Sounds From The Junkshop #6 - Love/Hate

 

"Don't ask me why things are the way they are - they just are..." - Love/Hate, Wasted In America (1992)

This has been one of the weirdest SFTJ's I've put together so far. Following the previous column on the Dogs D'Amour, I thought it'd be fun to take a bit more of a look at my teenage metalhead phase and dig up a few memories. The trouble really was finding one band to centre it around - as I've mentioned in previous SFTJ's, in between first seeing the sheer savage glory of AC/DC's Thunderstruck video on the ITV Chart Show as an 11-year-old and kind of finally settling in as a Wildhearts/Terrorvision/Therapy? fan (which, let's be honest, is pretty much the ground I've occupied ever since when it comes to this sort of music) three or four years later, I ended up taking more than a few turns down various metal back roads with varying degrees of success.

Short of calling this particular column "Confessions of a Teenage Metalhead" which seemed like a bit of a cop-out, I was gonna have to pick one band to sum this era up though and it was very nearly WASP just because they were the band who had my parents worried I was converting to Satanism. I was 13 years old, they had a single called Chainsaw Charlie (Murders In The New Morgue which had a picture of Blackie Lawless grinning maniacally while clutching a bloody chainsaw on the front, I really don't think I need to explain why I briefly thought they were amazing do I? Let's face it, boys that age are irretrievably drawn to the most evil disgusting stuff that'll scare the hell out of your parents - I'm pretty sure it was the reason why I first got into Iron Maiden off the back of their Holy Smoke single as well and then promptly went out and bought their No Prayer For The Dying album - jeez, can you think of a worse album to get into Maiden through?! It's a good thing that Fear Of The Dark was quite a bit better is all I can say otherwise I'd probably have avoided them like the plague subsequently!

Likewise, in the year or two before Smells Like Teen Spirit hit the Top 10 and ushered in a massive sea change, it was a bit hard not to get caught up by the whole sleaze rock/hair metal thing as it was pretty much single-handedly dominating the ITV Chart Show's Rock Top 10 at the time and I had cassette singles by Skid Row (18 & Life), G'n'R (Yesterdays), Metallica (The Unforgiven - I was a couple of years too late to kind of be aware of their classic '80s stuff and wouldn't really discover it properly until I hit my twenties) and the Quireboys (the re-release of There She Goes Again) in my collection back then as well. To be honest though, none of them really ended up being long term repeat offenders on my tape shelf even back then - I kind of lost interest in G'n'R when they started putting out bad Wings/Dylan cover versions, Maiden vanished off my radar when Bruce Dickinson left (not to return until I picked up the storming return to form that was Brave New World almost a decade later), the Quireboys didn't really have any further hits after the one I bought although Spike and the lads would elbow their way back into my conscience with a vengeance when I hit my twenties and started to go to Bradford Rio's on a regular basis where they'd play without fail once or twice a year and give me a great excuse to get absolutely tanked and holler along to their songs.

For a lot of these bands that I got into though, what sunk 'em in terms of me buying their records wasn't grunge - as I've already mentioned, I had precious little time for that apart from possibly the Smashing Pumpkins who I always liked until Billy Corgan managed to outdo Houdini by disappearing up his own backside (sorry Billy). No, what kind of caused me to lose interest in Skid Row, WASP, Iron Maiden et al was the rise of Britrock which took the killer riffs and choruses of old-skool metal and nailed them to a much more down-to-earth and relatable attitude which owed more to punk than it did to Zep or Sabbath (and yeah, I'll grudgingly admit it, grunge probably had a hand there as well). There were some bands such as AC/DC, Alice Cooper and Kiss (don't laugh) who I would stay a fan of throughout the '90s and to this day but when you first heard Terrorvision's How To Make Friends And Influence People or the Wildhearts' Earth Vs and Phuq, you couldn't help but find Axl Rose's diva behaviour, Sebastian Bach's glass-shattering screeching, James Hetfield's overwrought growling and Blackie Lawless and Steve Harris' long and drawn out concept albums about Satan's rectum all a bit...well, silly suddenly. Sorry guys.

I had a bit of a think and realised that actually there was one band who initially rose up with the hair metal crowd and just to say clung on in my affections through at least part of the Britpop era. I first encountered Love/Hate via a mixtape a friend did for me at school - I seem to remember him asking me if I'd copy him a couple of my Carter albums on to a C90 and in return he did me a compilation which was a weird mix of Britrock (Therapy?, the Almighty, I want to say Terrorvision but I think that might have been slightly later) grunge (Nirvana, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, again I want to say the Pumpkins but I think they might have also followed on a later compilation), the tail end of hair metal (Skid Row, WASP) and the heavier end of indie (the Manic Street Preachers whose From Despair To Where was the point where I though "oh okay, they do have some good songs to back their big gobs up then!", the Jesus & Mary Chain and somewhat incongruously Depeche Mode and Suede though to be fair the selections there, I Feel You and Animal Nitrate were definitely heavy enough to stand their ground in this company). This would have been early to mid 1993 I think but I remember the song that really stood out for me was one which kicked in with a Hendrix Star Spangled Banner style intro before kicking into a brutal driving guitar assault with lyrics about getting well and truly fubar. The song in question was Wasted In America and the band was Love/Hate.

Upon seeing my mate again at school the following week, I asked if he had any more of Love/Hate's stuff and he mentioned that his brother had both of the albums. Upon offering to copy him the two Senseless Things albums I had at the time, we agreed to another swap and thus I ended up with a C90 containing the Wasted In America album and its predecessor, the group's debut Blackout In The Red Room. Even as a 14-year-old, I could tell that these guys were cut from the same cloth that G'n'R had been before the mega success had blunted them and turned them from sounding furious to just sounding whiny. Wasted was good but it was Blackout that really caught my ear with its tales of getting well and truly wrecked on whatever you could lay your hands on. Even all these years later, the first side of it still sounds amazing with the call-and-response Fuel To Run, the seasick Tumbleweed and the frenetic She's An Angel still sounding awesome today.

Weirdly, Wasted In America had actually been a Top 40 hit the year before I first heard the band via that mixtape but it kind of really marks out what an oddity Love/Hate were. They'd come up during the hair metal era in the States but while they'd never really done anything commercially in their homeland, their much rougher and rawer take on the sleaze-rock formula had turned them into underground favourites over on this side of the pond with their chart positions slowly improving. Even the rise of grunge didn't stop them - while the likes of Warrant and Winger were well and truly floundering by 1992, Love/Hate were actually growing into genuine bona fide chart stars with the Wasted In America album breaking into the Top 20.

 Listening back to Wasted In America again all these years on, it's fairly clear (to me at least) why Love/Hate, at least initially, managed to surf the grunge wave rather than seeing it simply smash them to pieces the way it did to groups like Danger Danger et al. Sure, there were a few similarities to the whole G'n'R sound but Love/Hate peddled a much nastier, scuzzier and punked-up take on the formula with the likes of Yucca Man (which in a just world would have been the soundtrack to some sort of Hills Have Eyes style gorefest movie) and Happy Hour showing a self-deprecating humour at work behind frontman Jizzy Pearl's screeching vocals, Jon E Love's slashing guitar, Skid Rose's frenetic bass playing and Joey Gold's powerhouse drumming. Even by 1993, they were still holding up and I remember being excited to find out via an issue of Kerrang! shortly after getting that mixtape that they had a new album out imminently called Let's Rumble (with Love being replaced on guitar by Darren Householder). Sure enough, I went straight out and got a copy on cassette from HMV Leeds the Saturday after it came out.

Unfortunately, Let's Rumble was the point where Love/Hate really did start to lose momentum a bit. It still broke into the Top 30 but it disappeared pretty much as soon as it arrived with its one single, the sleaze-by-numbers Spinning Wheel missing the charts altogether. On listening to it, you can pretty much see why it tanked - it really isn't very good. The opening title track is a proper boozed-up call to arms and Boozer is well and truly ferocious, like the Chilis on steroids. Those aside though, it's pretty much forgettable. Ironically enough, they came over to tour to support the album and took the then fast-rising Wildhearts along as support and...well, you can probably guess how that ended - nearly every review had the support band well and truly nuking the headliners. Love/Hate would be dropped by their label soon afterwards and that was pretty much that.

Or not quite as it turned out. A couple of years later in 1995 right in the middle of the summer of Britpop while browsing the metal section in HMV (I presume I must've been looking for a Wildhearts single or similar), I stumbled across a new Love/Hate album called I'm Not Happy on German import CD for the princely sum of £8. "Hmmm," I thought, "Well, it's not like there's much else out this week, I've got enough money to get a new album...oh and it says here that it's the original line-up back together, let's give it a punt."

...and I promptly wished I hadn't as this one was similarly poor to Let's Rumble. Apart from the dark and doomy The End (probably the only song on there that could've sat on Blackout without being terminally embarrassed) and the pounding Superfragilistic, there really wasn't much worth writing home about on this one either apart from hearing them gleefully murdering I Am The Walrus as the closing track (I remember playing it to a group of "lads lads lads!" Oasis fan types who I was mates with at the time and having a chuckle at the expression of sheer horror on their faces so at least one good thing came out of it!) Having said that, I'm pretty sure I'm Not Happy made its way to one of the then-numerous record exchanges in Leeds fairly quickly after I bought it and that really was that.

Love/Hate would struggle on for a couple more albums which didn't really get far beyond their native California - 1997's Livin' Off Layla saw Jizzy quit the band halfway through to be replaced by Marq Torien of the Bulletboys (another group who'd sprung from the LA glam scene but had got decidedly scuzzier after their first album - unlike Love/Hate though they never really had any success over here in dear old Blighty). To be fair, this one is slightly better than its predecessors in that it has four good tunes on it (all with Jizzo on vocals natch) - Driver, Walk On, Wish I Had More Time and It Shines. Meanwhile, 1999's Let's Eat had Jizzy back along with Joey and a new guitarist and bassist. Again, it's not the worst but it's no Blackout either.

By this time, I was blissfully unaware that Love/Hate were still even a thing (indeed, Jizzy would be off fronting LA Guns for a bit in the late '90s and even did an album with them before Phil Lewis returned to the fold) but, as with quite a few late '80s/early '90s rock bands, that would promptly change when I returned to live in Bradford in the early noughties following four years at Uni down in Stoke-on-Trent. With Britpop long dead by this point, indie music subsumed by sub-Strokes dullards and metal the preserve of nu-metal neanderthals and frat-punk bozos, my attempts to find a place to go where they played music I actually liked led to me to the hallowed halls of Bradford Rio's about half a mile outside the city centre in Great Horton. Saturday nights there would involve copious amounts of Jack Daniels, Red Stripe and Jagermeister (and if you were feeling particulary brave, maybe one of their legendary "rocktails" such as turbo snakebite and black (with Pernod instead of blackcurrant) or nuclear snakebite (snakebite with blue bols which for some reason went luminous green!)

My first trip to Rio's was to see the Almighty (another band who I'm sure will be a SFTJ entry in the near future) there in 2001, shortly followed by a Ginger Wildheart solo gig about a month later just before Christmas. While looking at the listings there, I noted that Love/Hate were due to play the venue the following March. As I'd never seen them live first time round, I promptly went along and had the time of my damn life - even though by this point the band was basically Jizzy plus whoever he could drag along (as indeed it has been ever since - according to Jizzo there's no bad blood, it's just that the others all have families and jobs back in the States and aren't able to take time away from them to tour although there's been the occasional reunion tour down the years), Love/Hate have always been a great band to listen to in a sweaty rock venue after a few drinks and by the time Wasted and Blackout finished the set, I'd well and truly rediscovered my love for them!

Love/Hate ended up being the last band I ever saw at the original Rio's before they knocked it down to become a car park (I don't think my inner rock child has ever really recovered from that to tell you the truth) - as it was closing weekend, obviously I had to try as much of the "rocktail" menu as I could and by the time they came on stage I distinctly remember being slouched halfway over the crash barrier singing the lyrics to Fuel To Run back at Jizzy at the top of my voice - fun times...

Jizzy has put a couple of albums out under the Love/Hate name in recent years, usually a bit on the inconsistent side but with the occasional reminder of what they're capable of when they nail it. My last encounter with them was at the Croydon Rocks festival a couple of years ago where they put on a headline set to a suitably lubricated venue to good effect. Yup, Love/Hate weren't big and they weren't clever but as far as songs to bellow along to after a few beers go, they've got few equals and for that I salute them. Tune in, get drunk and enjoy.

(NB - Jizzy's old website available via the Web Archive contains a full warts 'n' all story of the ups and downs of Love/Hate's ten year existence and is a pretty good read if you're curious as to what life was like for the hundreds of bands in the late '80s LA scene who didn't go on to sell millions of copies. Definitely well worth a read)