Sounds From The Junkshop #123 - The Hangmen

 

"There ain't nothin' on TV but a preacher tryin' to save me/I'll just close my eyes and make it go away..." - The Hangmen - Rotten Sunday

The Hangmen are one of those rare groups who could have featured in either the Sounds From The Junkshop or Garbage Days Revisited columns as their career kind of straddles both. The group would first rise up in the Sunset Strip era when they were briefly being hyped as the Next Big Thing only for things to fall apart and the group to be knocked on their backs for over a decade before pulling themselves out of the gutter to start things again in the early noughties.

(Quick NB - this is the American Hangmen we're talking about, not the UK psychobilly band. Just so we're all on the same page right from the off, like)

The group formed in L.A. in 1986 under the guidance of Montana native Bryan Small and, similar to the Joneses a couple of years earlier, gained notoriety as a killer live band in the L.A. circuit who were offering up a rawer and more punked up take on the glam metal formula with a tip of the hat to Iggy, Stiv and the Dolls. Songs like the staggering blues rock of Desperation Town and the scowling hangover lament of Rotten Sunday showed that they had the chops to compete with the best of them while the frenetic spite of Coal Mine had more of an edge than most of the latter day Aqua Net merchants. A competent cover of the old Flamin' Groovies classic Slow Death was perhaps more of an accurate indicator as to where their influences lay as was the fact that the album was produced by former Motorhead producer Vic Maile.

Unfortunately, as with a lot of the harder edged Sunset Strip bands who were trying to break through at this point (see also Rock City Angels, the Throbs etc etc), the Hangmen kind of got lost in the shuffle. Their album didn't shift the numbers that their label Capitol was expecting and they ended up dropped. Initially it looked as if they were going to move across to Geffen and even recorded an album only for their new label to can them before they'd even had the chance to release anything (as we've established on the Nymphs GDR a while ago, Geffen really were experts at buggering up the careers of rock bands who weren't called Guns 'n' Roses at this point).

Similar to a lot of bands who saw their dreams go up in smoke when the Sunset Strip scene collapsed, the Hangmen disintegrated very messily in the early '90s and, similar to Jeff Drake from the Joneses, Small would end up doing jail time which prompted him to clean himself up afterwards and get back to making music upon his release. He would put a new Hangmen line-up together and sign to veteran L.A. punk label Acetate (who've also got the likes of Junkyard and the Supersuckers on their books - the 'Suckers and the Hangmen are old friends which definitely figures if you listen to their music) and release the Metallic IOU and Loteria albums in the early noughties followed by the In The City mini-album which is where I discovered them. All of the above are good efforts, taking the classic Hangmen template but adding the sort of terrifying stories from being a down and out on the local skid row that the group had experienced in the interim. The likes of Bent, Broke, Drunk and Stoned and Loners, Junkies and Liquor Stores were sometimes uncomfortably near the knuckle tales of being battered down to the floor with nothing left to live for in the grasp of addiction with no sugar-coating. The sort of songs you listen to and pray afterwards that it never happens to you.

Loteria was a pretty regular presence on my stereo in 2005 and it soundtracked my own personal nosedive through a lot of that year - losing my job, the end of a relationship that I'd probably pinned too many hopes on, being out of work for nine months and having to move back into my mum's house and basically spending most nights up surfing the internet and drinking foul tasting 49p a can supermarket own brand beer just to put myself out until midway through the next afternoon. It's weird how when you're broke and don't really have anything much to wake up for most days that your sleeping patterns suddenly change dramatically - I quickly realised there was very little more depressing than waking up at 9am and realising that I wouldn't get to interact with another human being for another nine hours until my mum came home from work about 6pm. I was sending off my CV left, right and centre but literally no bugger was even bothering to acknowledge they'd received it and the whole process was making me incredibly angry and down about my lot. I became a very unpleasant and irascible character, picking verbal fights with people just to kind of feel something really and I lost a few friendships over it. Again, to those who were victims of my behaviour back then I can only apologise.

In a way though, it was the hope in Loteria that, along with a lot of other very disparate records ranging from Ginger Wildheart's Valor del Corazon through Alice Cooper's Goes To Hell and Cinderella's Long Cold Winter to Big Country's One Great Thing, kept me going. I'd read the interviews with Bryan Small around the time of the album and thought fuck it, as bad as things are they could be worse - unlike his nosedive, I still had a roof over my head and wasn't in trouble with the law and he'd rebounded back to make a bloody awesome album like Loteria. I guess it kind of helped me realise that there's always a light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how dim it seems sometimes.

I've continue to roll with the Hangmen ever since - they've produced another two excellent albums since in the form of 2012's East Of Western and 2019's Cactusville, remaining with Acetate records to this day. They've also had former Supersuckers drummer Ron Heathman join the band in recent years (although I think he's now left again) and their former guitarist Tex Mosley resurfaced with the excellent Neverland Ranch Davidians in our reviews column a few days ago proving that the rock 'n' roll flame here is still burning strong.

I guess all I'll say in closing is that I'd pretty much recommend all of the Hangmen's stuff. It's brutal and doesn't pull any punches but similar to how Stiv Bators and Jeff Drake used to do so well, there's an honesty, rawness and fury to it that grabs you by the neck and won't let you go, not to mention this group's knack with a cracker of a Thunders/Keef style riff to power things along. If you've remained unaware of them before now then I heartily advise you to go and put that right asap. End of.