Man in the Moon

You are locked into The Zoo, the place where the deep cuts still get the full ride, and right now the needle is on a record that Hollywood Records dropped in August 1991 and most of rock radio treated like a short-term visitor. The song is "Man in the Moon." The band is The Scream. The album is Let It Scream. If you only know John Corabi from the years he spent holding down the microphone for Mötley Crüe, this is the record that got him the job, and this is the track that walked out front.

"Man in the Moon" opens on acoustic guitar, low and unhurried, the kind of intro that makes you lean toward the speaker before the band even arrives. Bruce Bouillet, the guitarist who had already spent years shredding with Racer X, plays it like a bluesman who wandered into a hard-rock session and refused to leave. Then Walt Woodward III's drums hit, John Alderete's bass locks under them, and Corabi comes in with that rasp that sits somewhere between Steven Tyler and a bar singer who has already lost the argument and decided to sing anyway. Five minutes and forty seconds. No hurry. A kiss-off sung to the only company a guy has left once the door closes.

Here is the piece of trivia the liner never printed. The song was already in motion before Corabi joined the band. Jamie Brown, who had been singing with the Racer X guys, had started it. When Corabi came in he slowed the thing down and pushed it toward a Zeppelin groove. The writing credit on the Hollywood Records disc reads The Scream and Jamie Brown, which is the paper version of that handoff. Corabi has said, years later, that people still argue over whose song it is. Both names belong on it. The arrangement that made the radio cut is the one the four of them finished together.

Another one for the file. Hollywood put "Outlaw" out first as a teaser, no video attached. The clip that actually went to MTV was "Man in the Moon," and they had to trim it a little to fit the channel's window. One of the managers, Tim Heiney, had bet the other way on which song should lead. Once the clip landed he bought the room dinner and admitted he had called it wrong. That is how a band finds out a song has legs. Not from a meeting. From the manager picking up the check.

The single debuted on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Tracks chart at the end of August 1991 and climbed to number 25. Not a smash. Not a stiff. A real rock-radio record in the last season when a Hollywood Records hard-rock single could still get that kind of air before the whole format shifted under everybody's feet. Eddie Kramer produced the album and engineered it, the same Eddie Kramer whose name sits on Hendrix, on Zeppelin, on Kiss. Mixing was Kramer and Garth Richardson. The sessions ran through Conway, Ocean Way, Track Record, and American Studios. Jimmy Waldo played Hammond B-3 on a couple of other cuts. Bill Bergman added saxophone. John Scarpati shot the photos. For a debut, the room was not small.

The band that walked into those rooms had only just settled on a name. They started in Los Angeles in 1989 as Saints or Sinners. Corabi had come out of Angora, a Philadelphia kid who had moved west chasing the Strip. Bouillet and bassist Juan Alderete, billed on the album as John Alderete, came out of Racer X, the technical metal band that had already built a cult and then come apart. The original drummer was Scott Travis. He left to replace Dave Holland in Judas Priest before a note of Let It Scream was cut. He still has a writing credit on "I Don't Care." He does not play on the record. Woodward, late of Shark Island, took the chair, and the name changed to The Scream. A lot of the songs had already been played in the clubs before the tape rolled. This was not a band inventing itself in the studio. This was a band that already had a set.

Corabi was born in Philadelphia in 1959. He played in local bands, moved to Los Angeles, and put in the years that do not show up on a résumé. Angora got him noticed. The Scream got him a major-label album. Then the phone rang the other direction. Nikki Sixx had named Let It Scream one of the ten best albums of 1991 in a Spin piece. Corabi called to say thanks. That call is part of how he ended up auditioning for Mötley Crüe after Vince Neil walked. The band played a one-off at the Astoria Theatre in London on December 6, 1991. Not long after, Corabi was gone. Billy Fogarty, from Dashboard Mary, stepped in. The second record, Takin' It to the Next Level, came out without a major label and without the same singer. The Scream as most people heard them lasted one album. Woodward died in 2010. Alderete went on to the Mars Volta and a long session career. Bouillet kept teaching and playing. Corabi did the Crüe album, then Union with Bruce Kulick, then The Dead Daisies, and he still pulls "Man in the Moon" out on his own shows. It is one of the songs from that record that never quite left his set.

Listen to the lyric and you hear a man talking himself into the quiet. He has waved off a friend. The woman is gone and he is fine with that, or he is saying he is fine with that, which is not the same thing. He likes it alone because nobody complains and he does not mix up the names. He is singing his song to the man in the moon. It is a breakup tune that refuses to beg. AllMusic's John Franck later called it one of the strongest tracks on the album, a bluesy acoustic start that turns into a scorching rocker, and noted the odd foreshadowing: the same singer would soon be out front on a Mötley Crüe record that the market did not want. The Scream had the songs. The calendar did not cooperate.

That is the part worth sitting with. Let It Scream is the sound hard rock might have kept making if the floor had not dropped out. Hooks, chops, a singer who could carry a ballad called "Father, Mother, Son" and a stomper called "I Believe in Me" in the same hour. "Man in the Moon" is the one that splits the difference. It is patient. It is mean in a tired way. Bouillet's guitar never shows off for the sake of it, which is saying something from a guy who came out of Racer X. Alderete plays bass like a second guitar. Woodward hits hard and stays in the pocket. Corabi sounds like he means the brush-off and also like he might call her back if the room gets too quiet. That tension is the whole song.

Collectors still chase the original Hollywood Records pressings. The U.S. CD is HR-60994-2. The UK vinyl is HWDLP16. Discogs has the master logged with a long list of versions, Japan included, and the ratings from people who held onto their copies sit high. It was never a blockbuster. It was a band record, the kind that gets passed hand to hand by people who were in the clubs or who found it later and could not figure out why it had been left behind. Corabi has talked about his manager sending back old ticket stubs from a Scream show, a watch with the album cover on the face, handwritten lyrics from the kitchen table. The paper trail is still out there. The songs are still out there.

If you want the rest of the story, the singer keeps his own house in order. The official site is johncorabi.com. The official Facebook page is John Corabi Music. The official Instagram is @johncorabiofficial. On X he posts as @Crablegs59. The full Let It Scream release history, pressings and all, lives on Discogs. And you are already in the right room for the song itself. The Zoo is at thezoorocks.com, listener-supported, commercial-free, still spinning the records the big stations filed away. "Man in the Moon" is one of those records. Turn it up. The man on the other end of the lyric is still singing.