Larry ‘L.A.’ Greene has passed away. The vocalist was best known for his work with AOR bands Fortune and Harlan Cage, and he also made his mark as a songwriter and performer on a string of movie soundtracks, including “Top Gun”, “Over the Top” and “Mystic Pizza”. In recent years he was busy writing and performing music for current TV series and films, and he also worked with the revived Fortune, with whom he released two studio albums, in 2019 and 2021.
Fortune broke the news yesterday on their official FaceBook profile (below), though they kept the details pretty thin.
Larry Greene joined Fortune in 1985. Fortune are a cult eighties AOR act. Cult because they put out one superb album in 1985 and then vanished from the rock map. Not much has been written about the band, even though AOR and melodic rock fans who dig deeper into both genres know them very well, since their debut counts as one of the best records the genre produced in the late, great eighties. We’re talking about the AOR reach of American west-coast bands that were blending hard rock with pop aesthetics extremely successfully at the time. Yes, Fortune were also taking a few lessons back then, a bit from ABBA, a bit from Boston, Styx, Journey and, last but not least, Bonnie Tyler.
Strictly speaking, the band had already released its first record back in 1979. Even then they were called Fortune, and even then that album was called “Fortune”. But over the following years the band went through a serious transformation in sound and style, so it seemed perfectly logical to start over from scratch. From the beginning. Under the same name. Even before the release of the debut (or, to be precise, the second album), the band had gained recognition three years earlier with the song Airwaves, which they contributed to the movie “Last American Virgin”. The album “Fortune” had huge potential, and when it came out it was warmly received, praised by music critics and the wider public alike, but then Camel/MCA Records, the very same label that also had Night Ranger and Guiffria under its wing, declared bankruptcy.
After Fortune fell apart, Larry Greene founded the AOR outfit Harlan Cage in 1994, and between 1996 and 2002 they lined up four excellent studio albums: “Harlan Cage” (1996), “Double Medication Tuesday” (1998), “Forbidden Colors” (1999) and “Temple Of Tears” (2002).
Almost 35 years after the debut “Fortune”, the reformed Fortune, led by founding members and brothers Richard and Mick Fortune and of course Larry, released the long-missed second studio album “II” in 2019. The album was played, recorded and produced by the core of the lineup that made the studio debut, and it’s an excellent companion piece to its older brother. In 2022 Fortune dropped another very bold studio album, “Level Ground” (Rockline review), on which they stayed true to the musical elements that make up the bulk of eighties AOR. Even earlier, in August 2020 to be exact, Fortune released the live document “The Gun’s Still Smokin’ Live”, recorded at their 2019 Frontiers Rock festival set in Trezzo Sull’Adda near Milan, Italy (RockLine review).
Larry Greene was actively writing music for films throughout his career. His best-known piece is the composition used in “Top Gun”, titled Through The Fire, from 1986. This year Fortune used inserts from Top Gun for the video for Level Ground, taken from the band’s 2022 album of the same name. He also went on to co-write and perform the songs Take it Higher and Mind Over Matter for the film “Over The Top” (1987), and co-wrote and performed the song Long Journey for the film “Mystic Pizza” (1988). Also worth mentioning are his contributions to the films “The Neverending Story (Chapter II)”, “Glass Cage”, “Ring Of The Muskateer” and “All The Right Moves”.
