Garbage Days Revisited #40: L.A. Guns - "Vicious Circle" (1994)

 

"Rats in the cellar, screams in my head, I look in the mirror, I look like I'm dead" - L.A. Guns - Why Ain't I Bleeding?

The mid-'90s were a tough time for sleaze rock. When grunge hit, it pretty much brought on a nuclear winter for the genre which almost overnight went from in vogue to about as out of fashion as you could get. Some bands were simply instantly sunk by the tidal wave while others attempted to swim with it by changing to a heavier sound. It maybe goes without saying that the vast majority of the latter though would fail miserably as they just couldn't carry off the change convincingly. There were, however, the odd exceptions and one of them is the album we're covering today, L.A. Guns' 1994 effort Vicious Circle.

I was probably a year or so too late to get into L.A. Guns back in the day (although I remember seeing the video for Some Lie 4 Love on the ITV Chart Show Rock Top 10) despite them being that most rate of beasts, a Sunset Strip band with a Brit fronting them in the form of Phil Lewis who'd made his name in his homeland first with early '80s almost-weres Girl (who also featured future Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen in their line-up) and then with Torme, fronted by the titular former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Bernie Torme before heading across the Atlantic to try his luck in Los Angeles. He ran into original Guns 'n' Roses guitarist Tracii Guns who was starting his own band up with Aussie ex-pat Mick Cripps and former drummer with seminal L.A. punks the Weirdos Nicky Alexander, the quartet roped in ex-Faster Pussycat bassist Kelly Nickels and former W.A.S.P. drummer Steve Riley to replace Alexander and thus L.A. Guns were born.

As you'd probably expect from their pedigree, the group resided in the scuzzier end of sleaze rock (similar to Tracii's old group G'n'R) and had a decent run at the top - their first eponymous album (well, sort of, Tracii had gone through a few line-ups who'd put out various self-released demo collections under the group name before the major labels came a-calling after Phil joined) saw them establishing the formula well with the likes of the doomy One More Reason, the strutting Electric Gypsy and the Welcome To The Jungle style Down In The City writing the sound large. Second album Cocked And Loaded was basically the big budget follow up with the AC/DC esque Rip 'n' Tear leading the way and the token slowie Ballad of Jayne giving them a Top 40 hit in the States and just missing the hit parade over here. Elsewhere, it was a surprisingly varied album ranging from the sleazy Wheels Of Fire and Sleazy Come Easy Go through the full on blast of Showdown (Riot On Sunset) to the almost gothy six minute epic Magdalene.

By 1994 though, the group were faltering commercially. 1991's Hollywood Vampires despite spawning a second minor UK hit in Some Lie 4 Love and having its swooping opener Over The Edge featured on the Keanu Reeves/Patrick Swayze film Point Break, was regarded as a bit of a disappointment and failed to match its predecessors for sales. It did enough numbers to keep the group with their label Polydor but with the grunge backlash hitting at around the same time, it did appear that it was all over bar the shouting, a fact seemingly reinforced when Riley was fired after getting into a brawl with Lewis backstage during a European tour supporting Skid Row.

Phil Lewis described Vicious Circle on the old L.A. Guns website as the band's first "in the studio" project" and it took them three years to complete (with this period seeing Tracii also leaving the group but then rejoining). It could have been a disaster but somehow it works - it's as if the group have been allowed to step back and take stock of things, try ideas, work out what was a goer and what wasn't and then put something which shows them flexing their creative muscles, trying a few new tricks and, surprisingly, pulling it off pretty well.

The first few tracks bear out that this is a bit of a different proposition from earlier L.A. Guns albums - opener Face Down crushes in on an absolutely brutal riff before No Crime is frenetic punk rock with Lewis spitting out pure venom. Lead off single Long Time Dead sounds uncannily like a distant cousin of the Manic Street Preachers' La Tristesse Durera before Killing Machine goes into almost thrashcore territory and Fade Away heads into blissful psychedelia. Make no bones about it, Sunset Strip by numbers this very much ain't.

The surprises keep on coming throughout - the Nickels-sung Nothin' Better To Do is freewheeling garage rock and the woozy heroin lament Chasing The Dragon is a distant cousin of Aerosmith's Sweet Emotion. It's the closing one-two that provides a great sign-off though - the mournful Why Ain't I Bleeding? is the sound of the group regretfully looking back at a life less than well lived ("'Cos I'm drunk right now and I need a cigarette/I wish that I knew somewhere to forget/But if I'm bound for hell for the state I'm in, I ain't got regrets and I won't change a thing") while the skeletal acoustic led lament of Kiss Of Death (featuring Griff from the Quireboys on guitar) is a less than fond farewell to a destructive relationship.

It may have been an unexpected triumph but Vicious Circle wasn't gonna rescue L.A. Guns' career at this point - it bombed and soon afterwards the band were gone from Polydor. Soon afterwards, Nickels, Cripps and Lewis would all leave the band leaving Tracii Guns and a returning Steve Riley to soldier on with a new heavier approach (the next album American Hardcore was closer to Pantera than anything and predictably went down like a cup of cold sick among the band's following). The group would bring in Jizzy Pearl from Love/Hate for 1998's Shrinking Violet but this also did negligible numbers and soon afterwards, the imperial era line-up would reform.

It would be a few years after that when I would finally get into L.A. Guns. As with a lot of sleaze rock bands, they were regulars at Bradford Rio's back in the day and because that was where I ended up spending most of my weekends in the first half of the noughties, it was probably inevitable that our paths would cross. The group would go through a pretty dramatic period of instability by this time - Kelly Nickels would already have left by the time of the group's first post-comeback album Man In The Moon with Cripps following him out of the door shortly after the album's release (he can now be found in the Brutalists with ex-Quireboys bassist Nigel Mogg). Following 2002's Waking The Dead, Guns would leave as well to form Brides of Destruction with Nikki Sixx. Unbowed, Lewis and Riley would continue and come up with another underappreciated effort in 2005's Tales From The Strip (give Vampire a listen if nothing else, it's probably the best song the band did in this era). Tracii would try to rejoin the band after BoD folded soon afterwards but Lewis and Riley said no which led to the somewhat farcical situation of two versions of the band doing the rounds for a decade or so with Tracii re-recruiting first Paul Black (the group's pre-major deal singer) and then Jizzo to his version of the band.

As well as seeing L.A. Guns several times during this period (mostly Phil and Steve's version but I saw Tracii's line-up once as well), I almost ended up interviewing Phil for Bubblegum Slut fanzine when the group played Leeds Rio's (after the club had moved across the county in the mid-noughties) in about 2007 - unfortunately he'd gone off sightseeing and didn't come back until the show! I ended up hanging out and chatting with Scott Griffin, the band's then-bassist who asked if I could show him where the Who had recorded Live At Leeds as it was one of his favourite albums. This led to the somewhat surreal episode of me being stood across the road from the bus stop I was getting off at to go to work most days with a big black-haired L.A. rocker guy in a leather jacket and him going "Oh man, this is so cool to finally see this!" while looking at the Uni refectory! Funnily enough, I met Scott again a few years later in Las Vegas when he was playing with Sin City Sinners (as detailed in the SFTJ entry I did on Bubble a few weeks ago) and he remembered the incident which was really cool.

Detailing everything that's happened with L.A. Guns in the decade since then would take forever and lead to this article drifting even further than it has so I'll try and keep it brief - 2016 saw Phil severing his partnership with Steve and forming a new L.A. Guns line-up with Tracii who, since then, have put out three albums in 2017's Missing Peace, 2019's The Devil You Know and Checkered Past which has just seen the light of day. The former two were good efforts, showing the group taking their sound in a much heavier direction but doing it well. The third one may just be showing up in the reviews section of this blog any day now. Steve, meanwhile, has joined back up with Kelly to form his own version (with Scott Griffin on guitar), calling it Riley's L.A. Guns (the inevitable court case and mud-slinging ensued but it appears to have now quietened down since the matter was resolved) who've also put an album out last year in the form of Renegades which I'm ashamed to admit passed me by at the time - I plan to rectify that at some point shortly. But anyway, back to the original point of this article - while it isn't exactly the typical L.A. Guns sound (to hear that at its best, check out the group's first two albums), Vicious Circle is, I'd argue, the great underrated gem in their back catalogue with the group showing a dexterity and variety that you wouldn't maybe immediately associate with them but packing enough twists, turns, riffs and hooks to keep your interest throughout. Arguably it never really stood a chance of being a success because of the timeframe it was released in but I'd strongly recommend giving it a listen if you've not done so thus far - if you think that sleaze rock group's aren't capable of surprising you then this'll make you think again.