When Matthew and Gunnar Nelson released their debut album “After The Rain” in 1990, it was a massive hit.
The record sold more than 2 million copies and launched a 300-show tour. The first single, “(Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection,” hit No.1 on the charts; the title track was released next, climbing to No. 6.
But ask people what they remember about Nelson today and plenty will give the same answer: The hair. Those long, blonde, lustrous locks cascading down around their faces on the album cover art.
“I always say we look like hot Swedish chicks, you know,” says Matthew Nelson, 58, and the elder of the identical twins by 15 minutes.
They can laugh now about hair jokes and how Nelson was seen, but at the time, the criticism stung.
“We did that. We chose that,” Matthew says of how he and Gunnar presented themselves and their music at the start. “We knew we had to die on that hill, and to a certain degree we did. We won and lost with it, and it was great. I walk back nothing.
“But we always said, ‘Love us or hate us, you’re going to know who we are,’” he says. “And that was the problem. Love us or hate us, people still don’t know who we are. So that’s why we wrote the book.”
“What Happened to Your Hair? How We Played Loud … Loved Proud … And Never Back Down … Together,” the new memoir from the Brothers Nelson, has just been published.
It’s a sprawling story of Matthew and Gunnar’s lives in and out of rock and roll, with all the highs and lows. With chapters written by whichever twin had the clearest memory of a moment or event, the book captures what sounds like their actual voices; the brothers parted ways with a prospective ghostwriter when they decided their personalities weren’t coming through.
“It’s been a common question: Why write a book now?” Gunnar Nelson says on a recent video call with his brother from the Nashville area, where both now live. “I think what it comes down to is this book is really about telling our story, rather than having other people tell it for us and spin it the way it’s always seemed to have been spun.
“Even though they marketed us like a boy band, we wrote everything ourselves. We produced everything ourselves. We designed our own image. We were responsible for the whole creative side of the trip.
“And after the fact, it was a lot easier for people to kind of relegate us to a particular part in music history because we actually test what their definition or presupposition would be of the two of us.”
Family ties
It’s important to know the roots of Matthew and Gunnar Nelson. Their musician and TV star father, Rick Nelson, was himself born into an entertainment powerhouse family. His parents, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, created the TV series “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” which starred Rick, who became a teen music idol thanks to the show, and his brother David Nelson.
Their mother, Kristin Nelson, was the actress-turned-painter daughter of Heisman Trophy winner Tom Harmon and actress Elyse Knox. Her siblings included Mark Harmon, a football star like his father and an actor like his mother, and actress Kelly Harmon. And the twins’ sister, Tracy Nelson, also became an actress.
You’d be forgiven if those two paragraphs make you think Matthew and Gunnar are nepo babies. But you’d be wrong, they say, and write in the book.
“This is kind of correcting the misconception that Matt and I were just nepo babies who had trust funds, and had it handed to us and didn’t work for it,” Gunnar says. “Music is something that we’ve wanted to do from our first conscious memories on the planet.
“It wasn’t a hobby, and we didn’t have a ton of family money to fall back on,” he says, noting that his parents’ marriage was expensive, and their divorce even more so. “We had to work really, really, really hard. You just put your nose to the grindstone, and you get on stage every night and do your thing.
“And you think all that stuff’s going to work out in the end. But we realized in our dad’s case, it really didn’t.”
Rick Nelson tried hard to break free of the teen star image that 14 years of “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” created. When fans and the music industry turned away from him, he wrote the classic song “Garden Party” about how it felt to be identified as something you no longer are.
“Even though in the beginning of his career he didn’t write his own songs, he still chose all the songs,” Gunnar says. “He still put that group together with [guitarist] James Burton and made a really amazing sound. And he never really got any of the credit for that. Throughout his life, I think he was unfairly discounted.”
In some aspects, the book seeks to set the record straight about their father, too, the brothers say.
“Our dad never wrote an autobiography,” Gunnar says of Rick Nelson, who died in a 1985 plane crash when they were 18. “And what a story he must have had to tell.”
Blitzkrieg boppin’
When Gunnar Nelson turned six, his dad took him to a Studio City pawnshop and bought him an inexpensive drum kit he’d been craving. Matthew got a bass for their birthday, and the Nelson rhythm section was born.
By the time they were 12, Gunnar and Matthew were playing in the power pop trio Strange Agent, performing at clubs such as Madam Wong’s in Chinatown and Santa Monica, the Central on the Sunset Strip, and FM Station in North Hollywood.
Nelson was considered to be a hair metal band in the late ’80s, but the brothers say they were suburban punk rockers before anything else.
“Nobody would believe it, but we really identified with that whole culture because we had our own prison,” Matthew says. “Trapped in a gilded cage, you know. We were living in Brentwood in the crappiest house in the neighborhood. It was a nice neighborhood. Marilyn [Monroe] died down the street. Our mother had convinced Grandpa Tom to buy a house for her so we could get in a decent school district.
“But quite frankly, we grew up with the poor kids in the rich neighborhood,” he says, later describing how he and Gunnar got after-school jobs at places like a Häagen-Dazs ice cream shop and a Licorice Pizza record store to earn spending money. “For us, that whole suburban angst thing, we identified with all of that a lot.”
When Strange Agent played a show at the Nelsons’ high school when the twins were 14, the set list included Black Flag’s “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie” and the Ramones’ “Beat on the Brat” and “Blitzkrieg Bop.”
A few years later, when Nelson was shooting its video for “More Than Ever” at the Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles, they looked out at an arena packed with fans – and saw Joey Ramone had somehow shown up.
“These are freaking heroes,” Gunnar says of the Ramones. “We’re just a couple of kids from Burbank who happened to have a dynasty behind us. But honestly, we just loved music, and we love the people who made it. We’re fanboys of music first and foremost.
“I’m sitting there, and Joey Ramone shows up to the show without telling anybody,” he continues. “He just appears in the audience. You can’t miss him, he’s 9 feet tall. He was just the most well-spoken guy. We were actually really influenced by those guys.
“People don’t know that, but Nelson’s music, just like the Ramones, there are no minor keys in anything,” Gunnar says.
“We’re more like heavy folkies with a little bit of punk DNA in there,” Matthew says. “It was fun once when I did an acoustic show in Hollywood, and I look up and about six feet away from me, it’s Lux Interior and Poison Ivy [of the Cramps] there to see me.
“[Lux] came up, and he had a full gold grill, like everything in his mouth was gold,” he says. “He was so sweet, and he handed me this album and said, ‘I just want to tell you, I loved your father. I dedicated this album to him when we made it, when he passed away.
“It was right there,” Matthew says of the dedication on the Cramps’ 1988 album “A Date With Elvis.” [The Cramps covered Ricky Nelson’s “Lonesome Town” on their earlier “Gravest Hits” EP.]
In the book, they also recount meeting Dave Grohl and Pat Smear after a Foo Fighters’ show in 2020, and Smear telling them he and his bandmates in the Germs had wanted to sneak out of the Hong Kong Cafe, where they were about to play, to catch the Strange Agent teens at Madame Wong’s one night.
“People didn’t know that the sun-kissed Malibu Beach twins with the assless chaps and the long hair actually grew up in the seminal L.A. punk scene sharing stages with all those guys,” Gunnar says.
“And we just love them, man,” Matthew says.
Henry and Matthew
The death of their father when they were 18 delivers one of the heaviest emotional moments in the book. Both Matthew and Gunnar write their own chapters about how they heard the news, the trauma of grieving, and the lost year that followed.
But the low moments are balanced by many laugh-out-loud encounters they’ve experienced. Like the time Matthew went to see Black Flag singer Henry Rollins perform a spoken-word show at the Roxy in West Hollywood. In the middle of a piece about the music scene, Matthew was in the audience as Rollins said, “I mean, Nelson … what IS that [bleep]?”
Matthew and Gunnar are glass-half-full guys. Positivity runs through the conversation and the book. So Matthew went backstage to meet Rollins; he pointed out that Rollins was judging the Nelson brothers without really knowing them in the same way others surely judged him for his tattoos, muscles and performance style.
They struck up a friendship. Rollins wrote and recorded a spoken-word piece planned for Nelson’s “Imaginator” concept album, though it was pulled after Rollins’ record label refused to grant permission for its use.
“From not knowing I was in the audience and crapping on my band in front of me, to me going up to meet him and turning it around into something that became a cool collaboration and a friendship,” Matthew says. “I can say this: Henry was one of the reasons why I kept coming back to the book thing with Gunnar.
“Sometimes you can find a common ally and a similarity with people you wouldn’t think is possible, you know?
Mom and Pop
The memoir ends with a chapter titled “What If Pop Hadn’t Died?” in which Gunnar wonders how his life might have turned out had Rick Nelson lived, and how he’d have felt if that meant he and Matthew had never reached stardom with Nelson.
The penultimate chapter, “A Letter to Mom,” sees both Gunnar with Matthew writing to their late mother, Kristin. Throughout the memoir, they describe her as neglectful at best, abusive at worst.
How hard was it to write about your mother, we ask.
” ‘Mother, do you think they’ll like this song,’” Matthew sings, quoting a line from the Pink Floyd song “Mother.” “Go ahead, Gunnar.”
“Yeah, you know, a couple of dudes with mommy issues. I know, it’s such a cliche,” Gunnar says. “Our mother and father had one of the worst divorces in Hollywood history. It was like six straight years … And our mom really didn’t like us very much. We reminded her too much of our father. That was just a fact.
“The way I put it most politely is that our mother was simply born without the mothering gene,” he says. “Our mother was living proof that God put us into the world together as twins for a reason.
“We loved her the best we could. We didn’t judge her. The funny thing is, and we said this in the foreword of the book, our mother probably wouldn’t be very happy with some of the things we wrote in this book. But she should be, because we had a lot more that we could have written.”
Full Nelson
In the recent finale of the second season of HBO Max’s “Peacemaker” series, director James Gunn cast Nelson to play themselves in a pivotal scene between Christopher “Peacemaker” Smith (John Cena), who loves ’80s and ’90s hard rock bands, and Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland).
“It happened completely organically,” Gunnar says. “James Gunn has always been known as a real music guy. And there was a song we had recorded about 15 years ago on a record of ours called ‘Lightning Strikes Twice’ called “To Get Back to You.’
“Apparently, James Gunn was working out one day and reading the trades, and he saw a blurb about [that record] and was just curious,” he says. “So he went up on iTunes and listened to it and loved it. Especially that one particular song.
“He kind of mind-banked it for the right opportunity, and it took a couple of years. Then he sent his production crew down to scope one of our shows to make sure that we still looked and sounded OK. We passed the audition, which was great, and the next thing you know, we’re in Savannah for two days, and we’re filming with James Gunn.”
Nelson plays the song on a paddleboat as Peacemaker and Harcourt have a moment. Gunn titled the episode “Full Nelson” and in addition to filming the band for the show, blended show and performance footage into a music video for the song.”
It was a delightful surprise, Matthew adds.
“It ended up in Rolling Stone because it’s kind of like, ‘James Gunn and Nelson?’” he says. “You know, ‘Henry Rollins and Nelson?’ It’s always kind of being the addendum on a sentence like that is the exact reason why we wrote the book.”
Postscript
As 2026 arrives, the brothers plan to be out promoting the book. In January, they’ve got an event at Licorice Pizza in Studio City to talk about the book and play a few songs.
They plan to tour again, and they’ve been asked by Frontiers, the Italian label that released “Lightning Strikes Twice,” to record another fully electric Nelson album.
They’ve been signed to do a podcast called Licorice Pizza – the guys are friends with Kerry Brown, who bought the rights to the long-dormant brand – where they’ll talk with musicians about their stories from the road.
And they’ll do the duo shows, playing acoustic guitars to accompany their harmony vocals and telling stories between songs, they’ve grown to love in recent years.
“Gunnar and I really find ourselves truly in our power with two brothers and two guitars,” Matthew says. “I think in a world of AI and fake, it takes [courage] to do that. You can’t hide.”
And, finally, we’re happy to report that while it’s shorter these days, their hair is objectively still fabulous.