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.
Reader Comments (25)
Made me laugh, Spyke. Still, life for Riley now has to be better than being stuck in the meat-grinder that was W.A.S.P. That said, those second and third albums he plated on hinted at something far more lasting and consistent, if not as explosive and raw, as the first one.
* P.S. Gary, Let's be fair, my mentor, Blackie Lawless is only 350 lbs of narcissistic egotism... but he's still a hell of a songwriter.
That said, Tracii Guns is a helluva guitarist and in my mind, Grant fills his shoes better than any of the other guitarists who played before him after Tracii left.
Why?
Because Guns overplayed the sh*t, too!
I've seen L.A. Guns 10 times since 1987 when I first caught them in L.A., the last 2 times with Grant, point blank, natch, and I can tell you, he blew the frickin' roof off the boat.
I also complimented Phil Lewis on the song "Underneath The Sun" from their latest album, "Hollywood Forever", is as good as anything they've ever recorded, IMHO, proof that they've still got it.
And now, with Kenny Kweens back on bass, you've got Lewis flanked by two great showmen plus a kicka*s drummer behind him.
Now, speaking of showmen... No doubt, Lawless is a narcissist but still a helluva talent. I saw WASP at M3 a couple of years ago and it was phenomenal except for the corny retrospective "concept" of the stage show using multimedia behind them playing old videos on the back drop with a "WASP, 25 Years of Rock & Roll" banner across it.
Now that I hear that he's an longtime AV guy who did a lot of movie projection in the early days, it explains why he added this layer to the show he simply did not need.
I only wish he wasn't so self-absorbed and was willing to let in a bit of outside influence and direction. I could care less that he cancels shows or that he is a religious fellow these days.
But he seems stuck. It would almost seem like anxiety/panic attacks if you stacked all of it together. And all of that sits uncomfortably next to all of his assets: talented writer, unique vocalist, gifted showman. He pushes people away and suffers no opinion but his own. I get it. He has a vision. But what of the tunnel?
Glad that _Golgotha_ found a label. But I am less and less inspired the more and more he keeps living in the past while attempting to assert his relevance in the current musical climate.
I'll try & give you a short version which might be a bit of over-simplification.
The Mid-West is full of hard working people who just seem to lead a simpler, more basic, grass roots existence. While the NY/LA/SF scenes all had more flash, less substance. Lots of bands are regional hits out there long before they make a splash in the "media outlet" cities. It worked for Rush, Kiss, Styx, REO etc. like that. all big in the mid-west long before they blew up on a national scale.
I think there are economic factors at play, as well as demographic issues as well. The coasts have been driven towards supplying what the market will allow. In many cases, that means that costs (rent, taxes, etc.) push towards format changes, closures, and following trend-lines. Those trend lines are dictated by what the populace wants. As urban areas undergo renewal (read: younger people moving back into city-centers after decades of flight, white or otherwise), they bring with them their incomes and tastes. Broader trends in music thus glom onto coastal centers and make them havens for the most widely shared (and trendy) genres and sub-genres of music, while also taking in diverse sub-genres that cater to newer demographic sets. So the classic stuff gets pushed inward, towards places that haven't experienced, relatively speaking, as much churn in terms of income levels and demographics. Generally speaking, the bleached face of metal is getting older alongside their bands as the broader coastal face is growing more varied in complexion, taste, etc.
Sure, there are exceptions to all of this and pockets on the coasts. But real estate, particularly commercial, is driven to hit that sweet spot that attracts the most eligible consumer (with music, so too bars, restaurants, theaters). Sadly, glam and classic metal aren't drivers when you are thinking per sq. ft. But if you are in an area that has relative stasis, those factors are less apparent or important. What plays in the Heartland still plays (at least more often) in the Heartland.
Other factors--race, class, migration patterns, etc.--also factor into these trends. And let us not forget that even Middle America is susceptible to being co-opted by market forces that are entrenched on the coasts (see: Rocklahoma). So the argument, at least as I see it, works best for smaller venues in smaller spaces where demographics haven't undergone significant shifts. You still have, in essence, target audiences that are stable and have grown up and older alongside the nostalgia acts that struggle to find places/space to play in bigger markets. In the latter, nostalgia acts get pushed into fewer spaces unless they reached some form of peak status that carried over from their heyday and/or that can be funneled into more and more packaged tours that tilt towards a "some old, a lot new and similar."
It isn't necessarily a market-critique approach to metal. But there is something to Ace's observations, something that has been bothering me for some time. Glad he took the time to express it so succinctly while I, as per usual, launched into a digression.
Thanks, Ace, for forcing me to think more seriously about my nagging questions.
I think there are economic factors at play, as well as demographic issues as well. The coasts have been driven towards supplying what the market will allow. In many cases, that means that costs (rent, taxes, etc.) push towards format changes, closures, and following trend-lines. Those trend lines are dictated by what the populace wants. As urban areas undergo renewal (read: younger people moving back into city-centers after decades of flight, white or otherwise), they bring with them their incomes and tastes. Broader trends in music thus glom onto coastal centers and make them havens for the most widely shared (and trendy) genres and sub-genres of music, while also taking in diverse sub-genres that cater to newer demographic sets. So the classic stuff gets pushed inward, towards places that haven't experienced, relatively speaking, as much churn in terms of income levels and demographics. Generally speaking, the bleached face of metal is getting older alongside their bands as the broader coastal face is growing more varied in complexion, taste, etc.
Sure, there are exceptions to all of this and pockets on the coasts. But real estate, particularly commercial, is driven to hit that sweet spot that attracts the most eligible consumer (with music, so too bars, restaurants, theaters). Sadly, glam and classic metal aren't drivers when you are thinking per sq. ft. But if you are in an area that has relative stasis, those factors are less apparent or important. What plays in the Heartland still plays (at least more often) in the Heartland.
Other factors--race, class, migration patterns, etc.--also factor into these trends. And let us not forget that even Middle America is susceptible to being co-opted by market forces that are entrenched on the coasts (see: Rocklahoma). So the argument, at least as I see it, works best for smaller venues in smaller spaces where demographics haven't undergone significant shifts. You still have, in essence, target audiences that are stable and have grown up and older alongside the nostalgia acts that struggle to find places/space to play in bigger markets. In the latter, nostalgia acts get pushed into fewer spaces unless they reached some form of peak status that carried over from their heyday and/or that can be funneled into more and more packaged tours that tilt towards a "some old, a lot new and similar."
It isn't necessarily a market-critique approach to metal. But there is something to Ace's observations, something that has been bothering me for some time. Glad he took the time to express it so succinctly while I, as per usual, launched into a digression.
Thanks, Ace, for forcing me to think more seriously about my nagging questions.