Garbage Days Revisited #88: The Joneses - "Keeping Up With The Joneses" (1986)

 

(Andy's Note - So this one's going to be a bit different from your standard Garbage Days Revisited. I'd planned to write something on early Sunset Strip scuzzmongers the Joneses for a while now and had already got this one scheduled in the diary when, out of the blue, I got an e-mail from the PR guy for the group's frontman Jeff Drake asking if I would be interested in an interview as he's got an autobiography coming out in the next few weeks and there are plans to do some reissues of the group's back catalogue coming up. Although I've occasionally borrowed stuff from interviews I've done in the past for GDR columns on here, most notably the one I did with Haggis for the Zodiac Mindwarp, Cult and Four Horsemen articles, it's now several years since I'd actually done one as part of a feature. However, this looked like an excellent opportunity to get back in the saddle and so I agreed to take Jeff up on the offer. Happy to say that he was an absolute diamond to deal with and hopefully this article will make for a good read both from my perspective as a Joneses fan who unfortunately was way too young, not to mention on the wrong side of the planet, to see them first time around, and Jeff's recollections of the group's existence. If you like this format then feel free to say so and, who knows, we might just try to do a few more GDR columns like this in the future).

"You used to be my pride and cure-all/A placebo for my brain/You were fine but so unkind/I couldn't stand the pain..." - The Joneses - Pillbox

The Joneses were there right at the beginning of Sunset Strip. Formed in 1981, just as Motley Crue were first lacing up their leather chaps for Too Fast For Love, they offered a much more scuzzy punky take on what, at the time, was still pretty much a "brickies in lippy" style scene full of old school metalheads raiding their girlfriends' cosmetics bags in the hope that it would somehow turn them into the next Aerosmith or Van Halen. It was a world where the no-nonsense unremarkable shredder-glam likes of Dokken and Quiet Riot were the big dogs in the yard - plenty of technical proficiency but not a whole lot in the way of attitude or excitement. In frontman Jeff Drake's words, "When we started the Joneses, we used to tell people we wanted to sound like if Eddie Cochran met the New York Dolls at Chuck Berry's house. We wanted to play trashy rock n roll with a lot of 50s influence and there wasn't anything like that happening. There was hardcore punk, which was very popular, but we weren't really into, there was Heavy Metal, Motley Crue was just getting big and that was about it, the cowpunk thing didn't happen for maybe a year or two after that." Arguably, the Joneses were the band who started the ball rolling that eventually saw the likes of Guns 'n' Roses and their numerous followers rise to prominence with a more punky angry take on the Sunset Strip rock formula. But this story starts way way before that.

As frontman Jeff Drake remembers: "Steve Olson (Joneses guitarist) and I had been in a couple of Rockabilly bands, the Aristocats and the Rockaholics, together in 1980-81. This was right before the Stray Cats blew up in the U.S., but there was a cool Rockabilly scene in L.A. and Orange County.  Anyway, I got kicked out of both bands - I think it was cuz I wasn't traditional enough, I say it was cuz I wasn't Howdy Doody enough.  Me and Steve both had big pomps and wore leather jackets, but I played with distortion on my guitar, so I think that's why I kept getting kicked out and Steve didn't. Or maybe it was because I sucked or nobody liked me, not sure. After I got kicked out of the Rockaholics, we decided to do our own thing and formed a band called the Dragsters for a short time. Steve had this friend named Mitch who had a couple of open dates at this venue called the Barn at Alpine Village opening for Missing Persons and the Dickies on Xmas Eve and Xmas night and it was Steve who came up with the name. We rehearsed everyday for three weeks and wrote a set of songs.  I was the singer cuz I wrote the words, but I didn't really want to sing, just play guitar. We were supposed to find a real singer but never did. So we did those shows and decided to keep it going."

The trouble was that having a sound that was so difficult to pigeonhole didn't do them any favours in that climate. Jeff:  "We played on some crazy bills in the early days.  Those shows with Missing Persons and the Dickies were our first, and we played with the Dickies after that as well. We weren't really part of any "scene" until about 1983 when we got back from our second tour and the cowpunk thing was starting - we kinda got lumped into that for a minute. The Joneses have always had a little country influence in there - I think the songs I write are kinda like country songs in a way, just the way they were structured.  But that scene was a lot of fun, a lot of partying. There was the Zero One Gallery after hours and this apartment complex in West L.A. that used to be a hotel called the Who's Who. It seemed like everyone that lived there was a cute, wannabe actress kinda girl. And they loved to party. Smoking quaaludes and doing things I never thought of."

Listening to a lot of the Joneses' early songs like Pillbox, Graveyard Rock and Fix Me, you can definitely hear those Dolls/Eddie/Chuck influences in there, all two minute Thunders-style blasts of snotty souped up rock 'n' roll attitude which stick their claws in your brain and don't let go. As I said earlier, the group were arguably glam-punk pioneers after a fashion. There was just one problem - there wasn't really a glam-punk scene for them to fit into.

Jeff: "Well we kinda started the glam-punk scene, but we didn't really fit in. At least not musically. By 1983, Steve had left the band and the direction changed. Then we were going for more of a New York Dolls, early 70s Stones thing, with maybe some Mott the Hoople influences.  We were really the first band in L.A. like that. We had long hair by that time and looked more like a rock n roll band, but we never went Heavy Metal. We started drawing pretty big crowds and all the guys were starting to look like us. Then they all started bands. The L.A. Weekly called them "Joneses clones". But musically, we were different. The bands that ended up getting signed and selling lots of records were more hard rock or heavy metal. We were never like that."

Trying to fit into the punk scene turned out to be a no-no as well - the group would make their recording debut with the aforementioned Pillbox and Graveyard Rock being included on a compilation on L.A. punk label BYO. Jeff remembers, "Our guitar player at the time, Steve Houston, had been in the Klan, which was a popular L.A. punk band. So BYO contacted him about the Joneses being on their compilation.  Most of the other bands on the comp were pretty hardcore, there was the Adolescents, Battalion of Saints, Aggression, bands like that. The Stern brothers, the guys that ran BYO, told us that they got more hate mail for the Joneses than the rest of the bands put together got fan mail! So naturally when they did that Another State of Mind tour that became a movie, we weren't included."

Nevertheless, despite being a bit of an odd band out, the group were definitely in the mix and became tight with several bands who would go on to the sort of success that would sadly elude the Joneses. Jeff: "We did some shows with Social Distortion - I was from Anaheim and Mike Ness was from Fullerton, so we used to run around a little bit. We played with the Red Hot Chili Peppers a couple times, but I didn't know those guys personally. At one time half the guys in TSOL and L.A. Guns were ex-Joneses. We used to hang around with the guys from Tex and the Horseheads a lot, they were a lot of fun.  I became good friends with Pleasant Gehman and the gals from the Screaming Sirens - they were crazy, Pleasant would call me and say, "Wanna go to a party?" and the next thing I knew it would be three days later! There was a little thing between the Joneses and Guns 'n' Roses. I don't remember much about that though. They would jump onstage with us uninvited before they got huge and we didn't like that, but I guess they were starving for attention. They got enough attention eventually."

Initially, the group were making hay while the sun shone with the BYO recordings being rapidly followed up by the Criminals EP, another wickedly sharp slice of switchblade glam-punk with a nod to the Heartbreakers and the Dead Boys with further compilation recordings surfacing the following year and the group being packed off on national tours across the States. But then things stalled - as Jeff remembers, "we wasted a couple of years trying to get signed to a major label and that didn't happen." In the end, it would be 1986 by the time the group got around to recording their debut album proper Keeping Up With The Joneses but legal issues meant it was a further year before it saw the light of day on indie label Dr Dream.

The delays would cost them badly as, similar to the fate that would befall many GDR bands in later years (Rock City Angels, the Nymphs etc), the group could only watch on from the sidelines as other bands zipped past them playing a more "commercially viable" (urgh) take on the same formula. Jeff: "It was like the scene we started passed us by. We were packing them in playing raunchy rock n roll starting in 1983. But the bands that came out of that scene were much different from us musically. Every band back then, including the Joneses, said their next record was gonna sound like the New York Dolls or "Exile On Main Street". Of course, none of them did.  They were all much more Heavy Metal at heart than anything else. Then once you get the major labels involved, you get Poison and Warrant. Cartoon rock."

It's a real shame as Keeping Up With The Joneses remains a fine album all these years later. A good two or three years before Guns 'n' Roses were introducing a generation of rockers to the delights of the New York Dolls, the Joneses were mining the same sort of formula to great effect even if its commercial impact was next to nothing. While the likes of She's So Filthy, Looks So Good and Cut That Trash were razor-sharp slices of sleazy street-punk, covers of Aerosmith's Chip Away The Stone and a 300mph demolition of Elton John's Crocodile Rock showed that they were far from a one trick pony. The trouble is that, as Jeff says, the general consensus by this point was that it had arrived two or three years too late to really capitalise on the momentum the band had at the beginning and band members would start to bail - bassist Scott Franklin would end up joining the Cramps while Paul Mars (aka Paul Black) and Nicky Alexander would both move on to the pre-major label line-up of L.A. Guns (they would quickly lose their places to Phil Lewis and Steve Riley after the band was signed).

It would all end very messily for the Joneses - in 1991, Drake was arrested for a bank robbery and spent three years in jail. "But really the band broke up before that." remembers Jeff, "After the release of "Keeping Up With The Joneses" got delayed, we lost a lot of momentum and the band broke up. Steve Olson and I tried to get it going again in 1989, RCA was interested, but that fell through. I was so strung out I couldn't really keep it together. Then I became a bank robber." Even so, the later Joneses recordings (collected on the excellent Criminal History compilation) still have plenty to recommend them - to be honest, their gleefully gnarly run through Hank Williams' Your Cheatin' Heart (the outro of which definitely bears a bit of a resemblance to the outro of the Wildhearts' classic My Baby Is A Headfuck from a few years later) is probably worth the price of admission alone but originals such as Tits And Champagne and Steamin' prove that they still had plenty of fire even at this late stage. Nevertheless, it's safe to say that robbing a bank is pretty much going to put a comprehensive full stop on any band's output.

Drake would move on to pastures new upon his release. "When I got out of prison, the Joneses did one more recording that eventually became the Anita Fix EP." he remembers, "That EP was originally recorded as demos, but when no one was interested we released the recordings as an EP. At that point I was tired of doing the Joneses and wanted to do something different. I had always wanted to just play guitar and write songs, so I asked my friend Mandy Brix if she wanted to sing in a band with me. She agreed and we got Sean Antillon on drums and Keith Michael on bass and Amanda Jones was born. Amanda Jones I still think is the best band I was ever in. We were kinda like a cross between Blondie and the Avengers. Good songs, good singing, good playing. We did an EP for BOMP! records that I'm really proud of. We had about ten more songs we demo'd for an album, but it never got made."

(Andy's note - headed up by an excellent cover of the old Boys power-pop classic First Time)

After that, Drake would move on to another criminally under-rated late '90s band, The Vice Principals. "(That) was a band I did with my brother Scott, the singer for the Humpers." he remembers, "We did an LP for Sympathy For The Record Industry and a single for Junk Records. The Vice Principals broke up cuz there was just too much genius for one band. Really."

Which brings us back to the present. After his rehabilitation, Drake would sort himself out, go clean and retrain to start a new life as a university lecturer. But he's still proud of his past and the Joneses seem to be one of those bands that attract a new group of underground followers every ten years or so. So maybe not a surprise that a reissue campaign is currently underway. Jeff: "I got contacted by Nat from Projectile Platters about releasing everything the Joneses ever recorded spread over the 12" LPs. So we compiled all the recordings, and I wrote some liner notes. We had a lot of photos to use cuz I had just gotten those together for the book.  Nat did a great job. They are really good looking and sounding records. If you're a Joneses fan and want to have everything, or you're just curious what it's all about, I suggest you run, don't walk, to go buy them. You can get them mail order from Projectile Platters or at your local independent record store."

Jeff has also been busy writing his upcoming autobiography which, as you can probably tell from this article, should be an interesting read. "My friend Jeff Davis, who put out the Anita Fix EP, had been harrassing me for about 30 years to write a book." he elaborates, "I never really considered it because I didn't think I had the discipline to do something that big. I wrote songs. Those take me about 20 minutes. A book would take months. And I didn't want to write about myself. If someone wanted to write one about me I would help them, but that's all. Then in January of 2021 I found myself with some time on my hands, and Jeff said now's the time. You're not getting any younger - write the book! So I did. It took me a couple months, but I did it. I contacted HoZac Books and they said they would be honored to publish me. I was shocked. I wasn't even sure if they knew who I was. So anyhow, the book should be available for pre-orders from HoZac in October and available fro HoZac and Amazon shortly after that."

And so concludes the story of the Joneses - arguably the great Sunset Strip trailblazers who never really got their proper due but, similar to other similar bands like the Lords of the New Church, remain a delicious underground secret to be discovered upon a bit of scratching below the surface. Suffice to say that both Keeping Up With The Joneses and the Criminal History compilation (or, if you're feeling a bit flush, that box set) come heavily recommended by your correspondent.

Special thanks to Jeff for all his help with this article - much obliged feller.

JONESES LINKS: Projectile Platters (for the box set), HoZac (for the book)