Sebastian Bach walked through Los Angeles International Airport this week in a black T-shirt, jogging pants and his signature long hair tied back into a ponytail. Nothing dramatic, except that the photos went viral almost instantly, mostly because the man in them looked so far removed from the glam-metal poster boy who fronted Skid Row through the late '80s and early '90s.

He'd just wrapped a show in Oklahoma and was clearly trying to move through the terminal unnoticed. He mostly did. It's the internet, after 30-odd years of Bach in the public eye, that couldn't let the moment pass quietly.

The photos set off a familiar chain reaction online, one where a changed appearance becomes an excuse to relitigate someone's whole career. And in Bach's case, that dredged up one specific story fans keep returning to: the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards, and what happened between him, Christina Applegate and a young, largely unknown Brad Pitt.

The story fans keep bringing up

Applegate wrote about the night in her memoir, You With The Sad Eyes. According to her account, she attended the 1989 VMAs with Pitt, who was still early in his career and dating her at the time. Bach, already a known frontman thanks to Skid Row, was also there. Applegate has said she found herself drawn to him over the course of the evening and ended up leaving the ceremony with Bach instead of Pitt.

Pitt, by her telling, took Applegate's mother home instead and stayed upset about the whole thing for years afterward. Applegate has said the two eventually moved past it and rebuilt their friendship, though it clearly stuck around as an anecdote worth putting in a book decades later.

The twist, as Applegate has recounted it, is that she regretted the decision almost immediately. She met Bach's girlfriend at an after-party that same night and learned he had a one-year-old son at home. Bach has since spoken about the incident himself and owned up to his part in it. "When you're young, you get thrown into the whirlwind of rock 'n' roll, meeting a lot of people, and you'd better hold on tight," he's said.

Where Bach is now

None of this is new information, but it resurfaces every time Bach makes headlines for something unrelated, which tells you how much cultural residue a single awards-night decision can leave behind. Bach has largely stepped back from the tabloid churn since his Skid Row peak, branching into television, Broadway and reality shows over the years. He's been married to model Suzanne Le since 2015, a quiet wedding after an earlier marriage to Maria Aquinar that gave him three kids, including son Paris Bach, who now performs alongside him on tour.

Whether this latest round of viral photos changes anything about how Bach is remembered seems unlikely. But the 1989 story isn't going anywhere either, not as long as Applegate's book stays in print and fans keep finding new excuses to bring it up.