Garbage Days Revisited #72: Keel - "Lay Down The Law" (1984)
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"It takes you to the limit/Eats you up and cuts you to the bone/It's all I need to get to where I'm goin'...fast..." - Keel - Speed Demon
It's been a common theme for a lot of our GDR and SFTJ entries regarding hair metal or sleaze rock bands that sometimes big and dumb just works way better than trying to be clever. From AC/DC through Smashed Gladys, Zodiac Mindwarp and Cats In Boots all the way up to Broken Teeth and Buckcherry, sometimes three chords, a decent sledgehammer riff and a chantalong chorus just gets the job done like nothing else.
Keel, one of the earlier Sunset Strip bands, are another example of this...but sadly only for one album. But hell, WHAT an album - their debut Lay Down The Law is one of those records that's so gloriously stoopid that you would literally have to have a huge chunk of your brain removed not to "get" the message herein (let's rock out essentially). But even if just for this one brief moment, they properly captured that whole lightning in a bottle "drink a beer and shout the chorus until your lungs give out" ethos that sums up the best bands in this genre perfectly.
Keel were formed out of the ashes of Steeler, a very early Sunset Strip band, by frontman Ronnie Keel (hence the name). Steeler were there right at the beginning of the Sunset Strip years with the likes of Crue, Ratt, Hellion et al. Notably their line-up also included a young Yngwie Malmsteen and it's probably not a surprise that with two planet-sized egos jostling for space that their shelf life was limited - the band lasted just the one album before Malmsteen went off to join Alcatrazz with ex-Rainbow singer Graham Bonnet and bassist Rik Fox would move on to an early line-up of W.A.S.P. Leaving Ronnie, modest as ever, to form Keel.
The group would sign to Metal Blade with the early Keel line-up including future L.A. Guns drummer Steve Riley (who would split for W.A.S.P. almost as soon as the album was finished) and guitarist Marc Ferrari who would go on to be in the house band for Wayne's World. And with Lay Down The Law, they came up with a proto-sleaze metal classic. One part Kiss, one part Judas Priest, songs like the title track, Thunder And Lightning and the chantalong Metal Generation are about as subtle as a stampeding rhino but dammit, they work. Like Twisted Sister, it's OTT, daft as a brush and just very likeable. Best of all is the ode to dangerous driving Speed Demon with its chugging Maiden style riff and screeched vocals from Keel which make Axl sound like Barry White. They even manage to get away with an absolute bludgeoning of the Rolling Stones' Let's Spend The Night Together to finish the album with. Ignore the ill-advised power ballad Princess of Illusion and you've pretty much got a perfect no-brainer headbanger album right here.
Unfortunately it kind of worked too well. Lay Down The Law brought Keel to the attention of Gene Simmons who promptly became their manager, got them signed to a major and rushed them back into the studio for a follow-up, clearly before the band was ready. The net result, 1985's The Right To Rock, has the storming opening title track in its favour (another gleefully meatheaded chantalong which could have easily sat on the band's debut) but the rest consists of unnecessary re-recordings of tracks from Lay Down The Law with the rough edges smoothed off and a bunch of unremarkable newies co-penned by Simmons. Their third album, 1987's Final Frontier, had a cool front cover and a very ill-advised cover of Patti Smith's Because The Night as its lead-off single and...well, that was that really. The band began to fracture with members bailing out. Keel managed to stagger on to a fourth self-titled album (have to be honest, never heard it) and split soon afterwards.
Keel have reformed intermittently since with Ronnie also going on to form country rockers Iron Horse while the band were on hiatus but really, ignore the rest of their back catalogue and head straight for that debut album. It's a perfect getting ready soundtrack for nights out at the rock club and feeling the highway scream (should you be so inclined). Yup, they may well have completely flamed out quality wise soon afterwards but for that one brief glorious moment in 1984, Keel were arguably the hardest rocking band on the Sunset Strip and Lay Down The Law is all the proof you'll need.
"You can't kill what you're afraid of...are you afraid of me?" - Silverfish - Big Bad Baby Pig Squeal I guess the obvious place to have written something on Silverfish would have been in one of the very early Sounds From The Junkshop but I'm ashamed to admit that they were a band who, while I was sort of aware of their presence at the time, I wouldn't really properly discover until well after they'd split. I can remember the band name from the occasions they'd pop up on the Indie Top 10 on the ITV Chart Show but it was only when their singer Lesley Rankine cropped up as a guest vocalist on Therapy? 's Troublegum album (on Lunacy Booth and Femtex ) that I decided to try and investigate their output in a bit more detail. Only to find they'd literally split up a few months before. Bugger. Silverfish hailed from Camden in the pre-Britpop days back when it was still the grimy scuzzy end of North London and the sort of place tourists would act
"I played my hand in a rock 'n' roll band, it was my ace, my jack and my king/I rolled the dice to see what Lady Luck would bring, salvation or sin..." - The Quireboys - One For The Road In a way, I'm quite surprised I haven't covered the Quireboys either on Sounds From The Junkshop or here on Garbage Days Revisited yet. Unlike a lot of bands who were slung in with the "hair metal" tag in the late '80s and early '90s, I actually was aware of the band when they had their brief flirtation with chart success around the turn of that decade and had a couple of their singles in my collection - Hey You on a Now compilation (which sounds incredibly incongruous all these years later!) and There She Goes Again/Misled on cassette single. For whatever reason though, they never quite became the firm favourites of mine that their fellow Soho dwelling glam rockers the Dogs D'Amour did. I'm not quite sure why - I think I just thought the Dogs
"If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!" - Soho Roses - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure,
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