Garbage Days Revisited #46: The Four Horsemen - "Nobody Said It Was Easy" (1991)

 

"Rockin' is my business and business is good (and if it's so good why am I still fuckin' broke?)" - The Four Horsemen - Rockin' Is My Business

There are a lot of great forgotten bands from the Sunset Strip era who offered a much harder leaner and meaner take on the sleaze rock formula than the chart-friendly fluff of yer Poisons and Warrants yet still got undeservedly swept away by grunge but the Four Horsemen really were one of the most desperately unlucky out there. Their harder-edged but supremely tuneful take on the formula, similar to other bands like Junkyard or Circus of Power (or if you're looking for a British equivalent, the Almighty's first two albums), should have seen them up there among the big-hitters but a combination of bad luck, bad timing and about a million other things pretty much sunk them without a trace.

The group were formed by guitarist Stephen "Haggis" Harris in 1989. Haggis had started his career a few years earlier with Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction for their High Priest Of Love EP before being poached to join the Cult for their Electric album recorded with Rick Rubin. Although Haggis wouldn't last beyond the Electric tour with messrs Astbury and Duffy he stayed friends with Rubin as the pair were both huge AC/DC fans and wanted to put something similar together. Hence Haggis found himself on a plane to LA where he and Rubin hooked up with notorious headcase singer Frank C Starr (formerly of early '80s Sunset Strip also rans Alien and SIN) and drummer Dimwit (brother of Danzig's Chuck Biscuits) to form a new group that would become the Four Horsemen. Guitarist Dave Lizmi and bassist Ben Pape completed the line-up and world domination beckoned.

Or, as the fact that this album is in the Garbage Days Revisited column to begin with suggests, not. They put out an EP (headed up with a cover of Johnny Moped's old pub rock/punk classic Hard Lovin' Man) only for Starr to be hit by a series of prison sentences which delayed the release of their album until 1991, literally just a few months before Nirvana went supernova and anything which wasn't wearing plaid went down in flames. I was lucky enough to interview Haggis in a pub in Soho for Bubblegum Slut many many moons ago (he was an absolute gent and it remains probably my favourite interview that I've ever done as a music journalist - put it this way, some of the stories in it made The Dirt look like a Just William book) and his take was as follows:

"The truth is that Frank went to jail on a number of occasions when I knew him...he was always getting in trouble with the law. But that's the thing about him - he was the real deal. Nearly all the frontmen I've worked with have been singers first, nutters second. Frank was just a nutter who didn't really care about being a singer... The nearest equivalent I can really think of is when I met a guy called Dave McCracken who used to produce Ian Brown's albums and he was telling me all these stories about the Happy Mondays when they were at their peak of their craziness. He was saying that the thing that made them so scary was that they really WERE drug-dealers and nutcases who just happened to be in a band as well. That was Frank in a nutshell."

It didn't help that while the Four Horsemen were sitting around waiting for lift-off, other groups had come through in their stead peddling a more well-behaved take on the same formula which meant that when the album finally saw the light of day they'd fallen behind the curve a bit. Haggis from that interview I did with him again:

"We made a really bad choice with our manager because he was also looking after the Black Crowes who were on the same label as us...they'd just finished touring "Shake Your Moneymaker" and he just assumed they would go away for a couple of years to do their second album and he'd be able to concentrate on us as we were just gearing up to tour "Nobody Said It Was Easy". What happened of course is that the Crowes got their second album done in six weeks and just as our record was starting to take off they called him back in to work with them. I think it'd be arrogant of me to say they were worried about how successful our record was because they'd just sold six million copies of Moneymaker but I think they were worried about us maybe having a more authentic sound than they did. I'm not criticising the Crowes but there was always a funny atmosphere between us and them. Not least because Frank really didn't like Chris Robinson and frequently threatened to kill him. And Chris knew Frank really could do that. So it became a really awkward situation and the management often had to keep us apart. And we really suffered because of that. Although it probably wouldn't have mattered if we hadn't been such a bunch of dysfunctional psychopaths who were hellbent on destroying our own career simultaneously."

The Horsemen would soon be gone from Def American (Rubin's label) after the album undersold and Starr ended up being thrown in jail again. Haggis and Lizmi ended up recording a second unreleased album with the band, Daylight Again (featuring a different singer plus fellow ex-Cult man Les Warner on drums - it would finally see the light of day in 2010 and it's a solid slice of blues-rock but very different from Nobody Said It Was Easy) but Starr's release from jail prompted the band to regroup with the aim of giving things another go. Then Dimwit died from an OD which caused Haggis and Pape to bail in quick succession. Frank and Dave struggled on to put a second/third (see above) album out under the Horsemen moniker in Getting Pretty Good At Barely Getting By but it was solid rather than spectacular. Before they could even tour it, Starr was involved in a motorcycle accident and was put in a coma from which he'd never wake up, his life support eventually being turned off in 1999. Lizmi would struggle on with the band until 1998 with Dimwit's brother Chuck Biscuits, formerly of Danzig and ex-Little Caesar singer Ron Young being drafted in for a couple of tours but eventually the group ended with a whimper rather than a bang.

All of which just leaves Nobody Said It Was Easy, arguably the great lost album of the dying days of Sunset Strip. Right from the moment the title track kicks in with Starr saying the words "Ready for what? We've been waitin' for two fuckin' years!", it's one slam dunk after another. I mean you could say that line "It's dirty, it's a pity and time ain't exactly on our side/But that ain't no reason not to give it a try" was pretty much my mantra for every ill-fated band I put together through my twenties.

Rockin' Is My Business, the second track, is even better with its rumbling riff and Starr's defiant snarl ("The book on rock 'n' roll? Motherfucker, I wrote it!"). Yeah, sure, the AC/DC influence is pretty hard to miss here but this kicks arse in a way that johnny-come-latelys like Airbourne only do very fleetingly. See also the five minute stormer Let It Rock (where Frank howls "Half a year from now we'll all be millionaires!" like Axl possessed by the spirit of Del Boy) at the end of side one for proof as to how well this band could nail it. Tired Wings is like one of Izzy Stradlin's G'n'R songs, all lurching slide guitar and moody riffs before Can't Stop Rockin' absolutely shreds it, well and truly summing up the experience anyone who's slogged it out for nights on end on the toilet circuit playing rock 'n' roll can relate to ("Well we're too drunk to play but who the fuck cares? Haggis and Dave on the six string guitars, Dim on the drumkit, Ben on the bass, my name is Frankie, let's fuck up this place!")

Side two fair zips by after that with the Skynyrd-on-speed Moonshine, the countrified Homesick Blues, the swaggering '75 Again and the frenetic Lookin' For Trouble blasting through in rapid succession before the epic eight-minute album highlight I Need A Thrill/Somethin' Good rounds things off in great style. After its Crowes style boogie opening, it builds up to a great soaring chorus ("I need somethin' good to get me through the day/Oh help me Lord, there's gotta be a better way"). With a killer guitar solo, some Hammond organ and a huge wall of vocals (I swear to god the angels join in towards the end), it's one of the best album closers I've heard in four decades on this planet and always makes me feel that little bit better after a shit day at work.

It's a real shame that the Four Horsemen ended up being an almost unknown footnote when it comes to the sleaze rock scene as they were absolute princes among most of the dross that was plaguing Sunset Strip in the final days before grunge hit. Ever since I picked this up from a record exchange in Bradford in the mid-noughties (I'm pretty sure it was the Sleazegrinder website where I took the tip-off from as they always used to speak very highly of them over there but there were a few other rockers I knew in my twenties who used to love them as well) it's never been too far from my stereo. There's plenty of bands who've come along espousing to be the true spirit of glorious kick-arse rock 'n' roll but the Four Horsemen were definitely the genuine article. Suffice to say that if you don't have a copy of this album in your collection then you need to remedy that right now. For your own sake.