EXTREME – The Oral History Of "More Than Words"

Maura Johnston at Rolling Stone has published a look back at Extreme’s #1 smash hit from 1991, “More Than Words”, taken from the band’s critically acclaimed Pornograffitti album. An excerpt from the article, featuring comments from frontman Gary Cherone and guitarist Nuno Bettencourt, is available below:

“More Than Words” was an anomaly in not just pop, but hard rock; acoustic guitars were standard in many a power ballad, but they were often surrounded by bombastic production and splashy solos. It even stood out in the context of 1990’s Extreme II: Pornograffitti, a wide-lens concept album. Its spare harmonies served as a widening of space after four powerhouse songs augmented with horns, double-entendres, Gary Cherone’s showmanship and Bettencourt’s fleet guitar playing. The album’s first two singles, the bombastic “Decadence Dance” and the horn-assisted “Get The Funk Out,” were relegated to the late-night wilds of Headbangers Ball. An April 1991 profile of Extreme in Rolling Stone talked about how the band had been slogging it out and trying to find a commercial breakthrough — at the time, the album had sold about 300,000 copies. The piece ends with the band hearing “More Than Words” on a Boston radio station. “There are a lot of hopes pinned on this song,” wrote Kim Neely, who noted that between the time of that interview and the piece’s publication, the song had risen to the Number 10 spot on the rock charts.

Cherone: “Nuno was on the porch strumming, he showed it to me, I ran in my bedroom and scribbled the first “More than words is all you have to do” — and it was obvious, after you read the first verse to go, ‘OK, that’s the title.’ You think it’s genius but it’s an accident. We were just in a groove writing, and that was just another song. I think we might have played it at a club that week.”

Bettencourt: “I remember going home to Hudson, which was like 45 minutes away. I’m the youngest of 10 kids, and I have this older sister, Fatima, who really didn’t pay attention to what I was doing in music, didn’t like any of the bands I was in. I was listening to that track in my bedroom, recapping it, and she walks by — usually she never speaks to me — and stops at the door and goes, ‘Is that yours?’ I go, ‘Yeah, we just recorded it.’ And she says to me — she doesn’t know anything about the music business — ‘You better not play that for anybody, and you’d better get that copyrighted, because that’s a huge song.’ And then she walked away. I was just like, ‘What?’ And then I didn’t even think anything of it.”

Click here for the complete story.

Pornograffitti was re-issued as a two-CD deluxe edition on January 19th. It features a bonus disc of remixes, B-sides, edits and acapellas, including four versions of “More Than Words”.

The tracklist is as follows:

Disc 1
“Decadance Dance”
“Li’l Jack Horny”
“When I’m President”
“Get The Funk Out”
“More Than Words”
“Money (In God We Trust)”
“It (‘s A Monster)”
“Pornograffitti”
“When I First Kissed You”
“Suzi (Wants Her All Day What?)”
“He-Man Woman Hater”
“Song For Love”
“Hole Hearted”

Disc 2
“More Than Words” (Remix)
“Nice Place To Visit” (B-side)
“More Than Words” (Radio Edit)
“Decadence Dance” (Edit)
“Money (In God We Trust)” (Edit)
“More Than Words” (Acapella)
“Get The Funk Out” (What The Funk? Mix)
“More Than Words” (A Cappella With Congas)
“Get The Funk Out” (12 “Remix)
“Sex N ‘Love” (B-side)