For The Love Of Money

BulletBoys: "For the Love of Money" (1989)

The BulletBoys were a Los Angeles-based hard rock band that formed in the mid-1980s after the dissolution of an earlier lineup of the group Day Tripper. The core of the band as it achieved commercial recognition consisted of vocalist Marq Torien, guitarist Mick Sweda, bassist Lonnie Vencent, and drummer Jimmy D'Anda. Torien had previously been a touring guitarist for Ratt, one of the more commercially successful Los Angeles glam-metal acts of the period, and brought to BulletBoys a performance style that was physically extravagant and vocally indebted to both David Lee Roth and the harder-edged singers emerging from the Sunset Strip club scene.

Formation, Signing, and Debut Album

The BulletBoys signed to Warner Bros. Records in the late 1980s and released their self-titled debut album in 1988. The album was produced by Ted Templeman, a veteran Warner Bros. producer whose credits included landmark recordings by Van Halen, the Doobie Brothers, and Little Feat. Templeman's involvement gave the BulletBoys a production sheen and a connection to the rock mainstream that helped the album gain commercial traction in a crowded marketplace. The debut included "Smooth Up In Ya," which became the band's best-known single and reached the Billboard Hot 100, establishing them as a commercially viable act within the glam-metal genre.

The follow-up material, which included a cover of the O'Jays' classic "For the Love of Money," represented the band's effort to broaden their commercial profile while retaining the hard rock energy that had attracted their initial audience. The O'Jays' original, produced by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff for Philadelphia International Records in 1973, had been one of the defining recordings of the Philadelphia soul era, characterized by its insistent bass line, horn section, and blunt lyrical statement about the corrupting influence of financial obsession.

The Cover Version and Its Chart Run

The BulletBoys' version of "For the Love of Money" was released as a single in 1989 and entered the Billboard Hot 100 on April 29, 1989, at position 87. The single climbed to its peak of number 78 during the week of May 20, 1989, and remained on the chart for six weeks. That chart performance reflected the band's established fan base from the debut album and the broader commercial health of the hard rock format in the late 1980s, a period in which Los Angeles-based glam and hard rock acts dominated album sales and MTV programming.

The decision to cover "For the Love of Money" placed the BulletBoys in a tradition of rock bands reinterpreting soul and funk classics through a harder lens, a strategy that had been successfully employed by acts including the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, and a number of their contemporaries on the Sunset Strip scene. The transformation of Gamble and Huff's groove-driven soul track into a guitar-forward hard rock arrangement was not subtle, but it captured the song's underlying aggression in a way that made sense for the band's aesthetic.

Context Within the Late 1980s Hard Rock Scene

The Los Angeles hard rock scene of the late 1980s was producing an enormous volume of commercial recordings, many of which sounded substantially similar to one another. Labels including Warner Bros., Elektra, and Atlantic had all signed multiple acts from the Sunset Strip clubs, and the marketplace was increasingly competitive. In this environment, a recognizable cover of a classic song served both as a calling card for new listeners unfamiliar with the band's original material and as a demonstration of range that differentiated the BulletBoys from acts that recorded only original compositions.

Ted Templeman's production on the BulletBoys' recordings was one of their competitive advantages during this period. Templeman understood how to make rock records that translated effectively to radio and to the video formats that MTV and its competitors required, and his experience with Van Halen in particular gave him insight into how to balance virtuosic guitar playing with accessible pop songwriting. The BulletBoys' second album Freakshow, released in 1991, continued this approach but arrived at a moment when the commercial landscape for glam-metal was already shifting dramatically.