Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Rock Club / Ronchi dei Legionari (Ronke) / Italy
Concert date: 12/15/2010
Attendance: 70
Ticket price: €20.00
L.A. Guns are yet another great glam metal outfit from the second half of the eighties, basically everything that was left of the band after the birth of Guns N’ Roses and Blind Melon. The first three albums surely adorn the record collection of every devotee of this school of rock. And yet the new times have changed a lot for L.A. Guns. These days there are two L.A. Guns bands. One is led by singer Phil Lewis, the other by guitarist Tracii Guns. Sadly, the two just can’t get on the same wavelength. There’s a rift between them, and each one pulls the reins in their own direction. Still, you could say the version of L.A. Guns with Phil Lewis and drummer Steve Riley is closer to the old, real L.A. Guns than the version with Tracii Guns on guitar and Jizzy Pearl on vocals. Pearl joined the lineup for the album “Shrinking Violet” (1999), left L.A. Guns soon after its release, but rejoined Tracii’s version last year. Before that, Jizzy Pearl did his time fronting Love/Hate, the house band of the famous Los Angeles club Whiskey A Go Go, who put out a dozen albums in the nineties. In the new millennium he also jumped in for a short while as Ratt’s singer and contributed vocals to the debut by Adler’s Apetite.
So it was Tracii’s L.A. Guns who landed in Europe on tour again. They visited the famous little town next to the Trieste airport, in the Slovenian borderland, Ronchi dei Legionari (Ronke in Slovenian), for the second time within a year. Before L.A. Guns, two acts hit the stage: Nasty Tendency, an Italian sleazy r’n’r outfit, followed by glam rock alternative guys Venrez, who are supporting Tracii’s L.A. Guns on the whole tour. Sadly, we got to Rock Club really late this time, so we only caught the last gasps of Venrez on stage. Besides Tracii Guns and Jizzy Pearl, this version of the L.A. Guns lineup is rounded out by Jeremy Guns on bass, who joined in 2006, and drummer Chad Stewart, who came aboard a year later.
L.A. Guns started out dreamily, with two raw bangers from the self-titled debut “L.A. Guns”, Electric Gipsy and Bitch Is Back. The crowd, a good 100 heads or so in the club, boiled over as soon as they recognized the classics. As expected, that was followed by the more laid-back Decide, a great ballad from the album “Shrinking Violet” (1999). Jizzy Pearl introduced the song in theatrical style: “This is a song from our latest album!”, which carried a symbolic weight. Tracii Guns obviously feels ashamed of the later L.A. Guns albums he made with Phil Lewis, two of them to be exact, while the latest, “Tales From The Strip” (2005), came out without Tracii in the lineup altogether. The band carried on with the all-too-familiar “Cocked And Loaded” and tore through the club with the pretty much obligatory classic Never Enough, whose catchy chorus got the red-hot Italian heads galloping again, along with a dozen Slovenian fans (especially from the Gorizia area).
Jizzy Pearl, who came on stage visibly tipsy and “fired up” by alcohol, didn’t sing optimally. You could feel it especially in the parts that demanded more sophistication. There he wasn’t quite on the mark and fumbled a bit around the melody of the verses. Luckily he didn’t forget the lyrics, but he ran out of breath as his voice got thinner and thinner exactly where it was needed least (Dreamtime, The Ballad Of Jayne, or the Zeppelin-schooled Over The Edge, the only song played from the third L.A. Guns album, “Hollywood Vampires”). In Over The Edge the lack of keyboards really showed, and in The Ballad Of Jayne the guys could at least have strapped on acoustic guitars, Jizzy at the very least, and squeezed more genuine energetic juice out of that song on stage.
Tracii Guns showed he’s an excellent guitarist who grew up under the strong influence of Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin). Some lines in his solos make no bones about their close parallels in the arrangement of notes and the placement of the “pull off” moments. However I turn it over, it’s clear that Tracii Guns’ version of the band clings to the glory of the first three albums. Jizzy Pearl, let’s be honest, doesn’t come close to Phil Lewis in charisma. On top of that, his vocal is at best a relatively decent approximation of Lewis, and the thing just doesn’t resonate live in a way that would touch you any deeper while taking in this version of L.A. Guns.
The show slowly fizzled out too, more and more as the concert neared its end. In the second half the band allowed itself extreme laziness and got stuck on jamming covers. They poured Rip And Tear into the Ramones cover I Just Wanna Have Something To Do. That’s unbelievable. What’s gotten into bands lately that they play so much Ramones? Not long ago we got a taste of that at a concert by today’s incarnation of Skid Row in Treviso. The vocals on the Ramones cover were handled in “faking it” style by bassist Jeremy Guns, followed by Hendrix’s Red House, which every little kid plays at home in their room, and that brought another 10 minutes of boredom. Here Tracii himself killed time on vocals, then it faded out in a solo “jam” where he came off as a Jimmy Page copy. Pearl returns to the stage and the band plays another round of the classic Rip And Tear, then clears off the stage after an hour and ten minutes. The very fact that Jizzy Pearl needs a break during the show is a sign that his voice isn’t fresh, and on stage in 2010 it sounds pretty pitiful and worn out. What is perfectly acceptable, though, is that the guys took on two Love/Hate covers, especially the excellent Black Out In The Red Room from Love/Hate’s cult self-titled debut.
After we expected L.A. Guns to make it up to us in the encore with a string of classics, what followed was a tease with Guns N’ Roses. Or rather, with Bob Dylan. There’s no need to even mention the title of that chewed-up classic. Stretched out to a good ten minutes, it was finally followed by one more L.A. Guns classic from the debut, Sex Action, and then the guys said their final goodbyes.
It’s also unbelievable how much of a star trip Tracii has and still allows himself, since right after the show he sped off wildly from the club to the tour bus and vanished from the public eye with mysterious haste. The other members handed out autographs and took photos until late in the night. And yet. However hugely grateful and undemanding, but more than intensely into it, the Italian crowd once again saved the picture of the concert experience with the Tracii Guns version of L.A. Guns, that still didn’t wash away the bitter aftertaste that the band left the audience in Ronchi dei Legionari owed quite a lot. Instead of stealing minutes with covers, at least a dozen more L.A. Guns classics.
And the moral of this story? If you’re an L.A. Guns fan, the Tracii Guns version is worth seeing. But no more than once. Unfortunately, the other version of L.A. Guns, with Phil Lewis, rarely makes it to Europe. However I turn it over, Rock Club once again basked in positive energy and a really nice atmosphere that night, which we can thank the great support of the crowd for. Tracii Guns and his L.A. Guns especially have reason to be grateful. It’s obvious that Italy keeps them somehow alive in this new era, because with such half-hearted effort, somewhere in Germany or Scandinavia, Tracii Guns and company would have no business being on a stage.
photos: Martin Prezelj
Setlist
1. Electric Gypsy 2. Bitch Is Back 3. Decide 4. Never Enough 5. Dreamtime 6. The Ballad of Jayne 7. Over The Edge 8. Spinning Wheel (Love/Hate cover) 9. One More Reason 10. Black Out In The Red Room (Love/Hate cover) 11. No Mercy 12. Rip and Tear 13. I Just Wanna Have Something To Do (Ramones cover) 14. Red House (Jimi Hendrix cover) 15. Rip And Tear (outro) —encore— 16. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (Bob Dylan cover) 17. Sex Action
Photo gallery
