Garbage Days Revisited #52: Uncle Sam - "Heaven Or Hollywood" (1987)

 

"Life's a race we're running in and you will die if you don't win so live for the day!" - Uncle Sam - Live For The Day

Heaven Or Hollywood is basically the best album that the imperial years Alice Cooper band never wrote. Scummy, nasty and with a seriously sick sense of humour right from that cover (let's just say that in the original version the girl is wearing even less than the censored version we used and leave it at that), it's the sort of album that in a just world would still be being hailed as a sleaze rock classic. Unfortunately, Uncle Sam are another one of those sadly now almost forgotten bands from this genre where bad luck and bad timing has left them as a well hidden secret to be discovered by the lucky few. Hailing from New York, they were arguably on the wrong coast to catch a lift on the whole sleaze rock scene to begin with but nevertheless they certainly gave it a damn good go.

They clearly did pick up a bit of a cult following in the day at least though as this album seemed to crop up in every "great lost sleaze rock gems" list I read in the mid noughties when I was going through my phase of rediscovering scummy '80s rock. It took a hell of a long time to track it down (it only ever came out on a minor label to begin with and had long since been deleted by this point) and I think I might have eventually ended up downloading it from a sharing site somewhere. Suffice to say it was worth the hard work.

Heaven Or Hollywood is basically what happens when sleaze rock meets '70s proto-punk - there's a hint of the sheer chaos of Iggy and the Stooges in there but like I said earlier, the very obvious template here is classic Alice Cooper right from the sheer panic attack opening one-two of Live For The Day ("Feelin' like you're lost in a nightmare/Lookin' like you're caught in a dream/But when you wake in the morning it's over/And you're lookin' at the same old scene") and Don't Be Shy (which packs an absolute scorcher of a guitar solo midway through). Balanced perfectly between froth-gobbed garage punk (Don't You Ever, Peace Of Mind...Piece Of Body and the Under My Wheels-referencing Under Sedation) and more menacing Dead Babies style slow and sinister numbers (Candyman, Alice D), it's a proper white and bruised knuckle ride of scumminess and it's flippin' awesome.

Although they made a few waves in the pages of Kerrang! (similar to how Love/Hate and Cats In Boots both did) and Heaven Or Hollywood did decent sales numbers considering the band were basically selling it from their houses, a major label deal wasn't forthcoming and frontman Scott Cessna ended up quitting the band who would reshuffle with bassist David Gentner taking over the vocals. The group's second album, Letters From London, wouldn't surface until 1990 and saw the Alice influence becoming a bit less obvious. It's not quite up to the full throttle chaotic brilliance of their debut but to Uncle Sam's credit, it runs it pretty close. It's maybe telling though that the two best songs on there, Whiskey Slick and Goodbye Mr Mary (containing the brilliant line "I'll tip myself a drink/I'll dance with the local whore/And when my fingers snap/I'll just take back all of yours") are the two most frenetic ones where they go almost Motorhead style brutal on the riffs (both said tunes were up on Youtube until recently but now appear to have been taken down - for shame...) 

Unfortunately Letters From London fared no better than Heaven Or Hollywood did. The group made one final attempt at breaking through by putting out a full-on Alice style concept album about serial killers  with 1993's Fourteen Women...Fifteen Days which saw them relocating to LA and getting none other than Kim Fowley in to mastermind the project but by the time it came out the band had already split. It's not quite up to the standard of the first two but it's still well worth a listen if you can find it. Gentner would move on to the Veins who've since put out three albums of which I've heard one, Hollywoodland. Again, if you're into supremely scuzzy glammed up sleaze-rock, you should find plenty to enjoy here.

It's a real shame that Uncle Sam have been pretty much almost forgotten about nowadays as they were cutting their own XXX-rated take on the sleaze rock formula while the major labels were trying to palm the "Osmonds with Aqua Net and guitars" likes of Winger and Warrant off onto the general population and deserve credit for it. Much like fellow GDR alumni the Four Horsemen, maybe they were just a bit too out there to ever really stand a chance of breaking through but in Heaven Or Hollywood they left one stone cold classic album and in Letters From London, one which was only a hair's breadth short of being as good. Both Heaven Or Hollywood and Fourteen Women Fifteen Days are up on Youtube in their full album form (disappointingly Letters From London doesn't appear to be) and if the idea of some full on scummy nasty gore-soaked sleaze-glam with a definite nod to Love It To Death and Killer appeals to you then I really can't recommend 'em enough. Good unclean fun all round.