1987, Hackett left GTR, stating it had been "interesting for about five minutes". He once said of the group, "There are artistic limitations with any successful band and it was a successful band."

 This Hackett fansite gives a more sanguine account, though the bio is ten years out of date. Steve Howe, seeing no point in going on without Hackett, abandoned sessions for GTR's never-completed second album, and that was that.  Hackett went on as a solo artists and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010 as a member of Genesis.  He has lately revisited his Genesis-era material as is nowadays common among the baby boomers' favorite musicians. This is his official website, hackettsongs.com, rather than stevehackett.com, which is owned and run by Steve's former manager.


Pretty tuneless stuff, if you ask me.  But show me a hit single today that begins with 42 seconds of instrumental intro.