Garbage Days Revisited #79: Demolition 23 - "Demolition 23" (1994)

 

"Well life's a drag and then you're dead/It's just me and the boys and a bottle of red/Tellin' lies about better days ahead" - Demolition 23 - Hammersmith Palais

After last week's look back at Andy McCoy's various misadventures through the '80s and '90s, I thought that it would be a good opportunity to look at his Hanoi Rocks co-accused Michael Monroe's adventures during this time period.

I've kind of touched on Mike's solo career in these pages already when we did a GDR on his Whatcha Want? album (his final solo effort before rejoining Hanoi in the early noughties) but following the group's messy dissolution in 1985, he would head out to the States with the aim of kickstarting a solo career. The result of this would be 1987's Nights Are So Long album featuring a good mix of originals (Too Rich To Be Good) and covers (takes on the Heavy Metal Kids' She's No Angel, the Flamin' Groovies' Shake Some Action, the Plimsouls' Million Miles Away and a brief snippet of Johnny Thunders' You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory dedicated to Razzle). It was more a testing the ground sort of release but it was still a decent effort and I'm still amazed it's never got a re-release (to the best of my knowledge) the way its successors did.

The follow-up, 1990's Not Fakin' It, was Monroe's most commercially successful album and was basically the big budget follow-up to Nights Are So Long. Lead-off single Dead, Jail Or Rock 'n' Roll (still a staple of his live set today) featured none other than Axl Rose in the video while the likes of Man With No Face and While You Were Looking At Me saw Monroe channelling the dark spirit of those "greed is good" times similar to how his old friend Stiv Bators used to do so well.

It was a decent album but it didn't do the numbers sales-wise that Monroe's label around this time were hoping for and he'd soon find himself dropped. Monroe's next step proved to be a bit of a wrong-footed one as he linked up with Billy Idol's former guitarist Steve Stevens and his former Hanoi bandmate Sami Yaffa, fresh from jumping from the sinking ship that was Jetboy, to form Jerusalem Slim but this turned out to be a massive bust, resulting in one self-titled album which the band effectively split up while making (Stevens then making matters worse by joining up with Vince Neil's band after Motley Crue fired him - given the long history of bad blood there over Razzle's death, that was pretty much the end of that venture) and just sounded like a bit of a mess for the most part.

Which leads us to the album we're covering today - following the break-up of Jerusalem Slim, Monroe and Yaffa would rebuild their bridges with Nasty Suicide (who'd previously been in the Cherry Bombz and the Suicide Twins with McCoy since Hanoi's break-up as well as his own band Cheap ‘n’ Nasty with UK Subs guitarist Alvin Gibbs - one decent enough self-titled album which is worth a listen for Hanoi devotees) and bring in drummer Jimmy Clark to form Demolition 23 and the result was probably the best album from the Hanoi split years.

The self-titled Demolition 23 album takes the classic Hanoi template but drags it into the '90s and puts a much more punked-up spin on it. Monroe's lyrics continue their angry political vent with Nothin's Alright being a look at the way humanity has essentially fucked up things in every decade since the summer of love ("Born in the age of take all you can get/Mommy and Daddy was a TV set/All they left for you to remember them by was poisoned water and a hole in the sky") and along with Hammersmith Palais' rueful look at the passing of time ("Once upon a time this world made sense/Now there's nothing straight enough to rebel against"...yeah, that sounds depressingly apt for the current climate as well) and the self-explanatory The Scum Lives On ("The immoral majority adding insult to my injury") makes for a killer 1-2-3 opening salvo. Elsewhere, tips of the hat are made to the recently departed Stiv Bators and Johnny Thunders (covers of the Dead Boys' Ain't Nothin' To Do and the Heartbreakers' I Wanna Be Loved plus the Stiv ode Deadtime Stories) and the living legend Charlie Harper (a cover of the UK Subs' Endangered Species) while the likes of Dysfunctional and Same Shit Different Day are pure blasts of venom. Basically this is Mike, Sami and Nasty channelling the classic CBGB's spirit to brilliant effect.

Sadly, it would only last one album as Nasty moved back to his native Finland and decided to forego rock stardom for training to be a medic. Yaffa would form his own band Mad Juana before joining the 21st century incarnation of the New York Dolls for their One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This masterpiece and Monroe would go back to his solo career with the Peace Of Mind and Life Gets You Dirty albums (not his strongest unfortunately) before the return to form that was Whatcha Want. Which is where we came in all those moons ago.

Obviously Mike has restarted his solo career since Hanoi's final split in 2009 and has come up with four pretty impressive albums since then with Yaffa on board throughout along with his former New York Dolls bandmate Steve Conte and ex-Danzig/Chelsea Smiles drummer Karl Rockfist.  The run started with 2011's Sensory Overdrive, co-written with Ginger Wildheart, 2013's Horns And Halos which saw Dregen from the Backyard Babies helping out before former Amen/Yo-Yo’s/Loyalties/Black Halos man Rich Jones came on board for 2015's Blackout States to complete the line-up that's remained intact since for 2017's One Man Gang and this year's excellent I Live Too Fast To Die Young (review here).

For me though, Demolition 23 is probably the great overlooked gem of Mike's back catalogue - the fact that a good three or four of the songs from here remain regulars in his set to this day tell you everything you need to know about its quality. If you're unlucky enough not to have encountered it so far then I really can't recommend it enough - a pure glam-punk blast of a record that'll improve your day the instant you listen to it.

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