YOU DON'T WANT TO MISS THIS ONE - BATTLE OF THE BANDS XV RESULTS

It’s time for the results in BATTLE OF THE BANDS XV and what a BATTLE this one was, despite a prediction that ‘(Mark) Chesnutt was roasting Aerosmith over an open fire’. HA! It just goes to show that in these BATTLES you really can’t ‘call em’ until the final vote is in.

Mr. Bird over at Tossing It Out likes to use some really obscure songs, or at least more obscure artists in his BATTLES, because he thinks that we only vote for the familiar, and don’t really give a ‘unique’ version a fighting chance (or something like that). For of that very reason, I almost didn’t go with this particular BATTLE.  I was pretty sure that most of you would vote for Aerosmith, being that they recorded the more popular version of this song attached to that ‘craptacularly entertaining blockbuster’ Armageddon.

I don’t know what it is about my BOTB posts, but I seem to have a knack for picking artists that garner the most negative responses (think Celine Dion, back in December) and it was no different with Aerosmith. Many of you seemed to cast a vote not so much FOR Mark Chesnutt as AGAINST Aerosmith. Regardless of anything else, I do agree with those of you who commented that Mark’s version of the song was more sentimental and you felt the love.

Normally my taste would lean more toward a Country version vs. a Hard Rock/Heavy Metal version of just about anything, BUT not this time. I cast my vote for Aerosmith. I really like the largeness of the Aerosmith version. That Philharmonic sound in the intro and even Steven Tyler’s screaming/screeching vocal acrobatics seem to lend something to their version that takes it over the top for me. I realize that it’s supposed to be a love song, but maybe it’s because of its attachment to that dramatic disaster, with a Swiss cheese plot, and utterly fantastic storyline, of a movie which somehow manages to be entertaining, notwithstanding some all-out silliness and a whole lot of very bad over-acting, that gives Aerosmith the edge. Or, maybe Mr. Bird is correct. Either way for the VERY FIRST TIME, here in one of my BATTLES we have a tie.

Counting my vote, the final tally was 7 votes each.

 Now that is a true BATTLE OF THE BANDS. These two artists duked it out until the very end with the final ‘outside vote’ coming in on Wednesday (after this BOTB post been covered over by another post). I really enjoy seeing something like this happen. I was encourage when the second voter, Mr. Bird, noted that he was having a hard time deciding, but it quickly seemed to go downhill from there. In the end, it just goes to show that we really can’t see how it will all end until it does.

One last thing.   I warned you to vote for the song and not the video, but I really liked the tricky little music video Aerosmith used for this song. As you may or may not know (spoiler alert – just in case you haven’t seen this flick from 1998) at the end of the movie Bruce Willis (Harry Stamper) stays behind on the asteroid to save the world by hand detonating a nuke. There is an emotional scene where Liv Tyler (Grace Stamper) and her father say goodbye to each other via some sort of space telecommunication like SKYPE. In the music video some of those scenes replace the video footage of Grace/Liv’s movie father Harry/Bruce with her real father Steven Tyler singing to her. I always kind of viewed that as the love song – father to daughter – telling her not to miss a thing and how sorry he was that he had to save the world and miss so much of her life. Corny, YOU BET, but also kind of clever, or maybe it’s just me.

OK, I’m done. Come back on the 15^th for BATTLE OF THE BANDS XVI and see if I can come up with another close one for you. Now go check out the results for the other BATTLES that ran this past week.