Garbage Days Revisited #31: Life, Sex & Death - "The Silent Majority" (1992)

 

"'Cos we all need to raise a little hell before we get to heaven..." - Life, Sex & Death - Raise A Little Hell

We looked at Antiproduct on Sounds From The Junkshop a couple of days ago but if you thought Alex Kane's reign of lunacy started there - oh no no no. About 5-10 years prior to dousing himself in Gene Simmons meets Krusty the Clown facepaint and regularly setting himself on fire onstage, Kane was the guitarist with one of the most utterly out there bands to emerge from the tail end of the LA hair metal scene, namely Life, Sex & Death. Formed in the dying days of Sunset Strip's reign as the Aquanet Babylon, they were one of those bands who were so uniquely insane that you could almost see their "plenty of press plaudits and a rabid die-hard following but album sales? Forget it" status coming from miles away.

The legend has it that after leaving Enuff Z'Nuff in the late '80s, Alex Kane would relocate from Chicago to LA and link up with the rhythm section of Billy Garr on bass and Brian Horak on drums. They had a set of material ready to go but were struggling to find a lead singer who could do it justice. Then one day as they were sat in the studio jamming some songs out, a crazy homeless guy called Stanley wandered in through the fire exit and started babbling at them. They decided what the hell, why not give the songs a go with this guy singing, somehow it worked and thus LSD were born. They quickly became a must-see act on the Sunset Strip club circuit with Stanley's incredibly erratic behaviour (leaping into the crowd to scream at audience members, falling asleep for several minutes onstage or just cowering in the corner of the stage randomly babbling and shrieking) getting them enough infamy that Warners reputedly offered a seven figure sum to sign them.

(NB - I have heard it said that the whole thing was, quite possibly obviously, a gimmick and that Stanley was actually an art school mate of the other band members. But what the hell, why let facts get in the way of a good story?...)

Lord only knows what Warners must have thought when LSD presented them with The Silent Majority - it's an utterly brilliant and totally unhinged album but if I'd been given the job of trying to take this fucker to market and make back a million dollars plus I think I'd have probably chucked myself out of the window of that twentysomethingth floor office then and there. It actually starts with a gentle acoustic lament, Blue Velvet Moon, from Stanley before Kane's guitars and the thundering rhythm section bulldoze in to turn the song into We're Here Now which is an absolute stormer of an opener ("We're here now boys and girls/Together we'll burn the world!" - again, you can definitely see future shades of Antiproduct in this one) and is quickly followed by the equally ferocious anti-authority Jawohl Asshole (great song title) and the gleefully boneheaded School's For Fools ("A-B-C-D-E-F-G/You wanna load your teacher up on LSD!") which was the obvious single here. At the time I first heard this album after getting a second hand copy from the excellent Discovery Records in Bradford for £8, we were in the middle of that tedious Busted song What I Go To School For being on the radio interminably and I suggested to my bandmates we should cover this as an answer to it. We tried it at rehearsals but as a group of four chord Ramones soundalikes it was a bit beyond our skill level unfortunately...

It's at this point though that things start to go REALLY weird - Telephone Call is a five minute blues ballad about Jesus phoning you up as a kid and telling you to leave home. Utterly bizarre but somehow it works brilliantly as does the acoustic Farm Song which sounds like it was recorded on the back of a bus before ending with the sound of bottles smashing. Then the tempo goes up again with the intense pounding drums of Fuckin' Shit Ass, another which definitely points the way forward to Antiproduct with Stan's screaming vocals and the sheer fury of the song.

And thus it continues for the rest of the album as LSD keep swinging between genres like a moonshine-raddled gorilla from the relatively straightforward pounding rock anthems Raise A Little Hell (the single that should've been) and Wet Your Lips through the ultra-intensity of Train, Tank and Big Black Bush to the full on weird-outs of the bluesy Hey Buddy and the ultra-nutzoid Guatemala. It all finishes with a gentle acoustic ballad from Stanley called Rise Above and that's it. At which point you'll probably be lying on the floor thinking "What...the...fuck...just...happened?" But I guarantee you'll be cueing it up for another listen before you know it.

It perhaps won't surprise you dear reader to find out that The Silent Majority did not recoup that $1 million plus advance that Warners spent signing Life, Sex & Death and they would be gone from the label very soon after its release. Horak would end up playing drums in Vince Neil's solo band for a bit, Garr I seem to remember cropping up in a band with Tracii Guns for about five minutes at some point (again, I realise that doesn't really narrow it down very much!) and Kane, after a brief stint in a band with Bam from the Dogs D'Amour and Share from Vixen that would later mutate into future SFTJ'ers Bubble, would head over to England eventually resurfacing in Clam Abuse and then Antiproduct (I also remember a funny story from LA Guns' Phil Lewis who was also back in Blighty and between bands at the time that he and Kane briefly went into business running an astrology phoneline which basically involved them buying a copy of all the days' papers, reading the horoscopes, basically cut-and-shutting them together for each star sign and waiting for the money to roll in which...erm, I suspect it didn't). And Stanley? Lord only knows. Either way, that's the Life, Sex & Death story - utter insanity and an album that even fifteen years after hearing it I still can't decide is utter lunacy or total genius. Probably a bit of both. Either way, you definitely owe it to yourself to give it a listen.