“Paul was tuning his guitar at one point, and I said ‘What key is that in?’, added a bassline and that became a song”: The good luck and creative chaos behind Mr Big’s Lean In To It
In March 1991, Californian rockers Mr Big were on an upward trajectory. Their self-titled debut album of 1989 had done well, although it hadn’t exactly set the charts alight. After tours with Rush in the US and Canada, and their own headlining tours of Japan and the Far East, the band’s second album, Lean Into It, arrived at a point when their profile was rising rapidly. The incoming winds of grunge hadn’t yet started blowing, so Billy Sheehan (bass), Eric Martin (vocals), Pat Torpey (drums), and Paul Gilbert (guitar) had much to be optimistic about.
Lean Into It become Mr. Big’s biggest-selling album, but it was assembled largely by instinct. “We went into a room together and started exchanging ideas,” said Billy Sheehan. “Paul was tuning his guitar at one point, and I said ‘What key is that in?’ It was the key of G, so I added the bass notes underneath it and that became the song Alive And Kickin’. We put it together, sent it up to Eric, and he did his lyrics.”
The album artwork itself came about through a twist of fate. “We went out to a restaurant for the big reveal to see the artwork photo—and it was just awful!” says Sheehan. “It featured a girl wearing a 50s bathing suit, wearing shoes with a short heel that a nurse would wear. We’re looking at it and saying, ‘What in the world is this? Anything will be better than this!’ On the wall was the photo of the train wreck, so I said ‘That would be better’. We ended up using that.”
Released at the end of March 1991, the album reached number 15 in the US album charts and produced five singles. The album appeared as Sheehan was reunited with Ampeg; he incorporated their amps and 8x10 enclosures into his setup for the recording, alongside his much-revered Pearce preamps. His Yamaha Attitude LTD-1 was firmly established by this point, strung with his custom signature Rotosound BS66 bass strings.
Musically, the quartet had progressed from the chops-laden excesses of their first album, having recognized the power of great songwriting over playing technique. Opening the album, Daddy, Brother, Lover, Little Boy is a fair statement of intent, with Martin's high-octane vocals sitting on a rock-solid groove.
The song is a prime example of Sheehan’s ability to groove – despite his live showmanship, it’s his ability to lock in as part of a rhythm section that makes him so reliable. Fast forward to 2’29” for the signature feature of the song – the bass and guitar solos, played with electric drills. Was that a dig at the speed-pickers of the time? “Yeah, that’s the joke,” says Sheehan, “but it turns out that Paul is faster than the drill! It was meant as a tongue-in-cheek joke, but then after that, everyone was thinking, ‘Well, we’ll get an egg-beater or a chainsaw...’”
Alive And Kickin’ was another groove-laden slab of melodic rock, with Torpey’s smooth drum fills driving the band along. Sheehan’s tapped harmonics can be heard from 1’17” to 1’20” and from 2’23” to 2’30”, along with an example of neck bending, which drops the played note to a lower pitch at 3’19”.
The second single, Green-Tinted Sixties Mind, features bass chords in the intro, verse, and outro, perfectly underpinning Gilbert’s fluid guitar flurries. “I think there’s some Beach Boys influence there from Paul,” says Billy. “At the time he was heavily into Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, and some of their chord voicings and the way they did things with harmonies. There’s some interesting content in that song: We were very lucky in Mr. Big to have decided to sing a lot and use harmony.”
Voodoo Kiss features a prime example of Sheehan’s grinding bass tone, which Bass Player once described as sounding like “a chainsaw going through chocolate pudding” (though his tone on this album is more rounded and sits better with the band than it did on the self-titled debut).
Just Take My Heart followed To Be With You into the singles charts – two ballads in a row meant that Mr Big was labelled as an AOR band for a period, not that they cared. It’s a treat to hear Sheehan perform on a Yamaha six-string bass, with its deep piano-like tone.
Road To Ruin? “That triplet feel in there – 1, 2, 3,1, 2, 3 – it’s rare now to hear threes and sixes,” he says. “To jam and play in 3/4 is something I really gravitate towards.”
A Little Too Loose is proof of the benefits of a Hipshot-equipped four-string, allowing the bassist to drop his 110 E string down a couple of semitones while retaining string tension for a full, ballsy bass tone.
The album’s last song, To Be With You, took Mr Big into uncharted territory with its McCartney-infused bassline, and in the process it gave them a number one single across the globe, courtesy of a DJ in Nebraska who picked up on the acoustic-led track.
No-one expected To Be With You to be a monster hit. “Eric sent us a cassette of songs that he’d been working on,” he told us, “and at the very end was this little piece on piano, To Be With You. Pat, Paul and I said ‘We gotta do it—it’s the perfect roll-the-credits-at-the-end-of-the-movie singalong’. And at first, Eric was reluctant, but we put it on there, and he sang it beautifully. If we’d known that song would be a hit, we’d have put it first and released it as the lead single.”
By sheer chance, they ended up with an album that has sold close to two million copies and remains a classic milestone in melodic rock. Sadly, grunge was around the corner…
Lean Into It is available to buy or to stream.
