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Stone Fury: Burns Like a Star (1984)

Most people who know singer Lenny Wolf (and the list gets shorter every day) do so through his work with late '80s Led Zeppelin doppelgängers, Kingdom Come, but a few years earlier and four decades ago, he was fronting another band called Stone Fury.

Born Frank Wollschläger in Hamburg, Germany, in 1962, the future Wolf honed his vocal and rhythm guitar talents with several small-time local bands and, yeah, it's probably safe to assume they covered a Zep tune or twenty.

By 1983, the renamed Lenny had relocated to Los Angeles, where he assembled Stone Fury with bassist Rick Wilson, drummer Jody Cortez, and lead guitarist Bruce Gowdy, whose past experience included a short-lived sci-fi-themed Disneyland rock band called Halyx!

Yes, of course they performed at Tomorrowland, but don't laugh: the Mouse taught Gowdy some hot licks and I may have just stumbled upon a new rock 'n' roll rabbit hole (or galaxy far, far away, as it were) to explore, but not today ...

1984 saw the release of Burns Like a Star (a Halyx reference perhaps?) through MCA and, though we've all heard Stone Fury lumped in with either Zep imitators (hello, Great White!) or the hair metal set (you know who they are), this wasn't strictly the case.

Instead, competent but risk-averse melodic rockers like "Break Down the Walls," "Don't Tell Me Why," and "Hold It" inhabit that gray area between AOR and hard rock; slotting this LP in the same ballpark as the first Night Ranger and Autograph records ... albeit nowhere near as good.

Digging deeper, we find Stone Fury at their most adventurous on the moody title track, at their most accessible on the arpeggio-loving power ballad "Life is too Lonely," at their heaviest on the driving "I Hate to Sleep Alone," and at their blandest on the near-comatose "Shannon You Lose."

And they do eventually resort to scavenging Zeppelin's barely-cold corpse on "Mama's Love" and "Tease," where Lenny's Plant-ian vocal affectations find their love-match in Gowdy's swollen, Jimmy Page-patented blues riffs and Cortez's echoing, Bonham-aping thunder-beats.

Both numbers are as dull as they are derivative, if you ask me, but they obviously sealed Wolf's inescapable destiny to lead Kingdom Come at decade's end, by which time numerous "Led Clones" (as Gary Moore and Ozzy Osbourne labeled them) like Blue Murder, Badlands, and Whitesnake 2.0 roamed the earth.

Meanwhile, back to Stone Fury, they hung together long enough to record a sophomore album, Let Them Talk, in 1986, but they would obviously be summarily forgotten before too long, and are currently residing in the "Where are they Now" file.

More Melodic Hard Rock & AOR: Bryan Adams’ Reckless, Airborne’s Airborne, April Wine’s Power Play, Autograph’s Sign in Please, Axe’s Axe, Bandit’s Partners in Crime, Pat Benatar’s Precious Time, Blackjack’s Blackjack, Boston’s Don’t Look Back, Coney Hatch’s Coney Hatch, Foreigner’s 4, Giant’s Time to Burn, Sammy Hagar’s Standing Hampton, Helix’s Breaking Loose, Journey’s Escape, Kansas’ Vinyl Confessions, Magnum’s On a Storyteller’s Night, The Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra,” Nantucket’s Nantucket, Night Ranger’s Dawn Patrol, Point Blank's The Hard Way, Quartz’s Against All Odds, Rainbow’s Bent Out of Shape, REO Speedwagon’s Wheels are Turnin’, Rough Diamond’s Rough Diamond, Shooting Star’s Shooting Star, Starz’s Coliseum Rock, Styx’s Paradise Theatre, Thunder’s Thunder, Toto’s IV, Trigger’s Trigger, Trillion’s Trillion.