Sounds From The Junkshop #98 - American Heartbreak
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"While our egos grow/While the bullshit flows/It goes on and on and on/Get my coat I've had enough, take me out of this place..." - American Heartbreak - Somebody
Similar to Broken Teeth who we covered on here a few weeks ago, American Heartbreak were formed out of the ashes of a group of '80s Sunset Strip also-rans who came together to well and truly surpass themselves by creating something special.
The group was put together by guitarist Billy Rowe who'd previously had five minutes of almost-fame with his late '80s San Francisco turned Sunset Strip band Jetboy. Jetboy were a weird one - a prime example of a group who by all rights should have been world-beaters but somehow the sum ended up being a fair bit less than the parts. They were formed as a sort of New York Dolls influenced glam-punk band (as the name suggests) by Rowe and fellow guitarist Fernie Rod, mohawked frontman Mickey Finn and bassist Todd Crew who'd been in an early G'n'R line-up before Duff McKagan joined. Crew would unfortunately pass away from an OD and the band pulled off a huge coup by bringing in none other than Sami Yaffa from Hanoi Rocks to replace him. When they were signed up by a major label, Elektra, it seemed that the world was theirs for the taking.
Unfortunately, Jetboy's 1988 debut Feel The Shake was a huge disappointment and arguably torpedoed them before they'd even had a chance to get started. I could be wrong here but it bears all the signs of a major label signing a band then turning them into something completely different - see the Rock City Angels and Throbs Garbage Days Revisited entries from days gone by for other examples of this. Except while in those two cases, at least the transformation worked (or kind of did in the Throbs' case), with Jetboy it was a case of turning a promising group of Ramones/Generation X style pop-punks into a generic late '80s hair metal band and the album just lacked any sort of memorable tunes to land a killer blow.
To be fair to 'em, Jetboy stuck it out for a few years and their second album Damned Nation in 1990 was a little bit better with tunes like Chevy Heavy and Stomp It Down (To The Bricks) at least being half-decent but by then the damage had long been done and the grunge nuclear winter was on the horizon. Jetboy would be dropped and stagger to a halt some time around 1991-92. As the '90s wound to an end, Rowe would end up reissuing a series of lost tracks albums for the band and the much more punky and raw versions of the album tunes plus the ones that never made it on to the records on there kind of show where they would've gone if they'd managed to steer the course. If only...
On the back of this, Rowe would end up putting a new band together in the form of American Heartbreak together with Mindzone bassist and nowadays host of the very excellent Rock 'n' Roll Geek Show podcast Michael Butler and singer Lance Boone. American Heartbreak were, I think, probably the nearest thing that the US produced to their own version of the Wildhearts so it's not much of a surprise that I gravitated towards them after hearing about them on Sleazegrinder at this time. Boone was an excellent vocalist, attacking the songs with a good mix of spite and venom and Rowe had a good line in penning angry but thoughtful lyrics.
At their best such as on Somebody and Superstar, American Heartbreak came across like a missing link between Cheap Trick and the Manics (they had a song called Richey James and another called Methadone Baby which was a bit of a giveaway) - yes, the sound had the glam rock DNA on it but there was a ferocious Generation Terrorists style punk anger underpinning it which really gave them a unique and excellent sound.
The group would pick up plenty of acclaim for their debut Postcards From Hell (picks - Dead At Seventeen, Please Kill Me, Wish You Were D.E.A.D.) and would move across to Liquor and Poker (also home of the Backyard Babies at the time) for their sophomore self-titled album which saw them break out the big production and angsty arena anthems (Raise Up Your Hands, Last Of The Superheroes Of The 1970s) like a 21st century version of the Electric Angels. It got some good mentions in Classic Rock magazine and should have been the one to break them big. It didn't.
Soon afterwards, American Heartbreak would go on hiatus - Rowe would go back to a reformed Jetboy and take Butler with him. I remember a few people on the Sleazegrinder messageboard at the time wondering why and saying it felt like he was taking a step backwards. I guess when it comes down to it, the harsh truth is that there was just more money to be made on the revival circuit than banging their heads against a commercial brick wall with American Heartbreak. Jetboy would do a comeback album, Born To Fly, in 2019 which I was completely unaware of until writing this retrospective. I may give it a spin - hopefully it'll be closer to their second album quality-wise than their first.
Rowe can also be found nowadays playing guitar in Buckcherry, having replaced Keith Nelson there a few years ago (which quite honestly seems like a bit of a waste of his talents given how poor that band's output has been in recent years) while Butler still has his Rock 'n' Roll Geek Show podcast which is well worth a listen. I've no idea what happened to Lance but hopefully he's still out there making music somewhere - the guy was a good frontman and it's a shame he never really got his due for it. Anyway, I heartily recommend both of American Heartbreak's full albums and their odds 'n' sods live/rarities collection You Will Not Be Getting Paid - their angry angsty take on glam rock showed a whole different direction that the sleaze rock movement could've gone down but sadly chose not to. More fool them.
"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...
You know what you're getting when it comes to the Chuck Norris Experiment. Now on no less than their tenth album, these Swedes continue to specialise in the sort of scummy dirty rock 'n' roll that you can trace back through all the best rock bands from the Hip Priests all the way back through the Dead Boys and AC/DC to the Stooges. This album may have been recorded remotely during lockdown last year but from the sheer ferociousness on show here, you'd never know it. Tunes like Dirtshot , Hand Grenade and Kill The Night are pure three minute adrenalin blasts which rip out of your speakers like an unleashed hellcat without even considering going below breakneck speed and are all the better for it. At the other end of the scale, the lumbering In For The Kill rumbles through with a similar lurching boogie to Motorhead's No Class and the ominous Devil's Lake could almost be early Danzig if you squint a bit. And just in case you’d written this band off as ...
Hardcore Superstar were the perennial nearly-men of the mid-noughties Scandinavian rock explosion. Lacking the scuzzy cool of the Backyard Babies or the garage rock fire of the Hellacopters or the Hives, they were a solid workmanlike sleaze rock band who seemed to be forever destined to be the genre's almost-weres. However, this theory does the band a disservice - they've hung in and outlasted nearly all of their contemporaries and Abrakadabra is no less than their twelfth album. It's pretty clear as soon as the opening title kicks in with its spiralling Love Gun style riff and having the sheer dumb guts to rhyme "She's a real puff adder" with "I forgot how I met her" . It ain't big and it ain't clever but it'll definitely put a smile on your face and isn't that exactly what sleaze rock's supposed to do? And thus it continues - the influences here certainly aren't anything you wouldn't expect with echoes of the Cult, ...
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