The band extreme is responsible for the very popular tune “More Than Words”. This interesting blend of musicians came together during the late 1980s. Founded by Nuno Bettencourt and Gary Cherone, since its inception there have been a wide number of members rotate through the group over the years. Like other bands, there have also been periods of high volatility.

The early popularity experienced during the 80’s and the 90’s made Extreme a common household name. The band credits influences from early metal bands, such as Queen and Van Halen. Other popular names that contain similar musical qualities are the Drama Gods, Tribe of Judah, Morning Widows, Satellite Party and the infamous Twisted Sister. These bands all exhibit similarities in musical qualities.

Extreme has sold many albums. There are five notable albums that should get credit. There are also a few EPs that were sold exclusively in Japan and a few other releases. By the early 1990’s, they had album sales exceeding 10 million, which is huge. The highest selling album was the second release, “Porngraphitti”. This is the same album that contained “More Than Words”, which we will discuss in this review.

Now, they’re basically from Malden, Massachusetts. And in the late 80s, there had been a band that had some of the members called the Dream. Now as that band broke up, like earlier members Paul Geary and Gary Cherone were part of the Dream. And as they broke up and didn’t get along anymore, they ran into Nuno Bettencourt who’d been a band called Sinful. There was another bass player, Pat Badger, who was playing with a band called In the Pink. In any case, they ran into each other and even argued about various dressing room things at concerts they were doing together and stuff like that. And, eventually, they took the name of the Dream and made it Ex Dream, because they’d all left the Dream, and now they are Extreme. One of their songs was even a big hit in the movie Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. So if you haven’t seen that movie and you’re really interested in Extreme. Probably everybody has seen that movie because it was great.

But their real claim to fame is, of course, “More Than Words” which came out on their second album, “Pornograffitti”. And it had some really nice guitar playing in it. This very percussive [music demo] playing that Nuno does and is very difficult to teach but I like to have people work on that kind of stuff. You have to break it done to just really specific mechanics that are hard to get the hang of. So it’s a song I really like to teach all of my students. Now when they recorded this, it became a big hit. It entered the Billboard’s Top 100 in 1991 and just became a huge hit, all over YouTube. You’ve probably seen there are some great YouTube videos including the main video at YouTube for this, where I guess the promotional one. You see, at the very beginning, dials getting turned down from the amplifier. And then the bass player and the drummer packing up their gear and going to have seats on the couch. And pretty soon, all you do is they focus in on Gary and Nuno and they’re just playing it. And the other two are sitting in couches, reading the newspaper, holding up little lighters as a show of the anthem like status they think the song deserves.

Anyway, and so, they enjoyed a medium amount of success for those couple of years until about 1993. And they got a little dicey later. And they brought in some new members by 1994 and 96. But they eventually broke up and just headed off for greener pastures. Although they have since gotten back together and put out an album recently. Let me find it…it’s missing…there we go. In 2010 and 2008. So they put out two more recent albums. Their first album was just called “Extreme”. The second one was called “Extreme II: Pornograffitti”. Third one was called “Extreme III Sides to Every Story”. That was in 1992. 1995, with a slightly revamped lineup now, they had “Waiting for the Punchline”. And in 2008, “Saudades de Rock”. Why they decided to head off into a French title? Not really sure.

I saw these guys on an episode of VH1’s Classic on VH1 classic, the “Metal Mania” show, where they were appropriately praised and deified by the hosts. Also watched a few videos of Nuno, trying to give a guitar lesson on his song “More Than Words”. He was a little reticent to do it to say the least. It wasn’t really his cup of tea. But he at least allowed the cameras to take close ups of his hands as he was doing this. But something about what he felt like was …it really seemed like he felt that the information he had about the guitar was kind of proprietary and he didn’t want you to know how it went.

Some people don’t want to share their talent or cooperate when teaching. For some students, this can be disturbing, since there is enough information to share, especially something that takes creativity like playing guitar.

So, it’s coming out …like right now, May of 2010 and it was recorded in Boston in 2009. So, it includes a lot of their big hits including “More Than Words”. So, I’ll have to check that out and see if they did it in their normal, acoustic guitar ballad manner or decided to dress it up on the tunes on it. And these are some of their other big hits: “Decadence Dance”, “Comfortably Dumb”, in case you have missed that and it’s of course, not the Pink Floyd song “Comfortably Numb”. And actually, none of their stuff sounds like Pink Floyd so that’s OK.

They have “Rest in Peace”, “It’s A Monster”, “Star”, “Tell Me Something I don’t Know”, “Kid Ego”, “Play with Me”, “Midnight Express”, and of course, “More Than Words” again, “Ghost”, “Cupid’s Dead”, “Take Us Alive”, “Flight of the Wounded Bumble Bee”. Now, one can only guess that this is taken from the famous War and Peace by Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov called “Flight of the Bumble Bee”. I think it is by Nick. I can’t remember it right now. My classical guitar links are suffering a little bit.

Oh, they are coming back. That was not “Flight of the Bumble Bee” but…and of course, couple of other big hits, “Get The Funk Out” and “Hole Hearted”. Now, there is a DVD that comes along with it that includes some other really interesting stuff but we are not going to talk about that anymore. We’ll just talk a little bit more about “More Than Words” because it is of course your typical Howard ballad, maybe. Oh, White Snake, that was the band I was trying to think of earlier that had a lot of these kind of things. They had the Girl Crawling On the Car sort of stuff and then meant for that…that real powerful look and screaming ballad type of thing. So, White Snake, another 80’s band and part of the Hair band stories that happened back in then.

“More Than Words” is a song addressing the person to show love through more than only words, but the appeal was universal. Even Weird Al Yankovic created a parody of this song with “you Don’t Love Me Anymore”. Amateur bands created spinoffs as well; the “amateur transplants” used a similar tune called “Northern Birds” from the 2006 album We Are so Bad.

This song also became a parody during an episode of “How I Met Your Mother”. with Jason Seagull. This eventually became a number one hit in the US, and the second largest in the UK. This put the band back on the map, with more people who knew that genre of music.

Many bands created their own version of this song. Some of the band in addition to the above mentioned Amateur Transplants included West Life, D.B. Mac and David Cassidy. This is someone who has had an up and down career, but during 2003 he released “A Touch of Blue”, and now many know him from his work with the Partridge Family. He was known for having a struggle with his identity, trying to find out if he was Keith Partridge, a TV rock singer, or did he want to be the real deal David Cassidy performing rock and roll guitar?

Well, it is tough to tell. David Cassidy really never stepped out of the shadows of Keith Partridge unfortunately. But he thinks he has. He was of course son of Jack Cassidy and stepson of Shirley McClain who was involved with him on the Partridge family. And getting back to his dad, Jack Cassidy, of course was an actor going way back into lots of character actor type thing from TV shows. He made three appearances in Columbo episodes. Peter Falk’s Rachel from the early seventies. Part of the NBC mystery movie series.

Peter Falk, Colombo, Jack Cassidy and Dick Van Dyke, were all famous villains. They were also all tied to David Cassidy. He is part of the story because he covered the song “More Than Words”. A last few observations on this song are the drippy sentiment this song conveys is a weak attempt to replicate great writers, such as Gershwin, or Cole Porter. The adolescent ramblings have been compared to John Meyers.

The band is still trying to stay alive. In fact, they are making quite a good living, since Nuno Bettencourt is such a prolific guitar player. He has been holding to the funky metal style, and it has been serving him well. We can keep hoping there will be more music coming from this group, since “More Than Words” and their other music is so phenomenal. It would be great to have more instructional material from this group as well.

Now, most of the other stuff can be found in various places on the Internet. All kinds of places around. I forgot to talk about one more thing and I was there as another great speaking of parodies. There is a great parody video, also at YouTube that would be worth checking out that talks… that shows…It looks at of…from the angle of what the other two guys were really doing or what they were really thinking or talking about while the video was going on. Now, this was not the real guys doing it but it’s still…somebody put together a great edited video that…

Do, if you’ve got a chance, track that one down but in any case “More Than Words” is well worth its weight in gold in terms of instructional stuff for guitar and entertainment value and everything else. So, I really encourage you to check out “More Than Words” and a few of the other things by Extreme.

The author is a big fan of Extreme and acoustic guitar. For free guitar lessons or to learn More Than Words guitar lesson or other songs check out TotallyGuitars.com.