This may strike anyone only familiar with Buckcherry’s latter-day butt rock incarnation as hard to believe, but there was once a time when the band were considered the saviors of rock n’ roll, the heir to the Guns N’ Roses throne. It was the late ’90s and times were fucking dire, nu-metal ruling the rock charts. And along comes this band with attitude, bluster, bravado, old school rock n’ roll riffs and lyrics about doing heaps of cocaine. It was what we needed!

Buckcherry would go on to release one more great album before descending into the modern rock radio abyss of the Breaking Benjamins of the world. “Crazy Bitch” from that record (15), is probably the band’s best known song to date, and it turns out that vocalist Josh Todd recorded the initial idea for the chorus on his mom’s answering machine. Cell phones that could easily capture audio, of course, didn’t exist in those days.

Speaking to Vegas Rocks, he explained that the inspiration for the track came when he saw Paris Hilton’s leaked sex tape, the idea struck, and he didn’t want to lose it:

“Then I started reminiscing about my youth, and I had a lot of crazy girls that I had met when I was younger. I just started singing [the] chorus of ‘Crazy Bitch,’ and I just wanted to record it. I called my mom to record it on her [answering] machine so I wouldn’t forget it. I just said, ‘Don’t erase this — I want to remember it. We’ll talk about it later.’”

That must’ve been quite the conversation later between Josh and his mom. I sure hope he bought her a nice car or at least, like, some flowers as a thank you for all the success the song brought him! It was a turning point in the band’s career, even if — in my opinion — it was for the worse.