DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn named Peacemaker‘s season two finale “Full Nelson” for the craziest possible reason: He recruited the actual band Nelson — ultra-blonde twin brothers Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, who reigned over MTV in 1990 with the Number One hit “(Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection” — to perform onscreen during the episode’s emotional peak.
First, we see Eighties-metal connoisseur Christopher Smith, a.k.a. Peacemaker (John Cena), pull Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) onto a party boat when he sees that Nelson are set to play, declaring them “the most underrated ever.” As the will-they-or-won’t-they couple finally share a drunken kiss, the sons of early-Sixties rock idol Ricky Nelson are onstage performing the deepest of deep cuts: the genuinely excellent power ballad “To Get Back From You,” a track from their 2010 album Lightning Strikes Back that had a total of about 30,000 Spotify streams as of Thursday.
“I wanted a band that was popular back in the Eighties or Nineties that would be potentially playing a rock cruise, which they’ve done, I believe,” Gunn says. As a Gen-X punk rocker, he says that Nelson’s hits were “not something I was necessarily into,” but he read about Lightning Strikes Back in a book about hair metal, checked it out, and loved it. “I thought that album sort of revealed how talented they were,” Gunn says. “I truly believe it’s a great album that nobody knows, a pretty great example of melodic rock. And the song is fantastic.”
Last year, Matthew — a Gunn fan whose son “pretty much grew up on” the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack — and Gunnar Nelson were backstage after a L.A. concert when one of Gunn’s producers showed up. “We couldn’t believe it,” Matthew said. “He said, ‘Our mission is basically to see if you guys still look OK and still play OK.’ It was like, ‘What was the verdict?’ And he said, ‘You passed the audition.’” (For the record, Nelson never accepted the hair-metal label, and weren’t really part of that actual scene, abundant tresses aside: “We always thought we were a heavy version of the Hollies.”)
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Gunn flew the brothers to Savannah, Georgia, and plopped them on a stage built on an actual paddlewheel boat, with hundreds of extras in the crowd. He used the same setup to film a scene with latter-day glam band Foxy Shazam, who perform the season’s theme song, “Oh Lord.” “It was just gonna be a couple shots,” says Gunn. “And instead I ended up shooting two music videos. I wasn’t supposed to do either of those things.”
The “Get Back to You” video, featuring footage from the season, is out today (watch it above), and an “Oh Lord” video will follow. “It was literally my favorite day ever on set, and I can’t believe how much we got done,” Gunn adds. “Nelson was performing on stage and Foxy was watching them the whole time, and then Foxy was performing and Nelson was watching them.”
Matthew came away raving about Foxy Shazam and the vocal range of the band’s lead singer, Eric Nally. “Hopefully this blows ’em up like they should have been,” he says. “And with us, you know, people will know we’re not dead.” Matthew emphasizes that his own band never stopped working. “We do know what it’s like to be Taylor Swift for a couple of years,” Matthew says. “But we played for a long time before that happened, and we played for even longer afterwards.”
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The brothers had always liked “To Get Back to You,” which was co-written with Mark Slaughter (of the band Slaughter) and features a guest guitar solo from Toto’s Steve Lukather. But it was never a single and they had never even played it live — they had to learn it for the episode, and have now added it to their setlists. The overall idea of Lightning Strikes Twice was to directly follow up 1990’s hit After the Rain, and pretend that the rise of grunge had never interrupted their career path. ”I really enjoy that album from stem to stern,” Matthew says. “It was actually an album that we put together as almost a continuation of our debut, as if the nightmare of the past couple of decades hadn’t happened.”
Now, the band, and one of their most obscure songs, have reached a new audience — and they also have the comfort of knowing that they exist alongside Superman in the DC Cinematic Universe. “I think that’s fantastic,” Matthew says. “People always thought we were cartoons anyway.”
