Damn Yankees – High Enough

Two of them wrote it in under an hour over a load of laundry, then spent days afraid to play it for Ted Nugent.

The head of A&R at Warner Bros. did not wait for the song to end. Michael Ostin heard the first chorus of High Enough, stopped the tape, and asked the three men in front of him a single question: “Who’s your lawyer?” That was the deal, more or less. It was made on the strength of a ballad two of them had been nervous about showing to the third, and that had come into existence because one of them needed clean clothes.

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The band was an executive’s idea. John Kalodner, the A&R man, had put Tommy Shaw of Styx and Ted Nugent together in New York to see what would happen. When Jack Blades told him Night Ranger was coming apart, Kalodner sent him to join them. Blades arrived at Shaw’s brownstone on the Upper West Side and, by his account, the two of them wrote half of the first album that weekend. One morning he was down in the basement doing his laundry and singing a line to himself. Shaw heard it and asked what it was. They went upstairs, picked up guitars, and in under an hour had the whole song, words and harmonies included.

Then came the problem of the third member. Nugent was the Motor City Madman, a guitarist whose entire reputation rested on volume and aggression, and they were about to hand him a love song with a string arrangement in its future. Blades has said they seriously wondered what he would think of them. At rehearsal they played him the demo. Nugent sat without moving until it finished, and the two writers braced for an explosion. He picked up his guitar instead. “Here’s what I think it needs,” he said, and played a part to go right before the chorus. His name went on the song with theirs.

The Ballad Outsells the Band

Ron Nevison produced the record, with strings arranged by Jimmie Haskell, and Shaw and Blades traded the lead vocal. Blades has explained the lyric as a story about loving someone so much that saying it out loud scares them off, and about what happens when they come back. Warner Bros. released it as the group’s second single on September 22, 1990. Rock radio took it first, and Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart ranked it at No.2 that fall. Pop radio followed. In January 1991 the Hot 100 had it at No.3, and Billboard later placed it among the fifteen biggest singles of that year. The RIAA certified it gold. It was the only Top 10 pop hit the band ever had, and it carried the album past two million copies.

The video went for melodrama. Shot on location in River Ridge, Louisiana, it follows a young drifter and his girlfriend through a string of robberies, a police manhunt and a siege, and it ends inside a prison. The last shot is a joke at the band’s own expense. The priest walking beside the condemned woman turns toward the camera, and it is Nugent.

Three veterans from three successful bands still had to prove the combination worked, as Blades has pointed out, and the proof turned out to be the song least like any of them. A supergroup assembled for firepower got its hit from a tune hummed over a washing machine. The man they were afraid of improved it and then played a clergyman in the video. The record everyone expected from Damn Yankees was the loud one. This one sold because they were willing to make the other kind.