Seventeen

Kip Winger was 27 years old when this song was released, making him a decade older than the groupie he sings about. Winger had long since lost interest in this game, but he certainly encountered many young vixens looking to share his company, which gave him plenty of inspiration for this song. Winger says that most of his indulging came when he was 15. "I was playing in bars all the time and thinking I was a rock star and doing all that stuff," he told Kerrang! in 1989. "But I wasn't really anything. I was just in a bar band and I was having women every night. Now the women are in much more abundance and I don't really indulge myself at all. I feel more of a responsibility in this position."

Laws vary from state to state determining how young is too young, and in this song it sounds like Kip Winger might have something unlawful in mind when he sings, "Daddy says she's too young, but she's old enough for me." In our 2014 interview with Winger, he explained that this wasn't the case. "Look, seventeen was legal in Colorado, so I didn't even get the joke, dude," he said. "I didn't get it. And then it hit and every seventeen-year-old girl in the United States thought that song was about her."

Thanks to a video directed by Mark Rezyka, this song did very well on MTV, where the photogenic frontman Kip Winger fit right in. The clip is mostly tight shots of the band, with fleeting images of the mystery girl seen in passing. With help from the video, the song became Winger's first hit, going to #26 in the US. It was their second single; their first was "Madalaine," which didn't chart.