Garbage Days Revisited #64: Rock City Angels - "Young Man's Blues" (1988)

 

"She's a night time nowhere baby, tearin' my soul right apart..." - Rock City Angels - Deep Inside My Heart

Bluddyell - never mind a Garbage Days Revisited column, you'd probably need some sort of cowboy hatted and velvet thrift shop jacketed sleaze rock version of Hercule Poirot to do the story of weird circumstances and deals gone wrong that I'm about to tell in this week's column justice. The Rock City Angels started life as a Florida punk group called the Abusers in the early '80s. Heading westward to LA and Sunset Strip in the middle of the decade, they took on a more glam rock sound and even had a certain young guitarist called Johnny Depp who was also trying to make it as an actor in their ranks.

Now here's where the story really starts to get a bit confusing - the group were starting to get a reputation as one of the most exciting new bands on Sunset Strip as 1986 turned to 1987 and ended up signing with New Renaissance Records run by Hellion's lead singer Ann Boleyn who also had a post-being-dropped King Kobra on their books at the time along with a roster that was mainly more based on the thrash metal end of the spectrum (Hellion and King Kobra are two bands whose stories alone would take up a whole column so we won't go into them here...but keep an eye on this website in the coming weeks). An album was recorded but supposedly as New Renaissance were bearing up to release it, Geffen records started taking an interest in the band and the label suddenly started receiving threats to let the RCA's talk to Geffen - supposedly Boleyn's car was very nearly run off the road in the canyons just outside L.A. around this time so it was clearly pretty serious.

Sure enough, the Angels' New Renaissance album was shelved (it'd eventually see the light of day on the label a good decade plus later) and the group would sign to Geffen, reportedly for an astronomical sum. And the first thing they did was take the group out of L.A. to Memphis to record their album with the aim of getting the group to aim for a more bluesy sound. Depp, having just landed the 21 Jump Street gig, couldn't commit and left the band leaving them to draft a new guitarist in. Now, there's two theories that seem to do the rounds a LOT here. Theory number one - when the Angels started to get all the press attention on the Sunset Strip, it coincided with Guns 'n' Roses, who were Geffen's big hope at the time, being signed and taken off to record Appetite For Destruction and the Angels took over a lot of Axl and co’s old club residencies in West Hollywood and became the new darlings of the venues that the Gunners had been the toast of the town at a few months before. Geffen ended up getting the jitters at RCA being a threat to G'n'R and, similar to how Chelsea used to sign players in the Roman Abramovic days just to stick them in the reserves so they wouldn't have to play against them, promptly made the move to sign them up to get rid of the potential competition for their golden goose, even going so far as to threaten the minor label they were currently signed to in order to get the job done. The second theory is that Hollywood bigwigs wanted Johnny Depp to concentrate on his acting rather than being a rock star and that it was them, colluding with Geffen, who were behind the threats.

Now I can't really comment on the second of those theories as my knowledge of Hollywood skulduggery is pretty much zero but as far as the first one goes...I don't really buy it I'm afraid (and I even remember reading an interview with Rock City Angels frontman Bobby Durango where even he said he was sceptical about it being true). While the Angels and the Gunners were definitely frequenting the same scene, there was more than enough difference in their sound for them to have both co-existed in the salad days of the sleaze rock scene. While the '86 version of the Rock City Angels were mostly a full-on New York Dolls influenced glam band (as evidenced on that self-titled New Renaissance album), having left most of their punk influences behind in Florida by this point, G'n'R had a much more punk/'70s rock take on the genre (Thunders meets Aerosmith) and I don't really believe the Rock City Angels would have been a major threat to Appetite's success had another label signed them.

What DID happen, however, almost by happy accident, was that by taking the Rock City Angels out of Los Angeles and out to Memphis and telling them to go for a more bluesy style vibe on their record (and I mean, let's be honest, Geffen definitely have a track record when it comes to signing bands and then turning them into something completely different from what they were before, see the Throbs' GDR entry for another example), Geffen unwittingly gave us one of the lost classics of the hair metal era. Sort of like an American version of the Dogs D'Amour, Young Man's Blues was an absolute cracker of an album veering from the Stax style swagger of lead off single Deep Inside My Heart through the tight soul boogie of Hard To Hold through the desolate laments of Mary (co-written by Depp) and Liza Jo to the punked up snarl of Damned Don't Cry and the killer shuffle of Boy From Hell's Kitchen. It's one knockout blow after another basically - never mind being suddenly taken out of L.A., if these guys had been British rather than American then they would have been regarded as natural kinsmen of the Dogs and the Quireboys. Seriously, that good. The band sound tight and focused throughout but their ace in the hole is Durango's sheer presence, sounding like Tyla possessed by the spirit and showmanship of David Lee Roth. The fact that he carries off a version of Otis Redding's These Arms Of Mine, which would have been absolute suicide in the hands of a lesser singer, is a real testament to the guy - he was definitely one of the most talented and unjustly overlooked frontmen of this era.

It could be argued that, even if we agree that the G'n'R conspiracy theory probably isn't true, Young Man's Blues never really stood a chance from the off. Regardless of whether Geffen designed it to be as such, the fact is that the label were putting all its efforts into promoting Appetite For Destruction in 1988 as Axl and co went supernova and the Rock City Angels were basically left on the shelf with their album slipping out to little or no fanfare. It deservedly gained a reputation as a cult classic but that wasn't enough to keep you on a label in those days and the group were swiftly dropped.

The group would press on for another few years after leaving Geffen but another record deal wasn't forthcoming and they would split in 1992 with the demos from this era eventually resurfacing as the Midnight Confessions collection many years later. Durango and bassist Andy Panik would reform the band in the 21st century with a more garage rock indebted sound for 2008's Use Once And Destroy album which included covers of Corrine and (I Ain't No) Miracle Worker (both of which were also covered by fellow GDR alumni the Barracudas which should give you a bit of an idea where the band's heads were at at this point). It was a decent comeback effort and is well worth a listen in its own right. Unfortunately, it would be their final release with Durango's passing in 2012, just as the band were midway through recording a third effort which was provisionally called Devils In The Countryside and hasn't seen the light of day as we speak.

I guess we'll never know the full story of why it never happened for the Rock City Angels. Label sabotage? Bad timing? Wrong place at the wrong time? Just plain bad luck? Could be all of 'em or it could be none. What I can tell you though is that whether it was intentional or just a happy accident, in Young Man's Blues, they came up with one of the great underrated albums of the Sunset Strip era which still sounds great today. Those who missed it at the time (especially the Dogs/Quireboys/Four Horsemen/Mother Love Bone fans amongst you) really should rectify that as soon as you can. It takes a lot of skill to marry blues rock and sleaze but goddammit, these guys did it almost perfectly.