With their third album, Once Bitten…, Great White finally perfected their blend of bluesy Aerosmith grind and Van Halen hard rock flamboyance. It all comes to a head on "Rock Me," a minor hit single that brought them to a broader audience, but there are a couple of other moments – such as the sleazy "Lady Red Light" or "Save Your Love" – illustrating that Great White is more than a one-hit wonder. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, allmusic.com
Issued by Collectors Dream, the Saturday Night Special (Ready for Rock 'n' Roll Part II) disc pulls together a cash-in collection of classic rock covers. In the late 1980s, they had their greatest hits with like Rock Me, Once Bitten, Twice Shy or Save Your Love. Over the same period, the songs from seventies heavy weights Aerosmith ("Same Old Song and Dance"), Lynyrd Skynyrd ("Saturday Night Special"), Led Zeppelin ("Dazed & Confused"), Thin Lizzy ("Sarah") and Van Halen ("Unchained") carry the sharpest teeth from the recording. Saturday Night Special is the follow-up album to the Collector's Dream Series Ready For Rock N Roll.
With …Twice Shy, Great White followed through on the promise of Once Bitten…, turning in a tight, hard-rocking album that featured well-chosen covers (Ian Hunter's "Once Bitten Twice Shy") and impressive originals that replicated the classic arena rock sound of the '70s ("House of Broken Love," "Mistah Bone"). The result was the band's best album and its most popular – the album broke into the Top Ten and sold over two million copies.
1986's Shot in the Dark was Great White's sophomore album and major-label debut through Capitol, having attracted enough positive press during its initial independent pressing to help the So-Cal hard rockers leave their spawning grounds in the music industry shallows in order to dive into its deeper waters, as it were. No, Great White still wasn't quite ready to challenge bigger fish in the American glam metal ocean like Ratt or Mötley Crüe just yet, but in promising tracks like "She Shakes Me" and "Run Away," the fledgling group dispensed prime examples of the muscular, distinctly blues-infused sound they would carry on finessing towards platinum status over the course of subsequent albums…
Elation is the twelfth studio album by the American hard rock band Great White, released in May 2012. It is the first Great White studio album to feature vocalist Terry Ilous. Additionally, it is the first one without original vocalist Jack Russell. Elation was produced, recorded and mixed by Michael Lardie and Mark Kendall, the band's two guitarists. Since its release, the album has been met with mixed to positive responses. Jon Hotten reviewed the album positively for Classic Rock magazine, writing that "it shows some of the qualities that took (Great White) in their substantial heyday", when the band "made hard rockin' sound easy". He praises Ilous "rasping-throat role" and concludes that, despite the lack of killer hooks "of the kind that Great White had in abundance" the band still shows its musicianship.
The twelve song Ready for Rock 'n' Roll disc is a repackaged collection of covers from days gone by, before Great White splintered into a pair of rival groups. "Sin City" starts that remake action, which includes a cool medley entitled "Bitches and Other Women".