Interview: Winger

The words Winger and Beavis & Butt-Head may always be associated with each other, but with their latest album, “Seven,” the band may be getting some overdue respect.

“‘Seven’ has sold really well,” Winger guitarist Reb Beach said in a phone interview. “I was really happy with all of the reviews. God, just straight down the board, the reviews are phenomenal.”

Such reviews were anything but common for Winger when the band came on the scene in 1988. This was at the tail end of the so-called “hair metal” era, when bands like Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard and Poison sold multiple millions of albums at a time, routinely sold out arenas and even stadiums and became famous for living hedonistic rock star lives. Following in the wake of those leading acts were many more bands -- like Warrant, Skid Row, Twisted Sister and Ratt -- that achieved notable, if not quite the same stratospheric success.

Winger were part of that second tier of bands. The group’s 1988 self-titled debut album became a double-platinum success behind rock radio hits like “Seventeen” and “Headed for a Heartbreak.” The second Winger album, 1990’s “In the Heart of the Young,” became another platinum hit, as the singles “Can’t Get Enuff,” “Miles Away” and “Easy Come Easy Go” all went top 20 or better on “Billboard” magazine’s mainstream rock chart. (Remastered versions of those two albums and Winger’s third album, “Pull,” plus a disc of demo versions of select songs were released in a deluxe box set in November 2023.)

But more quickly than Winger’s rise to popularity happened, it all disappeared. The grunge movement, led by the likes of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, arrived and hair metal bands quickly fell out of favor. More specifically, in 1993, the snarky cartoon comedy Beavis & Butt-Head became an MTV staple and introduced audiences to Stewart, a chubby kid who wore a Winger t-shirt (as did his parents and their dog) and was the epitome of nerdiness. That coupled with Metallica’s video for their hit song “Nothing Else Matters” (during which drummer Lars Ulrich threw darts at a poster of Winger’s singer Kip Winger) turned Winger into the most ridiculed band in the hair metal genre.

The impact on the band was immediate and devastating.

“People stopped going to Winger shows – while we were on tour. We were selling out theaters, and then boom,” Beach said. “Overnight it happened with Beavis & Butt-Head. People wouldn’t get caught dead at a Winger show.” 

Winger’s album sales also plummeted, as the band’s 1993 third album, “Pull,” which Beach considers his favorite Winger album, moved only 60,000 copies. In 1994, Winger went on hiatus.

“We didn’t officially break up because we were all good friends,” Beach said. “We said ‘OK, let’s do other stuff for awhile.”

The irony of becoming poster boys for all that was cheesy about hair metal is that Winger was actually more accomplished musically than most bands in the genre.

Beach was already an experienced session musician when Winger came together in 1987, and his fleet-fingered solos immediately showed he had the chops. Singer/bassist Winger was doing sessions with producer Beau Hill and had toured with Alice Cooper before forming Winger. Drummer Rod Morgenstein came to Winger after recording seven albums with the musically advanced band the Dixie Dregs and spent 20 years as a professor teaching percussion at the Berklee School of Music. Keyboardist/guitarist Paul Taylor had toured with Aldo Nova and Alice Cooper. Guitarist/singer John Roth came to Winger after touring with Black Oak Arkansas and working with Survivor singer Jimi Jamison on Jamison’s first solo album. This lineup remains intact today.

For Beach, life after Winger went on hiatus in 1994 gave him another shot of humility.

“It’s actually funny. I thought I was REB BEACH, come on. I’m Reb Beach. I can do whatever I want,” the affable guitarist said with a laugh. “I had a little attitude, this 29-year-old kid, I can do whatever, I can be the next Joe Satriani. And I was mistaken, horribly mistaken. I picked up the phone and made some calls and they were like ‘Who, what’s your name again? What do you want?’ I sent demos to everybody. Even Mike Varney (metal producer and founder of the Shrapnel Label Group) turned me down. I mean, everyone was just not interested in the guy from Winger. No one had even heard of Winger. Like it was over.”

During these lean times, Beach sold his guitars and his home. It was only after Kip Winger told him that Alice Cooper was auditioning guitarists that Beach’s fortunes took a turn for the better.

“I had to borrow 500 bucks off of Kip just to buy something to wear and to fly there,” Beach recalled.  The only reason I got the gig was because I sing. I just walked up to the mike at my audition and started singing ‘Poison’ and Alice said ‘You’ve got the gig. You’ve got the job,’”

After a four-year stint with Cooper, Beach joined Whitesnake in 2002, and he spent the next 20 years touring and recording with that band. 

Work on this latest album began in 2019 and had some challenges along the way, particularly for Beach, who generally writes guitar riffs and other parts, while Winger handles vocal melodies, lyrics and arrangements for the band’s songs.

“He (Winger) can take guitar riffs and make songs out of them so easily,” Beach said. “I’ll play him a guitar riff and he’ll hear a whole song.”

For “Seven,” though, the writing process wasn’t as effortless. Winger had a very specific vision for the kind of album he wanted to make, and for the most part, it didn’t include the kind of ‘80s metal riffs that are Beach’s specialty.

“Kip had this really high bar, higher than usual. I think he wanted this to kind of be the (band’s) swan song. I don’t know if we’ll make another record,” Beach said. “I’m a total ‘80s guy. I’d feel comfortable if my hair was still a foot off of my head. I write ‘80s guitar riffs. That’s what I’m good at. So he threw away a bunch of that stuff and he was only happy with stuff that I did that said something to him, that spoke to him. It ended up being kind of darker than usual. It’s kind of a dark record. 

“It took a while this time because I wasn’t giving him what he was hearing,” the guitarist said. “But it came out great, a really, really emotional record.”

Winger has a handful of concerts on the books for the rest of 2026, and fans can expect to hear all six hit singles Winger enjoyed from the first three albums, a few songs from “Seven” and a few songs that Beach said “really lend themselves to a live scenario. So we’ll do the songs that sound best live, that rock.”

And fans will likely notice that Winger is an accomplished live band.

“I have to say that the band sounds better now than we ever have because we’re a five-piece band, of keyboards and two guitars, which is just a huge sound,” Beach said.