Garbage Days Revisited #66: Bulletboys - "Freakshow" (1991)

 

"Well I don't know why it's such a bore/I don't think you're funny anymore" - Bulletboys - THC Groove

Consider this the second and (hopefully) final part of our Garbage Days Revisited detour that started following the Rock City Angels column a couple of weeks ago. The Bulletboys seem to be one of those bands cursed with being remembered as among the dregs in the closing years of the Sunset Strip and if all you'd heard of them was their first and best known self-titled album from 1988 then that's understandable - it's very much of its time. However, the band quickly seemed to kind of rebel against what was expected of them and came up with a couple of albums which I'd argue are actually a bit underappreciated.

But first...before there was the Bulletboys, there was King Kobra, a band who aren't really eligible for GDR as none of their albums were particularly good to be honest but who deserve a mention here for the sheer weirdness of their story. The group were formed by veteran drummer Carmine Appice who'd first made his name with late '70s psychedelic rock bands Vanilla Fudge and Cactus (the latter of whom could definitely be described as proto-metal) and bizarrely ended up drumming in Ozzy's band at the same time his brother Vinny was drumming for the Dio-led incarnation of Black Sabbath. Oh and he also did some work with Rod Stewart in the late '70s including co-writing Do Ya Think I'm Sexy? Seriously, look it up, it's true.

Anyway, after parting ways with Ozzy, Appice decided to put his own band together and rounded up a group of blonde-haired rockers to put together King Kobra who, at least at the beginning, were pretty much a typical early '80s hair metal band. It's often forgotten but there was a definite change in the hair metal sound circa 1985-86 to the version most people associate with it (bubblegum glam with big pop choruses and fretwanking guitar solos essentially) which you can probably blame Poison's Look What The Cat Dragged In for to be honest. Before that, hair metal was still kind of trying to be straight up rock music, just played by brickies in Aqua Net and lippy - see early Motley Crue and Ratt, Black & Blue, Dokken, Quiet Riot, Steeler etc and King Kobra's debut First Strike definitely falls into this category. It's basically a US version of Nazareth or Priest - simple straightforward ‘eadbanger music which sounds okay enough if not exactly up there with the best that the movement had to offer around this time.

Unfortunately, King Kobra's second album, 1986's Thrill Of A Lifetime, pretty much killed them stone dead. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it's got a cool front cover if you like '80s retro stuff. Beyond that, it's awful - synth-swamped '80s AOR which might as well have been Boston or REO Speedwagon for all the kick it had. I can only conclude that the group must have absolutely lost their minds while coming up with this. And the other issue - when you've got a drummer like Appice who's the band leader and generally regarded as one of the best in his field, why would you use what sounds like the cheapest '80s drum machine you can find on half the tracks? Special mention has to be made to the hilariously bad attempt at rap-metal on Home Street Home and the single Iron Eagle (Never Say Die) which was featured on the film of the same name (basically think a poor man's Top Gun and this is coming from someone who thought that movie was dreadful) and featured one of the most amusingly unintentionally homoerotic videos you will see outside of the Style Council's Long Hot Summer. Bizarrely, I was reminded of King Kobra when this song randomly cropped up on an episode of Tom Davis and Romesh Ranganathan's Essex Man sitcom "King Gary" last year - talk about incongruous...

Anyway, predictably, it all fell apart rapidly after that disaster. Bassist Johnny Rod was poached by W.A.S.P. for their Inside The Electric Circus album and frontman Mark Free also did the off (he would subsequently transgender and become Marcie). The group replaced them with Marq Torien on vocals and Lonnie Vincent on bass only for both of them to promptly do a runner alongside guitarist Mick Sweda to form the Bulletboys which is where we pick up this story properly. Appice and guitarist David Michael-Phillips would stagger on with a new line-up and ink a deal with Ann Boleyn's New Renaissance records for 1988's King Kobra III album which was essentially a straight cop-off of Whitesnake's sound (understandable as Coverdale and co were pretty much the biggest rock band in the world at this point) but despite a couple of blinders like Mean Street Machine (which itself was a fairly blatant rip off of Keel's Speed Demon - another band who we may cover on GDR at some point in the future) it wasn't enough to keep them afloat and they folded soon afterwards (though a reformed version is doing the rounds to this day).

Anyway, this left our three escapees Sweda, Torien and Vincent to link up with drummer Jimmy D'Anda in their new group. Signing to Warners, they would bring in long time Van Halen producer Ted Templeman to oversee their debut album and he would proceed to turn them into probably the most blatant rip-off of DLR, Eddie and co you could imagine with Torien especially trying to ape Diamond Dave as closely as possible. The overall result was a debut album that simply sailed way too close to its influences to really stand out (aside from an intriguingly left-field cover of the O'Jays' For The Love Of Money) although it managed to make the Top 40 in the States and the single Smooth Up In Ya was enough of a hit to allow them to press ahead with a follow-up.

Which is where this story actually starts to get interesting. Similar to Love/Hate, it looks as if the Bulletboys kind of saw the grunge iceberg coming from a long way off and Freakshow, even though it was a few months ahead of Smells Like Teen Spirit hitting the market, saw them start to move away from their hair metal origins into new waters with the likes of THC Groove and their cover of Tom Waits' Hang On St Christopher sounding more like the Red Hot Chili Peppers back when they sounded genuinely unhinged or maybe Real Thing era Faith No More while the barely restrained chaos of Hell Yeah! and Thrill That Kills were definitely streets ahead of a lot of the competition around this time. Oh sure, you could still see Torien hamming it up and doing his best David Lee Roth impersonations in the video but this showed the band developing a heaviness, aggression and even versatility that showed they were ready to roll with the punches if the tide was changing (which indeed it was very much about to). It's a very unfairly maligned album, even if the second side tails off a bit after a storming first half (SLF Nobody's Heroes syndrome as we refer to it in this column), and is well worth a revisit if you missed it first time out.

1993's Za-Za is almost as good with the group well and truly breaking their ties with the Aqua Net crowd and sailing away into even heavier waters than before and coming up with a genuinely dark and vicious album with the likes of Slow And Easy, and Laughing With The Dead actually showing a genuine heaviness and inventiveness - put it this way, you'd never believe this was the same group who'd done Smooth Up In Ya a few years before if you didn't know better. Think a halfway house between Love/Hate's Blackout In The Red Room and Skid Row's Slave To The Grind and you wouldn't be a million miles off.

Unfortunately, the group had long since fallen victim to the law of diminishing returns and would soon be gone from their major label deal with Warners with Sweda and D'Anda both jumping ship. Torien and Vincent would recruit a new line-up and retreat to the indies but 1995's Acid Monkey was unfortunately where the formula finally went askew with the grunge/funk influence taking over but the tunes very much absent. The group would go on hiatus soon afterwards with Torien going on to briefly front Love/Hate around the time of the Livin' Off Layla album.

The absence was only temporary though and the old ham Torien has been persevering with the group in various line-ups ever since they reformed in 1999. The group have seen everyone from ex-G'n'R drummer Steven Adler through future Beautiful Creatures/Sixx AM guitarist DJ Ashba to future Ryan Hamilton bassist and Straight To Video podcast host Rob Lane pass through their ranks in the last couple of decades, along with the occasional return of Sweda, Vincent and D'Anda to the line-up here and there. They’ve continued to put out music as well although it's been fairly quiet since their ninth album Elefante in 2015. Torien definitely deserves credit for his sheer persistence and I'm gonna say it now - the Bulletboys likewise deserve better than to just be written off as generic hair metal fodder. Sure, their debut album may well have kind of coloured how a lot of people look at them but in Freakshow and Za-Za, they came up with two genuinely good albums which were streets ahead of a lot of the johnny come latelys on Sunset Strip in this era. Give them a re-listen, you might just be surprised.