Garbage Days Revisited #103: The Sea Hags - "The Sea Hags" (1989)

 

"I can't recall 'cos I've had quite a few/So lend me your ears and I'll tell ya a tale..." - The Sea Hags - Doghouse

The Sea Hags hailed from San Francisco and were friends of fellow GDR alumni the Nymphs and if you remember that column, you've probably already got an uneasy feeling about how this story's likely to end. And I suspect that you're probably right but suffice to say the answer is "not well".

Anyway, the group were formed in San Francisco in the mid-'80s by frontman Ron Yocom and bassist Chris Schlosshardt. They seemed to quickly gain a reputation as a band who were scuzzy enough to attempt to appeal to the sleaze rock crowd but also heavy enough to capture a few floating thrash fans as well - indeed, their first demos were produced by none other than Kirk Hammett and they shared bills with the likes of the Ramones, Motorhead and fellow San Fran natives the Dead Kennedys in their early days. It was enough to bring them to the attention of Chrysalis who quickly signed 'em and moved them down the coast to LA to record their debut album - there was even talk of Ian Astbury being brought in to produce it but that job would eventually fall to G'n'R's engineer (and the man who would later bugger up the Glitterati's first album) Mike Clink.

To be fair though, on this occasion Clink did a decent job on the production and the sole Sea Hags album still sounds good now from the rush of lead-off single Half The Way Valley through the lurching Doghouse and Miss Fortune to the ominous closer Under The Night Stars (later used in one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies). Similar to the Joneses or the Rock City Angels or the Hangmen or the Dogs D'Amour, it's lumbering bruised wrong side of the tracks rock 'n' roll with a bottle of rotgut in one hand and a baseball bat in the other stumbling down the street looking for a fight and all the better for it.

Unfortunately there's the rub - this very much wasn't an act, the Sea Hags really were a bunch of chronic fuck-ups. Even Yocom himself admitted in an interview years later that there's only so far a band can go when it consists of three junkies and an alcoholic. Even by the time they'd put the album out, line-up instability was already setting in with Adam Maples replacing Greg Langston on drums and Frankie Wilsey being added as a second guitarist. Add to this the band starting to hang around with other wrong-side-of-the-tracks types like the Nymphs (Schlosshardt and Inger Lorre would become an item) and exchange bad habits with them and it was all starting to spiral rapidly out of control. The album didn't do the numbers, Chrysalis allegedly were already horrified by the stories surrounding the band and, in time honoured '80s major label tradition, rather than trying to help them sort themselves out they quickly washed their hands of them so they wouldn't be their problem anymore.

The Sea Hags would never recover - Schlosshardt would suddenly die from pneumonia in late '91 putting an end to both the Sea Hags and the Nymphs (Inger Lorre was so shaken up by his death that she left L.A. behind and went back to her native New Jersey). Maples would briefly act as a stand-in drummer for Guns 'n' Roses after they fired Steven Adler and Wilsey would join up with ex-Ratt singer Stephen Pearcy in his new band Arcade and would later end up with one of the various L.A. Guns line-ups. Yocom on the other hand would end up joining an industrial band.

And that's pretty much the decidedly short story of the Sea Hags in a nutshell - the sort of band who go out and do this sort of thing so the rest of us don't have to essentially. But similar to a lot of the other bands of that genre they did leave behind a bit of a storming album, proper wrong side of the tracks fucked up rock 'n' roll in the best Johnny Thunders tradition. Certainly if the idea of some scuzzed-up seasick lurching blues-sleaze floats your boat then you could do a lot worse than investigate it.