Most bands who fall into the 80s glam metal niche comfortably spend their sunset years going through the motions of the carnival and casino circuit, robotically playing the hits that put them on the map 30+ years ago. L.A. Guns isn’t “most bands”. Matter of fact, for this ragtag crew of leather clad lunatics, the 80s never ended. Phil Lewis, Tracii Guns, and the gang take the stage every night with the same vim and vigor that has been guiding them from day one: blazing through the classics and throwing in new songs that are bound to become classics in due time. We had the chance to sit down with frontman Lewis to discuss the band’s Checkered Past (figuratively and literally) and promising future.
Greetings Phil and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing this afternoon?
Phil Lewis: I’m doing great man! I’m doing good Joe. It’s good talking to you. I’ve been doing a bunch of interviews for the last couple of weeks now talking about this new record and it’s great. People are loving it. *pointing to my L.A. Guns’ The Missing Peace shirt* You’re a man of style. I see you’ve got the shirt. You’ve got a fine moustache going there. You and I are gonna get on well!
Yes we are my friend! First off, I love the title itself, Checkered Past. Who came up with the title and were there any others in consideration?
PL: Yeah, we were gonna call it Cannonball because we were so happy with the way that song turned out. If you look at the titles of the three albums we have done since our reunion, Tracii and I had a but of a Checkered Past. We had 15 years where we didn’t talk to each other. That’s a long fucking time. So when we got back together and we started making music and everything felt right, that’s how that title The Missing Peace came about. It’s “peace” as in “peace” and love, not a “piece” of string. That was a good pun on our relationship, our friendship, our partnership. Whatever you want to call it. As was the second title, The Devil You Know, because we’re both devils, you know? We both got that chemistry. We’ve always called each other Cain and Abel because when we fight, you don’t wanna be around us. And this one is Checkered Past.
As I said, we thought we were gonna be funny and call it Cannonball. We were gonna have the balls swinging over the nozzle of the cannon. It was like a funny double entendre, a bit spicy AC/DC sort of thing. But then we suddenly realized we’re not a funny band. We do have aspects of humor, but calling it Cannonball and making it look like a dick and a pair of balls disguised as a cannon. Fortunately, they talked us out of that. We knocked around a bunch of ideas. I think Tracii came up with it. Checkered Past, that sums us up very well.
This is the third L.A. Guns album since you and Tracii reunited. Was it a bit nerve wracking working with him again after so long and how would you describe your current creative relationship?
PL: When we got back together, there was no talk about making a record. We just wanted to bury the hatchet and maybe play a jam night. If I remember rightly, we were both invited to play a charity in Vegas around Christmastime. It was Toys for Tots or something like that. He was already doing it and I was invited to do it. They said, “Oh by the way, Tracii’s gonna be there.” My heart stopped. It was like, “Fuck, I haven’t seen this guy in 15 years.” I thought, “Wait a minute. This is a charity. I’m gonna be raising money for disadvantaged kids. Fuck the feud. I’m here for a good cause.” I went in with a clear conscience. It wasn’t, “Oh let’s get together. And if we get together, we can get this deal and that.” It wasn’t that at all. It was the purest of motives and we found ourselves in a room together. It was just amazing how quickly we were back to normal. We were back to being friends again. We both learned a lot. 15 years is a long time. We’ve both grown up a lot, certainly him. I was dealing with a much more stable person than the one I walked away from way back then, around the same time we put out Waking the Dead (2002).
We got up and jammed. We played a few songs. The chemistry was there. We looked over and were smiling and laughing at each other. Then we all just became friends again. I had an acoustic solo show coming up, and I invited him and Shane (Fitzgibbon), his drummer at the time, to come sit in with me. I was gonna play songs that he knows. Songs that, damn, he was involved in writing. And he agreed to do it. He’s not an acoustic guitar guy by any means, so I knew it was a stretch for him to agree to do it. I’m glad he did. From that point on, it was hanging out with him and playing me ideas that he’d been working on. Songs that he had lying around that he didn’t know what to do with. I said, “Let me listen. Let me see what you got.” I heard it right away. It lit up like a bulb. These were great songs. This is a guy that I’m really happy to be around. It felt like it was time for us to make up for lost time.
We do have that chemistry, that Joe Perry/Steven Tyler thing going. You can’t deny it. I’ve played with hundreds of guitar players, but none that made me work as hard as he does. I feel that he would never give me anything half-assed. He never said, “Here’s a rough idea. I’m still working on it.” He’s never done that. It’s always, “This is the song. This is complete. Make changes by all means.” But I rarely do. I rarely need to make changes. He thinks of my ability in terms of picking out a key for the song, and it’s mathematical. Basically, there’s a two bar intro, one verse or two verses. It’s either two, four, or eight sections. With that template, he came up with those dozen songs in about a month, maybe less than a month. He was over in Denmark banging away on GarageBand. That’s how it came together.
You speak about making up for lost time. The Missing Peace and The Devil You Know seemed to come together rather fast. Was Checkered Past an album that would’ve come out sooner had it not been for the pandemic?
PL: Oh certainly, yeah. The pandemic fucked everything up. It was the most untraditional record I’ve ever done. Normally the guys get together in a room, hash out ideas, work on choruses, get the song tweaked, get it all sounding good. When the song’s written, then you’ll play it countless times, just because it’s fun, and because you wanna be ready when that red light goes on. This was completely different. I was handed finished songs with drum machines. This album…I haven’t sung any of it live. It’s the first time its ever been ass backwards like this. Normally, when you do an album, I would’ve sung these songs hundreds of times before I got behind the mic to record. No this is very, very different. And then doing it at home, engineering it myself, was very, very different. It slowed us down considerably.
I am a recording engineer, but rusty as fuck. I haven’t done it in so long. I had to get back my engineering skills and then setting the tape 15, 20 seconds before my punch in so that I can get up, run to the vocal booth, get the headphones on, get the vibe right, get in front of the mic, and come in and do that. When you’ve gotta do that a dozen times for a certain section, you get pretty fit running up and down. I did it all by myself. We did do a fair bit of Zooming between band members when I was putting vocals down because I wanna know if I’m going in the right direction, if they’re okay with it. So yeah, it was a very different way of recording. I didn’t hate it.
I’ve got to say really quickly that I didn’t use any fancy equipment. I used an 8 year old Dell computer, an entry level two channel Focusrite interface, and a so so medium level Chinese knockoff mic. There’s no fancy compressors, no 1957 warm tube amp, none of that shit. I recorded straight to tape, or straight to computer. No effects, no reverb, no delay, nothing. All that stuff we put on later. So to all you home recorders out there, don’t fall for it. Don’t let them sell you stuff you don’t need, because you really don’t. This album is living proof of that.
There’s been three songs released from this album thus far, the first being “Knock Me Down”, which boasts that classic gritty L.A. Guns sound. Could you tell us the story behind this song?
PL: Not really. I was shocked when that was picked as a single. We don’t pick the songs. For me, it’s an okay song. It’s very fun. I like the handclaps. It’s a good staple rock song. It could be on Pyromania or something. It’s very generic. I was a bit blindsided when that was chosen to be a single. Not that I have anything to do with the choice, but for me, my head was thinking “Cannonball”. If it wasn’t the first single, I knew it was going to be a single and I wanted to be ready with all the pantomime, all the stuff that I was gonna do to embellish and to make this song fun. I had my head wrapped around it so much, when “Knock Me Down” came out, I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s a nice song.”
Same thing with “Get Along”. I knew, when we were doing it, there was something catchy to it. It reminded me something of “The Battle of Evermore”. That Zeppelin rock crossover idea. I’m very, very excited about that. Those are the two songs that I have my heart set on. I can’t really answer your question other than yes, it’s a good song. There’s great teamwork on it. I don’t think we’re playing it live. It’s a fair fact that 70% of this record will never see the light of day. It will never get heard live because we can’t do it. We’re so limited with what we can put in a set. We still have that legacy that we have to honor. It’s very difficult to pick out songs from these last three post-reunion albums that aren’t gonna tip the balance.
“Cannonball” is in the set. “Get Along” is in the set. “Let You Down” is in the set. That’s it for the time being. If we put another one from the record, we’ll have to take out one of those three. So yeah, it sucks, the juggling act. I love “Living Right Now”. It’s got that real 70s punk vibe to it. It’s got that Generation X, Lords of the New Church vibe to it. I’d love to do that live. If it does come to a vote, that will be my pitch, but I’m happy with those three that we got so far. I think that “Let You Down”, it’s kind of a novelty track in the context of an L.A. Guns affair, so hopefully we might be able to replace that with “Living Right Now”. I’m just thinking aloud.
You mention “Cannonball”, which of the three singles is my favorite. It reminds me of Motörhead. I’ve always felt, going back to the first L.A. Guns album, that you guys were always heavier and edgier than your peers of that era. Did you ever feel a sense of rivalry or vendetta against the more polished bands of the time?
PL: I’ve gotta watch what I say here, but yeah, we did feel slightly different from the big hair explosion. We fancied ourselves being a little bit dirty, with the biker leather jackets, the greasy hair. Now I know you can dig up pictures from old Hit Paraders and we’re all poofed up and as glammed as it gets, but you gotta remember. This is the era when the Prince of Darkness had frosted hair! It was a glam old time, I suppose you could call it. I’m not saying we weren’t guilty of crossing that line. I know we did, but our spirit, our soul, and our blueprint was to be dirty. We were gonna be sort of like the west coast Ramones or the new Alice Cooper band. Certainly not this big teeth, big hair, happy L.A. Buns *laughs*. That was never our intention.
Did we resent it? Well, a little bit. We didn’t resent the other bands doing it. We resented being sucked into it and consequently being referred to as a band from the “hair metal” genre. Whether we like it or not, we’re stuck in it, a bit like Elvis Costello and The Police being sucked into punk rock/new wave. They were never punk rock/new wave. They were as classic as it gets, but guilty by association.
It certainly was that era. It was also the age of the music video. There’s many classic L.A. Guns videos, my absolute favorite being “One More Reason” because it plays out like an action movie. What are your memories of shooting that video?
PL: Oh, fucking good ones. We could do a whole interview on this. I came over from London. When I was over there, I was working for the biggest video company in London as an assistant, a runner. I was friendly with up and coming directors. As fate would have it, when I came out to L.A. and we got the record deal, they said, “We’re gonna make a video.” At this point, I was like, “I know all these people in London.” They always believed in me when I was over there working, driving vans. I drove Dokken for two weeks on Tooth and Nail. I was the one saying, “One of these days you’re gonna hear me name.”
So we got an opportunity to make this video and I knew Ralph Ziman from London. He was dying to do a video for me, but I never had any money in London. All of a sudden I got a budget and he was over in L.A shooting a video for Exposé. They were making a video and they wanted a backing band, so Ralph conscripted Tracii, Mick (Cripps), Kelly (Nickels), and our then drummer Nickey (Alexander) to be Exposé’s backing band. If you look at the video, you’ll see them in it. I can’t remember the song.
Consequently, because of that, this was before video, everything was shot on film, Ralph had four or five rolls of film leftover from the Exposé shoot, which he was gonna use for our “One More Reason”. The deal we had was tentative, but once we made that video, that really sealed it. It’s these weird connections from London and then Exposé and then having the footage. And then we just had fun thinking about all the ways we could die. Being thrown off a roof, getting hit by a car, getting stabbed in the back in the shower by a mad bitch, floating face down in a pool with a Les Paul at the bottom of it: All the goriest ways. It was really a lot of fun.
We had never made a video before, none of us. I had done backstage, backstreet stuff in London, one or two camera shoots. This was my first real production and it changed everything. It was funny, it put us on the map, and it gave us great credibility. I remember taking it back to London and all my metal friends, Lemmy and his crew, it was like, *imitates Lemmy* “Finally! Finally he gets it!” It was great. I’m glad you brought that up. Interesting series of events.
Finally, when can fans expect to see L.A. Guns touring in support of Checkered Past?
PL: We’ve got a gaggle of dates. We’ve got half a dozen shows in the L.A./Vegas area when the record drops on the 12th. Then we’ve got the Whisky a Go Go on New Year’s Eve, which is kind of a tradition. And then we’ve got nothing next year until the Monsters of Rock Cruise in February. And then summertime, we’ve got dates coming in for a Tom Keifer/L.A. Guns/Faster Pussycat package tour. That will be coming to a town near you if we continue to go in the right direction. Who can say? That’s the plan.
Checkered Past comes out Friday, November 12 on Frontiers Records. For more information on Phil and L.A. Guns, visit www.lagunsmusic.com.
Tom K. / LA Guns & Faster Pussycat tour will be excellent