Got No Shame

You want a song that walks into the room like it already owns the place, grab Brother Cane and the first cut on the first record. Got No Shame is the opener on the self-titled Virgin debut, released May 10, 1993, and it still sounds like a band that had been waiting their whole lives to kick the door in. Birmingham, Alabama hard rock with a southern pulse, a harmonica that cuts like a switchblade, and a frontman who was not about to apologize for any of it. Damon Johnson and Marti Frederiksen wrote it. Frederiksen and Jim Mitchell produced it. The record was cut in 1992 at Airwave in Birmingham, the Record Plant in Hollywood, and Rumbo in Los Angeles, and the single that came out of those rooms stopped just short of the top of the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart, peaking at number two on September 18, 1993. The song that kept it from number one was Cry of Love's Peace Pipe. Close enough to taste, and loud enough that rock radio never really let it go.

The band that made it had only been together a few years. Brother Cane came out of Birmingham in 1990, started by singer and guitarist Damon Johnson and bassist Glenn Maxey. They had first gone under the name Chyld. Guitarist Roman Glick and drummer Scott Collier filled out the lineup that signed to Virgin and cut this album. Johnson had already done time in the local trenches: Split the Dark in Birmingham, the Atlanta band Witness, and Memphis's Delta Rebels. He knew what a barroom riff was supposed to do. What he wanted for the top of this record was something with the same kind of charge as Guns N' Roses' Welcome to the Jungle or the Black Crowes' Sting Me, only with Alabama dirt on the tires. Got No Shame was that song, and it nearly did not make the album. Frederiksen has said the label was not especially interested in whether it landed on the record. He and Johnson kept fighting for it. Good thing they did. It became the first single Brother Cane ever released, and the calling card for everything that followed.

The writing happened in a Howard Johnson's on Highway 31, Johnson and Frederiksen knocking the thing into shape in a hotel room. One of the best lines in the song, the one about taking a left turn back down the right road, came to Johnson later, sitting at a red light on Lorna Road on the way to pick his daughter up from daycare. That is the whole character of the lyric. Fools of faith, rats and snakes, leeches pretending they are something they are not. A man walking around with a heavy load, hounds coming, and a decision to stop explaining himself. I got no shame, I got no one to blame, all the same, gonna taste the wine. It is not a confession and it is not a sermon. It is a guy who has already decided the opinion of the room does not get a vote. Johnson has described the core of it as a lack of inhibition, the feeling of being pushed to the edge and not caring about the consequences anymore. In 1993, with half the rock format turning inward and gloomy, that kind of swagger was its own argument.

Then the harmonica showed up and the song became the song. Tracking at the Record Plant, Johnson decided the track needed a harp. The first idea was to have him play it. He had a better idea. Birmingham bluesman Topper Price got the call. Price arrived drinking moonshine out of a Ball jar, plugged into a Fender amp, climbed up on top of that amp, put the harmonica mic to his mouth, and said roll it. What you hear on the record is the first thing he played. One take. Johnson has said he is grateful to Price for it, and that he is not sure Got No Shame becomes the record it became without that harmonica. Collier's drums and cowbell lock the groove, Maxey holds the low end, Glick and Johnson trade the guitars, and Price's harp runs through the whole thing like a second lead singer. The album cut runs just under five minutes. The radio edit trimmed it to a little over four. Carlos Grasso directed the video. None of that paperwork matters once the riff starts.

The rest of the debut kept the promise. That Don't Satisfy Me followed Got No Shame up the Mainstream Rock chart and peaked at number six. Hard Act to Follow reached number twelve. The album itself topped out at number fourteen on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. On the road behind it, Brother Cane opened for Robert Plant, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Aerosmith, playing arenas and sheds full of people who had come for the headliner and left knowing the name on the support slot. Frederiksen has said the radio life of Got No Shame is what got him in a room to write with Aerosmith. He went on to co-write songs including Jaded. The hotel-room co-write in Birmingham had a longer tail than anybody in that Howard Johnson's could have guessed.

This is also the only Brother Cane album with Glenn Maxey on bass. He left after the debut cycle. Roman Glick moved over to bass, David Anderson came in on guitar, and that lineup made Seeds in 1995 and Wishpool in 1998. Seeds gave them a number one with And Fools Shine On. Wishpool gave them another with I Lie in the Bed I Make, which held the top of the Mainstream Rock chart. Breadmaker, Voice of Eujena, and Machete all charted too. Three albums, a stack of rock-radio hits, and then the band came apart after Wishpool. There were reunions in 2005 and again from 2011 into 2013. They came back for real in 2022, and in 2023 marked thirty years of the debut with a remastered anniversary edition, the album's first vinyl release, plus two bonus tracks, Cold Heart and Rattle My Bones. Johnson spent the years in between as a hired gun and then a full member in rooms most players only visit: John Waite, Alice Cooper, Thin Lizzy, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, where he has been filling the space left by Gary Rossington. The current Brother Cane lineup puts Johnson back with original bassist Glenn Maxey, along with drummer Jarred Pope, guitarist Tony Higbee, and keyboardist Buck Johnson. In 2026 they released Magnolia Medicine on Double Dragon, Johnson and Frederiksen writing together again after nearly three decades.

Got No Shame is still the one that announced them. A southern hard-rock record cut in Alabama and Los Angeles, a single the label almost shrugged off, a harmonica solo played in one take by a man standing on an amplifier, and a lyric finished at a stoplight on the way to daycare. It opened the album, opened the career, and opened the door to the tours that put Brother Cane in front of the bands they had been listening to. If you are parked on THE ZOO, you already know the kind of record this is. The band keeps the lights on at the official Brother Cane site, posts the road news on Facebook and Instagram, and still flies the old handle on X. Turn it up. They got no shame, and they never needed any.