Reb Beach Describes How Winger Went Broke Almost Overnight: ‘Metallica Threw Darts At A Poster Of Kip Winger. It Was Bad’

Winger guitarist Reb Beach recently offered a stark look back at the dizzying speed with which his band plummeted from platinum-selling arena rockers to struggling musicians in the early 1990s. What felt like a dream run quickly turned into a financial nightmare, a change Beach described as happening in mere weeks.

Reflecting on the band’s initial success with their first two multi-platinum albums, Beach recently told the Badass Network it was initially “everything I thought it would be.” However, he acknowledged the timing wasn’t ideal for longevity in that era:

“I thought it would go on forever, you know, but it was a lot shorter than other bands from our genre. If Winger came out in 1986, I’d be a rich man” (as transcribed by Ultimate Guitar).

The turn, when it came, was brutally swift. Beach pinpointed the rise of grunge, coupled with cultural jabs from MTV‘s ‘Beavis and B*tt-Head‘ (where the nerdy character Stewart wore a Winger shirt) and Metallica (famously featuring Lars Ulrich throwing darts at a Kip Winger poster in their “Nothing Else Matters” video), as catalysts for their immediate decline.

“The shows were canceled. People stopped buying tickets overnight,” Beach recalled. “‘Beavis and B*tt-Head‘ came out. Metallica threw darts at a poster of Kip Winger. We were on tour at the time. Tour was canceled. Ticket sales ended the day ‘Beavis and B*tthead’ came out. Like a week later, done. No one would be caught dead at a Winger concert.”

The fallout was devastating on a personal level for the guitarist. An anticipated large payday for their third album, Pull, vanished as the record failed to gain traction despite Beach considering it some of their best work.

“I had a big house in Florida that I just bought because my next publishing advance was for $300,000 for the album Pull, which I thought was a genius record… It bombed,” he stated. “And so, I sold my house, sold all my guitars, and moved back home, and I lived on selling 20 guitars for a year, until I got to Alice Cooper. I didn’t have the money to fly to go to the audition, and Kip had to lend me 500 bucks.”

Beach summarized the severity of the situation plainly:

“So it was bad. It was really bad. It didn’t just happen to Winger. Winger got it worse than anybody, but it happened to all the ’80s bands…”

Interestingly, regarding the infamous Metallica dart-throwing incident cited by Beach as contributing to their woes, frontman Kip Winger revealed in a separate interview that an apology did eventually come – though not from the dart-thrower himself. Kip confirmed that Metallica frontman James Hetfield called him personally about a year and a half prior to his interview to sincerely apologize for the slight, establishing a friendly contact, while noting Lars Ulrich has never directly apologized.

Despite the hardships described by Reb Beach during that tumultuous period, Winger eventually regrouped. His recollections, however, remain a vivid picture of how quickly the tide turned for bands of their era, fueled by shifting musical tastes and pop culture ridicule.