L.A. Guns Playing Dayton This Weekend
Wednesday, April 1, 2015 at 12:01AM
“We love touring all over the world, but there’s no place like playing in the U.S.,” exclaims L.A. Guns drummer Steve Riley. “The fans here are so knowledgeable and cool to us. We feel like we’re friends with a lot of people all over the country.”
L.A. Guns will bring a piece of California’s Sunset Strip to Dayton’s Oddbody’s Music Room on Saturday, April 4.
If you’re not a big fan of ’80s metal, then the band L.A. Guns might just be a foggy memory. Or you might think of them as “Axl Rose’s band before Guns n’ Roses.” If you’re big into the ’80s hair scene, then you know all about Axl leaving, singer Phil Lewis coming in, original guitarist Tracii Guns, two touring versions, lawsuits and now the current incarnation of the band, still fronted by Lewis but without Guns.
The first incarnation of L.A. Guns formed way back in 1983. In the years since, the band has released more than a dozen albums.
“We’re really proud of our repertoire,” Riley says. “A lot of bands from the ’80s say ‘I wish we’d done that differently.’ I don’t think we do. It’s not us just pumping our chests out, saying we love everything we did. We’re so proud to be able to go around the world and have a repertoire of songs that everyone knows. We go around the world, play our own songs, no covers, and that’s very fortunate.”
Still a good draw, the members of L.A. Guns tour off and on throughout the year, every year. The days of the big tour bus and driver are gone. Now, it’s airports, rental cars and weekend runs and back home in between. This saves money and sanity.
“When we first started we were always on a bus,” Riley says. “But now we’re used to it and it is fun and we get to come back and forth to home so it’s all right.”
Still, the desire to do a proper tour with another national act is there, and Riley says L.A. Guns may soon team up with fellow glam metal rockers Faster Pussycat for a string of dates. This would mean renting a tour bus and doing things old school, like back in the heyday of the 1980s.
Since L.A. Guns is a road band at heart, the quartet writes while on the road. Singer Phil Lewis recently announced the band would be hitting the studio soon to record a blues album.
“We play straight rock and roll,” Riley says.
His statement is more definitive than explanatory: “We’ve never gotten too heavy or too fluffy. Not to compare us with the Rolling Stones because they are so huge, but they play straight rock and roll and that’s pretty much what L.A. Guns is too – we’re a straight rock and roll band. With that straight rock and roll, we’ve always had a blues influence in us. We’ve always loved the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Humble Pie doing the blues. Our new record will be a rock album with a blues feel. We don’t want to scare people into thinking we’re working on a slow, plodding record. We’re not.”
The band members will take the rest of the year to write around 25 songs and continue to work on them, whittling their choices down to the top 12 or so. Those 12 best songs will make the cut and be recorded at the end of the year and in early 2016. Before the band can get to the recording stage, they do all their pre-production work in a rehearsal space, avoiding the costly expense of piecing songs together while in the actual recording studio. This means recording is down to a near science, with Riley laying down all his drum tracks for an entire album’s worth of songs in just a couple days.
Some of those new songs will get worked out during sound checks before shows. While the band doesn’t necessarily have any plans to add new songs into the set, Riley admits they always add a few surprises or nuggets into each show for the die-hard fans.
For Riley and the rest of L.A. Guns, playing at Oddbody’s is familiar. The band stops in Ohio with quite a bit of regularity. Riley says the band likes to play here because its fanbase is so strong.
“Ohio’s such a rock and roll state! Most bands come in and out of Ohio a couple times a year now” he says. “We’re looking forward to coming back there – it’s always fun. You can spend a couple weekends playing there. The whole Midwest area… well, people don’t realize how many rock and roll fans are there. Way more than the East and West coasts. The Midwest is just stocked with rock fans. We play a lot of shows in the Midwest. Ohio’s beautiful and the people are great there.”
L.A. Guns will perform on Saturday, April 4 at Oddbody’s Music Room, 5418 Burkhardt Rd. Doors open at 7 p.m. Concerts at Oddbody’s are 18 and older. Advance tickets for L.A. Guns are available now for $20 or $25 at the door, day of show. For tickets or more information, please visit laguns.net or oddbodys.com.