The Desperado Ace shelved album is one of heavy metal’s great buried treasures: a gritty, blues-soaked record that Elektra pulled just weeks from its May 1990 release, leaving it to circulate for years as a bootleg before it finally saw a proper pressing. Dee Snider formed the band after Twisted Sister dissolved in 1988, pulling in guitarist Bernie Tormé, drummer Clive Burr and bassist Marc Russell to make something rawer and more direct than anything in his previous catalogue.
The record was shelved by Elektra as the musical landscape shifted towards grunge and internal label tensions escalated. The band were dropped. For years, the album lived only in bootleg form, passed between fans who’d stumbled across it. According to Ultimate Classic Rock, the album actually received its first official release in 1996 under the title Bloodied but Unbowed, before the master tapes were salvaged and the record reissued in 2006 via Angel Air / Deadline Music under the title Ace. That two-stage release history has helped muddy the album’s profile further, which makes the current wave of reappraisal all the more worthwhile.
The Desperado Ace Shelved Album Story: What Snider Said
Snider was candid in the liner notes. ‘Very proud of the Desperado album, some of my best songwriting,’ he wrote. ‘Painful to think about what might have been. I found a real partner in Bernie; it resulted in magic.’ He singled out Burr’s approach as unlike anything he’d worked with before: ‘Clive is the only drummer I’ve ever worked with who works off the vocals; to finish his parts, he works off the melody, where most drummers work off the guitar or bass.’ That’s a small detail, but it explains a lot about why the rhythm on Ace sits differently from most hard rock of the era.
‘But doing that record, creatively, was the best moment in my life to that time,’ Snider continued. ‘Bernie plays like I think; it opened me up as a writer and shared the burden. A real blossoming as a writer and creator. We bonded, we got on great, and it breaks my heart that we didn’t get to tour and really be onstage together.’
Fan Verdicts on a Long-Overdue Listen
The Album of the Week Club put Ace through its paces recently, and the range of responses is telling. Chris Downie placed the record in a broader argument about Snider’s legacy, pointing to the Kelly Osbourne spat that resurfaced questions about whether the man had been creatively dormant for four decades. His verdict: the Desperado Ace shelved album is one of several projects that deserved better and was ‘arguably buried in the zeitgeist of its time.’ He noted that Burr’s playing on the record underlined what a loss the drummer was to the wider scene after his time with Iron Maiden.
Gary Claydon was more plainspoken: ‘Bernie Tormé is the star turn. Shooting from the hip with his fuzzbomb guitar, Tormé rarely allows the energy levels to dip. Had this been released in the early 80s, it would have gone down a storm.’ Several other listeners echoed the timing argument. Adam McCann called it ‘a cult album with solid alumni, which sorely needs a proper reissue so that it can finally be recognised 30 years on.’ John Davidson, coming in with no prior knowledge of the album’s existence, landed on ‘if it had been written in 1981 it would probably have been a hit.’
Not every take was glowing. Chris Elliott offered the most pointed dissent: ‘Think meat and potatoes, but the meat’s grey and the potatoes are lumpy.’ Mike Canoe found the formula working for a little over half the album before ‘the clichés start piling up and getting stale.’ Greg Schwepe, who went in expecting to hate it, ended up giving it 7 out of 10, admitting it kept him engaged across its full running time. The final aggregated score across 38 votes was 6.73 out of 10, which feels about right for a record that rewards patience without quite hitting the heights its best moments promise.
What runs through almost every response is the name Tormé. Track after track, listeners zeroed in on the guitar playing as the album’s consistent highlight, with Snider’s broader vocal range, freed from the theatrical demands of Twisted Sister, as the other main revelation. The western-themed conceit, Hang ‘Em High and all, could have been a gimmick. On the actual record, it mostly holds together.
The Desperado Ace shelved album is available now via Angel Air. Given the 1996 Bloodied but Unbowed pressing and the 2006 reissue both remain in circulation, a proper remaster, as Claydon suggests, is arguably the one thing still missing.
