Suggested by Patreon member Patrick Testa in a community poll against Metallica’s Master of Puppets, Slade’s Keep Your Hands Off My Power Supply, and Motörhead’s Iron Fist, Tora Tora’s Surprise Attack won in a landslide with 50% of the vote. Want to bring YOUR favorite lost album to the table? Suggest it for a future episode or community poll.
A Memphis band born out of Free Beer
Surprise Attack is the debut studio album from Tora Tora, a hard rock band formed in Memphis, Tennessee in 1985, released in May 1989 on A&M Records and produced by Joe Hardy and Paul Ebersold. According to a Headbangers Ball interview, a friend of the band handed them a list of 60 to 70 possible band names, and Tora Tora was the one that stuck; the group’s original name had reportedly been Free Beer. Frontman Anthony Corder and guitarist Keith Douglas anchored a lineup that, unlike most of the Sunset Strip class of 1989, wasn’t jockeying for space against Poison, Warrant, and Mötley Crüe. Being 10 years removed from the epicenter of hair metal and working out of Memphis instead of Los Angeles let their influences run closer to Aerosmith and Judas Priest without the scene politics diluting them.
Judas Priest power wrapped in Beale Street blues
What makes Surprise Attack stand apart from the era’s cookie cutter glam records is the way it fuses two things that shouldn’t fit together this cleanly: chunky, Judas Priest style power metal riffing and loose, Aerosmith style blues shuffle. Songs like “One for the Road” flip between the two feels within the same track rather than settling into either lane. “Being There” opens with a Leslie organ tone that gives it a soulful, almost 70s texture before the chorus turns into a chugging metal hook, a nonstandard spin on the power ballad formula that trades polish for grit. “Walkin’ Shoes” builds its hook by reusing the same riff in the intro and chorus but cutting it short in the verse, a small structural trick that keeps the song’s signature lick from wearing out its welcome.
A&M pulled three singles from the record: “Walkin’ Shoes,” “Guilty,” and “Phantom Rider”, and the trio doesn’t sound like a single band phoning in three versions of the same song. “Guilty” carries a five-to-ten-second stretch of unusually chunky, distorted guitar after the first chorus that never repeats anywhere else on the record, a moment specific enough that it landed on mixtapes for years. “Phantom Rider” leans hard into a Bad Company style groove that stands apart from the glossier singles around it. The album reached number 47 on the Billboard 200, modest by hair metal standards but enough to get the band on the road opening for LA Guns, then for The Cult on the Sonic Temple tour alongside Bonham, and for date runs with Great White.
The record’s biggest obstacle isn’t the songwriting, it’s the mix. Reverb and delay sit over nearly everything, to the point that bass playing, organ parts, and even guitar solos get buried in a wash rather than cutting through. Compared to a band like Badlands, which stripped its production down to emphasize raw performance, Surprise Attack sounds like it defaulted to the standard late-80s hard rock settings rather than chasing the drier, punchier tone the songs seem built for. It is the kind of album that rewards a remix or remaster candidate conversation, because the performances underneath the haze, particularly the vocal and guitar work, hold up better than the mix lets on.
The verdict
Community sentiment on this album splits hard. Some listeners call Surprise Attack an underrated great that got unfairly lumped into the tail end of the hair glam era despite not really belonging there. Others have a much colder read, with one commenter recalling mercilessly mocking the band’s friends over the record back in the day. Even a Wikipedia-linked contemporary review dismissed it as a Van Halen and Dokken knockoff, a comparison our hosts pushed back on hard. So does the deeper album justify the singles that made it a modest hit, or do the singles carry a record that gets less memorable the further you go? Is the reverb-heavy 1989 production a dealbreaker or just a product of its time? And which handful of songs would actually survive a trim? The hosts weighed in with a real verdict on this one, ranking it somewhere between a worthy full album and a tighter, stronger EP. Listen to the episode for the full ratings breakdown, and drop a comment with where you’d land.
What happened to the band
Tora Tora followed Surprise Attack with 1992’s Wild America, then largely dissolved as the industry’s tastes swung toward grunge. In the years since, the label FNA has released a string of compilations and unreleased material, including Bombs Away: The Unreleased Surprise Attack Recordings, and the band reunited to release The Bastards of Beale on Frontiers Records in 2019, followed by a live acoustic EP. Corder still plays regional dates around Ohio, where local Columbus musician Charlie Bonnet III has opened several of the reunion shows.
Episode Highlights
Intro - "Walkin' Shoes"
00:00: Poll results, Tora Tora wins the four-way poll with 50% of the vote against Metallica, Slade, and Motörhead
04:18: Band history, hosts share their personal history with Tora Tora and the second album Wild America
06:35: Tour bus story, a firsthand account of interviewing the band in 1992 before a Newport headlining show
20:39: What works, breaking down the blend of Judas Priest style riffs and bluesy grooves across the record
23:19 - "One for the Road"
24:53 - "Being There"
32:31 - "Guilty"
33:34 - "Walkin' Shoes"
35:16 - "Riverside Drive"
39:34: Band name origin, the list of 60 to 70 names and the Free Beer backstory
40:04: What doesn’t work, a deep dive on the album’s reverb-heavy 1989 production
47:28: Legacy, the FNA reissue campaign, Bombs Away, and the 2019 reunion album The Bastards of Beale
49:43: Final verdict, worthy album, better EP, or decent single
Outro - “Hard Times”
