Major Letdowns: Molly Hatchet, "Lightning Strikes Twice"

"Don't judge a book by its cover" is one of those things we're regularly told from the time we're old enough to understand complete sentences, and for good reason — in general, it's pretty great advice, and can save a person from making countless bad decisions. On the other hand, there are plenty of times when judging something based on its appearance can be perfectly safe, and even advisable; for example, your average movie poster, book cover, or album artwork is specifically designed to convey the tone and artistic goals of whatever product it's pushing.

And then there's Molly Hatchet.

If you prowled record stores as a kid, you were undoubtedly familiar with Molly Hatchet's albums, almost all of which promised the sort of hard-rocking mayhem suitable for axe-wielding barbarians rampaging atop barrel-chested steeds. If you weren't familiar with the group's music, and weren't actively on the hunt for some serious heavy metal assault, those covers — eye-catching as they were — could be interpreted as a warning: ONLY THOSE WHO TRULY WISH TO ROCK MAY ENTER. Between Frank Frazetta's cover art and the group's ridiculous name, I spent many years under the false assumption that these guys sounded like Scorpions or Krokus or Helloween or W.A.S.P. or some other shrieking gaggle of Teutonic metalheads. The truth, as you are well aware if you've ever heard a Molly Hatchet song, is far more mundane.

The reality is that rather than standing proud and dealing the devil's music, Molly Hatchet has always been a third-rate Southern boogie rock band — and one that made the mistake of showing up pretty late for the party, to boot. Their self-titled debut LP arrived in September of 1978, at which point Skynyrd had already suffered through their aviation-assisted temporary breakup, the Allmans were in hibernation, and no one cared about 38 Special.

The Hatchet still managed to cut through the AOR fog with their first few albums — particularly their sophomore outing, Flirtin' with Disaster, which peaked inside the Top 20 and went double platinum on the strength of the hit title track. But the closer they got to the '80s, the duller their blade became: Singer Danny Joe Brown struck the first blow, leaving to pursue a (failed) solo career after Disaster, and although he quickly returned, rejoining the lineup in time for 1983's No Guts... No Glory, it wasn't enough to reverse the steep decline of their commercial fortunes. After 1984's The Deed Is Done peaked at No. 120, they entered the "contract-fulfilling live album" phase of their career, and were quietly dropped by Epic.

But a funny thing happened on Molly Hatchet's descent into state fair sets: Toward the tail end of the '80s, Southern rock experienced a brief and unexpected resurgence. The Allmans reunited, Skynyrd did too, and 38 Special had a left-field adult contemporary hit with "Second Chance," all of which might go some way toward explaining how in the hell these guys ended up inking a brand new record deal with Capitol and ending a five-year drought between studio albums with 1989's optimistically titled Lightning Strikes Twice.

Like every other rock band who released a note of new music during this period, the guys in Molly Hatchet billed Lightning as a back-to-basics affair — and like virtually all of those other acts, they were either deeply delusional or completely full of shit. (Their bassist, the hilariously named Riff West, went so far as to compare the vaguely poppier Deed Is Done to a Duran Duran record while promising that Lightning rocked twice as hard.) This is not to say that this is a distractingly slick album, but it does sound basically the same as everything every other middle-of-the-road rock band was doing in '89. You've probably never listened to a note of Lightning Strikes Twice, but if you've heard the Doobie Brothers' "The Doctor" or Great White's cover of "Once Bitten, Twice Shy," you definitely get the general vibe. Everything is played competently, and it sounds enough like a real rock record to pass muster if you've got it playing at low volume in the background, but the louder you turn it up, the softer it sounds. Everything is mannered — the guitars and keyboards are evenly mixed, the drums are embarrassingly polite, and Brown still sounds like a guy who didn't quite make the cut after auditioning for a local covers band.

A lot of those complaints can be reasonably chalked up to the prevailing production aesthetic of the day, which had a tendency to neuter even the heaviest bands. But even if this had been an immaculately produced record, it wouldn't have been enough to make up for the deeply pedestrian nature of the material. Like a lot of late '80s records from aging rock bands, it relied fairly heavily on outside writers, front-loading the track listing with those cuts and stuffing the band members' contributions deeper down. There were also a ton of cooks in the proverbial kitchen — one song, the somewhat surprisingly anti-capitalist "What's the Story, Old Glory," actually has nine credited writers. The caveat here is that it looks like Molly was in the habit of crediting all original material to all six band members, so I suppose there's a chance that just one of those guys worked with the three outside writers who were also involved, but — you know what? No. Fuck that. I'm not thinking that deeply about these songs, because it's exhaustingly apparent that no one involved with creating them did either. More than anything, this record is simply, deeply, thoroughly ordinary, which is perhaps the most damning thing you can say about an album with a Frank Frazetta painting on the cover.

Buyers agreed, ignoring Lightning Strikes Twice so resolutely that the album failed to chart. Members of Molly Hatchet told the press that Capitol was talking about releasing five singles from the record, but after "There Goes the Neighborhood" failed to do much at rock radio, those plans were quickly changed; after a fall tour with Foghat, the band's major-label era was officially over.

Of course, that didn't mean the saga of Molly Hatchet ended. In the press kit for Lightning Strikes Twice, guitarist Duane Roland is quoted as saying, "Molly Hatchet has always stuck it out, and if this record doesn't do for us what we want it to, the next one will. Molly Hatchet is not known for giving up." Stick it out they did — and they continue to, despite the fact that every original member of the lineup is now dead. (The old vets in the group are now keyboardist John Galvin, who joined in 1983, and guitarist Bobby Ingram, who came along in '87.) Following Lightning's failure, they signed a deal with the German Steamhammer label, releasing five albums between 1996-2010; a sixth, the covers collection Southern Rock Masters, came out through Cleopatra in 2008. (Mayor Wardlaw tells me they released a single in 2023, but I'm not listening to that, and I suspect you shouldn't either.)

I guess all of this serves to prove, once again, that judging something by its cover is a bad idea, even if that cover is totally bitchin' and includes a bloody axe. If you're looking for something to listen to between rounds of the Doobie Brothers' Cycles and 38 Special's equally limp Rock & Roll Strategy, then you could do worse than Lightning Strikes Twice. Otherwise, feel free to follow the Molly Hatchet fanbase's lead and go on pretending this album doesn't exist.