Tracii Guns

IN MY OWN WORDS TRACII GUNS

My new album, Sunbomb: When Frontiers asked me if I wanted to do my record, I said yeah, but I had no idea what I would do. I could have done something mellow, but as a guitar player, my thing is Metal.

So my wife and I were doing Sunday drives up the coast listening to only Metal and discovering different things. No matter what I was listening to, it was all influenced by The Scorpions and Randy Rhoads.

You can’t get away from those influences. So I started demoing stuff, and I had three or four tunes, and I thought this is great, but who’s going to sing this stuff?

I’d recently met Michael Sweet and seen him play live at The Whisky, so I sent him a demo. He asked me, “What’s this?” and I said, that’s me.

Do you want to sing on that? He said yeah. I said, ok, what about eleven of these? (laughs). He said, “I’m in”.

It took me another year to finish all the music, and then it took him another year to write all the lyrics and record it. I never even heard a demo of what he was doing!

When songs started coming back, it was like Christmas! We did a successful collaboration, and I couldn’t be any happier with it.

The future of the music industry:

I think that things will go back to some sort of normal, but I don’t think they will ever be the way they were before the pandemic. Right now in The States, for example, you can play half-capacity shows or full capacity if you’re in the south where they don’t care about the pandemic. We won’t partake in that. We have a responsibility to our audience.

Tracii Guns, co-founder of Glam Metal pioneers L.A. Guns

The creative comeback of L.A. Guns:

The element of creativity and having a good time with it is what fuels authenticity. As long as we’re enjoying it, it is going to show. That’s the benefit of having a band of guys and a crew that are like family. cord, Cocked and Loaded Live, is coming out. We had a deadline to turn in

“We’re proud of how we sound, and I think Phil has taken care of his voice. We still care. We have to be L.A. Guns.”

TRACII GUNS

our new studio record on 1 November last year - it wasn’t possible.

The label needed to put something out, so I called my manager and asked, “didn’t we multi-track that live stream? I’ve got to listen to it.”

It was pretty damn good! It’s something I’m proud of, and I think L.A. Guns fans will love to have a live version of Cocked And Loaded.

We’re proud of how we sound, and I think Phil has taken care of his voice. We still care. We have to be L.A. Guns.

I’m glad we have the live album because I had to re-learn a lot of that stuff. Like the solo in Magdalaine, it is so fast! It was such a pain in the ass to learn for one gig.

But now we have it on record, so it was worth putting the time into it. That was a good album, man! Listening back to stuff like Showdown, like 30 years later, I was like, damn, these guys were good.

The new album Checkered Past comes out on 12 November. We put out the new single Let You Down about two years ago, and the fan response was immense.

It was surprising because most L.A. Guns fans want that riffy, powerful rock, but I just had a feeling about that song.

So going into Checkered Past, I made sure there was more of that ambient sound. Then the hard-hitting rockers are on a new level. The chemistry evolves. Stylistically, it is broader, and

IN MY OWN WORDS

it is a different mood to The Devil You Know.

The formula is Phil Lewis - going from Cocked and Loaded to Hollywood Vampires. I knew that we could pull that off. As long as Phil is singing, that’s the continuity factor.

With Zeppelin, The Stones or Van Halen, those bands got away with musical murder because the vocals were the identifying factor.

On Eddie Van Halen:

Eddie Van Halen and I became golf partners in the early ‘90s - we had an enjoyable relationship. I met him because he had heard this King Biscuit Flower Hour recording of L.A. Guns.

My girlfriend at the time got home and hit the answering machine; “Hey Tracii, it’s Eddie Van Halen. Could you give me a call?”. She said that’s Eddie. I said no, it’s not! (laughs). Eventually, I realized it was him and called back.

He said, “Hey Tracii, what are you doing? Want to come up to my house? I’m trying to mix this live record, and I got hold of the engineer that did your live recording.”

I went up there, and Sammy Hagar was there too. Eddie handed me this cassette and said, “what’s going on with the guitar right there?”

Back then, I had a stereo guitar sound where one side was dry, and the other had a chorus. What happened was that when we went to mix, the chorus track wasn’t recorded properly, and we had to reconstruct it.

Being in a mobile truck, I didn’t have all my guitars or pedals, so we just added a harmonizer to that second track to replicate what I had done initially.

It ended up sounding cool. So I told Eddie what we did. He was trying to mix Live Without A Net, just himself and an engineer. He ended up abandoning it and getting Andy Johns to do it, and they replicated that method for the guitar.

After that, you can hear Eddie had this more stereo sound on the Sammy era records. We had fun - he was a great guy.

On playing with Poison:

C.C. had left Poison to do his project called Samantha 7, so the guys in Poison all called me back to back. The interesting thing was, we started rehearsing to write.

We go in, and Bob Ezrin is there. He is going to produce the next album.

The thing is, we’re kind of musically incompatible - Bobby has a way of writing, and that’s cool because that’s Poison, but I couldn’t add any musical sophistication to it. Bob Ezrin was pulling me outside going, “I don’t know how we’re going to do this”.

I ended up getting sick with the flu on the fourth or fifth day, and during that break, Bob decided he didn’t want to do the project and that it wasn’t for him.

After the new year, Bobby called me up to talk about payment. Like you want a percentage of the gross, or can I pay you ten million a week in cash? I was like, Jesus, you guys make that much money? [laughs].

We had gotten to that point, but all of a sudden, C.C. freaks the fuck out and says, “you can’t have Tracii in there. It’s my band.” I get it.

The thing was, I had cleared my schedule of over a year of L.A. Guns shows. Bobby called, and he understood - they’re great guys, and we’re all long time friends.

• AS TOLD TO KAHMEL FARAHANI