When you compare LA Guns to most of the other bands that fermented on the Sunset Strip in the 1980’s, they didn’t necessarily fit into the whole lipstick and spandex hair metal world. Leather, chains, snarls fresh from studying posters of Sid Vicious, they played hard with a twist of lime. You never got the impression they were here to kiss your cheek but to punch you right in the mouth. And although they could take a melody and make it a hit, ala “The Ballad Of Jayne,” their center was sleazy, punkish tunes drenched in attitude.
Fast-forward to 2015 and Tracii Guns is sitting outside, smoking a cigarette, waiting till it’s time to go pick his son up at school. For a moment, he is at rest. The guitar player always has something on his plate at any given moment and now is no exception. Best known for his time in LA Guns, he has played with Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx in Brides Of Destruction, with Michael Schenker in Contraband and with Axl Rose in Guns N Roses, albeit for only a hiccup of time. He was a member of the Vegas rock show Raiding The Rock Vault in 2013, a gig he will be returning to in October for a month, trading off with Doug Aldrich as he plays shows with Gunzo, his band with legendary Ozzy Osbourne/Quiet Riot/Whitesnake bass player Rudy Sarzo.
Then there is Devil City Angels, a project conceived when Guns and Poison’s Rikki Rockett played a special gig together. They messed around with some tunes with Cinderella bass player Eric Brittingham and Cheap Thrill’s vocalist Brandon Gibbs and thus a record was born. The self-titled debut will officially be released next week, September 18, fresh behind new single, “All My People.” Although Brittingham wasn’t able to commit to the band following the recording, Sarzo has stepped in for any live shows and videos the band has coming up.
Guns is noticeably excited about where his life has ended up in 2015 and he is happy to be playing music with friends like Sarzo and Rockett. Glide caught up with Guns on that lazy afternoon a few weeks ago and talked with him about guitars, rock stars and creating new music. “You better watch out,” Guns said with a laugh after saying we could talk until it was time for him to retrieve his son. “We got a lot to say, right.”
You have got a lot going on. Where does the energy come from to do all these projects at one time?
I don’t know cause I don’t have ANY energy (laughs). That’s the biggest misconception. I get roped into things and then I just go. You just hit the go button and you go till you hit the wall. And I don’t really hit the wall very often. But the one thing about being a musician is opportunities are supposed to be few and far between. So I was brought up to, hey, take an opportunity, you never know where it’s going to lead to. So when opportunities arise, I always say yes first and take it to where it’s going to go and hopefully I do have the energy.
Were you like this growing up as a kid? You took life by the balls and ran?
Yeah, kinda. I mean, first it was sports and then it was bicycle and motocross and surfing. Just an extremely ridiculous amount of drive and wanting to be the best at something, you know what I mean. I started playing the guitar when I was really, really young, like six years old, and I was definitely the best six year old guitar player I knew (laughs). I was like, “Hey, I’m the best at this!” Which is exactly where my son is at right now. He’s six and a half years old. He’s playing the guitar and he claims he’s a much better guitar player than I am (laughs). So I get to look in the mirror now, forty-three years ago or whatever. But yeah, I mean, that’s the one thing in any business, if you’re motivated enough you can out-motivate everybody else that is trying to do something. Somehow the music part really naturally comes out and it’s ready to go at any moment. So I kind of lucked out in that department. I can’t say that about every other aspect of my life.
You said you played sports, what did you play?
Well, I thought I was going to be a basketball player until I got to high school and I stopped growing at about 5’8 and that was a big disappointment because coming from junior high school, I was just a medium-sized basketball player. Then when I got to high school, there were guys that were already 6’3 and 6’4. I was like, oh my God. They were like giants (laughs). So that put a kibosh on that. I got a concussion playing football a couple of years before that and so that was the end of that. But guitars seemed to be the thing; they just always seemed to be my thing.
So why did you pick it up? Was anyone in your family playing guitar?
Definitely. My uncle was the first one to show me a chord when I was six years old. He showed me a D major chord so I could play along with “Pinball Wizard” by The Who. My uncle was always studying and I was always hanging out in his room while he was studying and I was annoying. So he finally was like, “Here’s a D chord, here’s this record, play along with it.” But my father and mother and my grandparents all play piano, folk guitar, hippie music, country music, all kinds of shit so it was always around and, I hate to say it, it came really easily for me to play, you know. And to keep myself interested, that was the easy part.
And hopefully having a teacher who is encouraging.
See, that’s the thing. It’s like a teacher can really talk you out of playing if it’s the wrong person, you know. With me, I didn’t really have any teachers until I was older so the more frustrated I got the more I wanted to play. It kind of had the reverse effect on me because I heard Jimmy Page when I was six years old. I heard “Whole Lotta Love” and I was like, “Oh my God, what is that sound? I have to make that sound.” So the less teaching I had, the more I had to figure stuff out on my own and play it wrong, the more I kept trying to get it right. In the mid-seventies when all those live records came out, all the way from Ted Nugent, UFO and Peter Frampton and Aerosmith, I had all the live examples of guitar playing that I could just kind of jam along to and that’s when it really was just like, wow, this is great. I kind of gave up on the rest of anything else in life.
What was the most frustrating part in learning the guitar?
I do remember certain things when I was younger was #1, you had to get through those initial weeks of your hands and fingertips hurting. And it wasn’t so much I couldn’t fret certain chords, it was just it hurt. Once I got past that, then it was just really not having a good ear. That was the most frustrating, still to this day. I’ll hear something that I want to learn how to play and it doesn’t come very naturally. It’s like, even though I’ve heard those notes a million times, my brain doesn’t automatically tell me, “All that is is a seventh chord.” It’s like, oh shit, I have to figure that out. Cause I was doing this thing in Vegas, and will do again, called Raiding The Rock Vault, and it’s basically like you really got to play the songs exactly right. And that process was tough for me learning that stuff. But once I got it, it was a breeze. But I had Howard Leese, the other guitar player, and he was showing me and if it wasn’t for him I probably wouldn’t have gotten 100% of the stuff right. He’s just so amazing at recognizing exactly what somebody else is playing. My parts, the stuff that I wasn’t figuring out right away, he was like, “Trace, all that is is this.” And I’m like, Oh jeeze, that’s simple, you know (laughs). I think I overcomplicate things is my problem.
But I nailed that shit, there’s no doubt about it (laughs). See, that was the advantage I had over Doug Aldrich is that Howard and I and the band, we rehearsed for over a month before we actually did like a preview show. So we really did have like all this time to perfect everything so the first show was effective. But when I split, Doug had to come in pretty quick. It was like, “Hey dude, play these twenty songs right now.” So it took him like a minute to figure all that stuff out but Doug’s amazing.
But I got to say, the toughest thing for me, before I went to rehearsals, is I was on tour. So I was trying to learn stuff off of YouTube in like the back of a van, on airplanes. I was like, oh my God. And by the time I would actually get to learn something, I would get an email going, “We cut this song and that song so don’t bother with those.” And those were the ones I was working on! (laughs) But I got to say, the first show we nailed it, so it worked out.
What was your favorite moment in Rock Vault?
Well, there were two. When I do “All Along The Watchtower,” I got to really do the whole Hendrix thing, which is a big part of my style, so I could really let loose on that within keeping in the notes of the song. Then obviously, the first two hundred times I played “Stairway To Heaven” were great (laughs). Those are cool. And then, you know, the outro solo on “Hotel California,” when Howard and I would get together to do that, that was always a showstopper. People really enjoyed that. Then me and Andrew, kind of towards the end of the set, would do “Separate Ways” by Journey and he would always give me a kiss on the lips, which always made the crowd freak out and make really rude comments or throw rainbow flags at us. Either way, it’s cool. So yeah, I definitely had a chemistry with the guys in the band. We each had a separate relationship on and off stage. Rock Vault is a cool thing to do, it really is.
How are you going to do that with all this other stuff going on?
I have a plan (laughs). Okay, so basically when I do reappear at Rock Vault, it won’t be like it used to be, it won’t be like when Doug was there and I was there; it will be a rotating thing. I would commit to a month at a time, various months or a shorter amount of time or a longer amount of time, depending on what’s needed. But it will enable me to do Gunzo so that’s a great thing. As far as Devil City Angels goes, we don’t have any touring plans or anything. It’s like, when the record comes out then we will see how well the record does before there’s any more discussion of going out on the road or anything like that. It’s not as busy as it sounds. The busy stuff is when I’m home. Going on tour is more like a vacation (laughs).
You and Rikki Rockett put Devil City Angels together, right?
That’s right. We were put together in a little quartet to do a Keith Moon/John Entwistle tribute at the House Of Blues in LA about two years ago. Sean McNabb was playing bass in that little group and when we got done playing our two songs, we walked off stage and Sean just goes, “Guns & Rocketts!” Like, ha ha, new band, you know (laughs). And Rikki and I just kind of took it from there, like, why aren’t we doing something, cause we’ve been friends for a very, very long time. What we did was we had a short discussion and was like, “Hey, let’s do a simple rock & roll band.” You know, nothing too big. Then he had mentioned that he knew Brandon, the singer, and had known him a long time and was a real trustworthy guy and young and a good singer. I talked to him and I really liked Brandon on the phone the very first time I talked to him. He was already playing with Eric Brittingham from Cinderella in another band so we flew them out to LA and we recorded a song, “All My People,” a really good song and people responded to it really well. So I was like, “Hey, people like this band. Maybe we can do this band.” So we recorded a few more songs and put them out on Reverb Nation and people liked those too. Then we decided we were going to go play some shows and went out and did, I don’t know, maybe fifteen or twenty shows. And people showed up and they liked the new material and they liked the fact that we played LA Guns and Poison and Cinderella. Then we got a manager, Larry Mazer, who is the best rock manager in the world, and he got us a record deal and we made a record. Then Eric left and Rudy came in.
Look, anything that has Rudy in it is a good band.
That’s right. He’s the best, man. He’s the best. I’m telling you right now: Rudy Sarzo is the best rock bass player that ever lived. I can’t even tell you how much I love Rudy. I’d do anything for the guy. He’s a very self-controlled, smart man; been through it all, seen it all, very wise and his musicality is from another planet, which ultimately makes my musicality start coming from another planet. And that’s the most important thing in music to me is to be able to play outside the box and make people go, WOW. And if you can achieve that, then that’s the ultimate goal. And Rudy really brings that to my style of playing. It’s really fun, I got to say. I am lucky.
Why did Eric leave?
He left because we’re adults, you know, and being adults we have different types of responsibilities and people are in different stages of their life and Devil City Angels, logistically, just didn’t make sense to Eric. You know, he lives in Nashville, we’re out here in LA and Brandon has a lot more freedom to fly in and out to do work here and stuff like that, where Eric just doesn’t. But man, what a great bass player and a cool dude and we made a great record with him. A highlight of my life for sure.
Which one of the songs on the DCA record would you say had your biggest imprint on it’s creation?
Well, it’s hard to say because I really took every song, whether I was involved in the genesis of the song, cause a couple of songs were Brandon songs. Like “Boneyard” was a completely different song. He played it for us and I heard something completely different. Like, what if we played it like this? So “Boneyard” I could definitely say has a big Tracii stamp on it. However, I didn’t write it but I definitely took it in a way that is my personality as a guitar player. But stuff like that, the stuff with the harder edge, obviously, like “Bad Decisions” and “Numb,” stuff like that, is more of what people would expect I would do. Although, the more mellow stuff, like “No Angels” and stuff like that, I came up with those music parts. So it’s hard to say.
“Bad Decisions” is a great way to end the record.
Yeah, that’s a breaking shit kind of song, isn’t it (laughs). It’s great to hear everybody’s opinions of how the record flows and everything because that was one of the things that was discussed. Since most people don’t really make physical records anymore, how do you have a Side 1 and Side 2? On the CD, it’s just a track list. We discussed it would be a ten song album and the running order would be a certain way and it seems like we made a good decision in this case. People like the album from the front to the back and it all makes sense and goes by pretty quick and that’s what you want in an album. You don’t want to bore anybody.
I miss those days where you could take an album, something like Quadrophenia or Tommy or Pink Floyd, and just let it play one side after the other. I don’t have that kind of time anymore.
Oh man, I know. Nobody does. I miss those days and I have my record collection down in my room and I just stare at it for two minutes at a time when I’m down there. And I’m like, shit, I wish I could just sit here and get really stoned and listen to a bunch of records. But I just don’t have the time.
Which guitar did you use primarily during the recording of the DCA record?
When I look at all the guitars from beginning to end, I think that I might have used my 1959 Les Paul on some of it. I know I did on the solo for “All My People” but I think I pretty much used my Dean Signature guitar, which is basically a Telecaster, on the whole record; even on “Bad Decisions,” the heavier sounding stuff. Those are Dean Telecasters. And I have a few different ones. But what I really learned in the recording process was that these kinds of guitars kind of cut through the mix a lot better than the standard Les Paul. The Les Paul can sound heavier and thicker live but in the studio they have a tendency to be mushy. So the Telecaster really worked good on the Devil City Angels record because the songs aren’t as heavy, like a typical Hair Metal album you might say. They’re more clear and concise. So I used that and I played through a Blankenship amp, which is an exact replica of like a 1969 50 Watt Marshall. And I have a special mic. I have a mic made by a company down in South Africa called Tul and they make a specific guitar mic and I’ve been using that mic for my guitars for the last couple of years and they really make the guitars sound really clear within the mix. So the combination of the Tul mic and the Blankenship amp and the Telecaster sound really give the mixer a lot of control over the guitars. I’m really happy with the guitar sound.
What was your dream guitar when you were growing up?
A 1959 Les Paul (laughs). But however, that being said, I finally found a Les Paul that is the Les Paul I’ve wanted my whole life without knowing it. And it happened to be this guitar I’ve been playing for the last four or five months. It’s a 1983 Les Paul Custom, which makes it vintage, even though 1983 seems like yesterday (laughs). Originally it was a blue guitar and it sat in a smoke-filled apartment for like twenty years and it actually changed the color to green, a really beautiful dark green. It really has an old soul, it’s really comfortable, it stays in tune amazingly, it sounds ridiculous, just the greatest sounding guitar. And that’s the one I’ve been playing live. Now, based on that guitar, I just designed a new Flying V with Dean Guitars that will be my next Signature model that has a lot of the same qualities as this Les Paul. But it’s just crazy that it took me till I was forty-nine years old to find this guitar that I fell in love with. But I think any rock guitar player would love to have a 1959 Les Paul. That’s the Holy Grail.
Do you connect with a guitar as soon as you pick it up or does it take a little while to feel like it’s the one?
Well, THE one, like I said, it took me over forty years to find THE one. However, I’ve never met a guitar I didn’t like. Like, I can pick up just about anything, and you can go look at photographs from over the years and you’ll see I’ll play any fucking thing (laughs). But I got to say, my first Dean I had made, I really connected to. I loved that guitar like no tomorrow. Then this new Les Paul, and they’re completely separate kinds of guitar so it’s nice, as soon as he opened the case it was like, “What is that?” I fell in love with it and it’s crazy to finally have a guitar that I just can’t go without. I mean, I would lose my mind if I didn’t have that guitar.
Out of all the bands that you have been involved with, which one do you feel kind of got the short end of the stick, so to speak, attention-wise?
That’s hard to say. I mean, the fact that anybody goes to see you any time is getting the good end of the stick. I think I would have liked to have spent more time in Brides Of Destruction with Nikki. I thought that was a really explosive, over-the-top band that enabled me to really express the guitar player that I truly am, that bombastic, late-seventies, loud guitar player. And I was really able to do that and then also play Motley Crue tunes within that band, which was a dream come true. So I could have probably done that forever. That was just incredible.
But where I am at now though with Gunzo, purely from a musical point of view of expression, I’ve definitely arrived where I want to be musically. Devil City Angels, if we have commercial success, that would be amazing because the record is really good, I love the guys in the band, and that would be an amazing journey too. But it’s tough these days. Whether records with a rock band that is a bunch of guys from the eighties is actually going to sell, you know, is hard to say.
What did LA Guns have that no one else had during those Sunset Strip days?
We had a lot of sass, you know. We were equal parts Led Zeppelin, equal parts the Germs. We really had an attitude and the relentless ability to be snotty and just complacent about what was going on around us. It turned out true when I was in Guns N Roses and I just kind of followed through on the same attitude. It’s like, yeah, all the other bands are good but fuck those bands cause we’re doing this (laughs). We came out at a time where Hair Metal was the thing but we were a lot deeper musically. And also having this kind of hippie vs extreme punk rock mix was very unique at the time and you can really hear it in our albums from the first through the third and then on the later albums too where the diversity and the depth of the musicianship and the complexity of the arrangements within these kind of simple rock songs were very thoughtful and I spent a lot of time putting that stuff together at a really young age.
Being aware that it would have been easier just to write “Live Wire” type songs for LA Guns, I always thought it was more important to inject a little more blues, a little bit more classical music in there. LA Guns, I think the uniqueness of it is that we took a lot of chances that we probably shouldn’t have done from a focused point of view, coming out in a time where people just wanted to party and sing songs about getting laid. We had that approach but we also had a more seventies kind of thing about it too. Ultimately, that is what made it satisfying to the band. On the success level, we didn’t have the “Pour Some Sugar On Me” nine times in a row on an album so we were never going to have that kind of single success. But we all knew that too.
What about Kelly Nickels? He kind of disappeared.
He’s doing great. He’s married to a lady named Kelly and they live in upstate New York somewhere and he’s very happy.
No wanting to come back to rock & roll?
No (laughs). You know, one of the coolest things Kelly ever said to me was, we came off of Hollywood Vampires and we’d done our last arena show and then by the time our fourth record was done, we were going to have to go back to playing clubs. It was just the way it was. And he was like, “Nah, I’m not going to do that. That’s not rock star shit. That’s fucking begging for money.” I was like, wow, dude, you rule. And he bailed. He was like, and he always said from day one, “I just want to be a rock star. I want to play Madison Square Garden.” That was his attitude and he stuck true to his words and I respect him for that.
Who was the first real rock star you ever met?
In my opinion, the first real rock star I ever met was Kevin DuBrow. And I say Kevin DuBrow because there was a picture of Quiet Riot on the side of a club we had here called the Starwood in the seventies. And it was the Quiet Riot with Randy Rhoads. I was a really big Randy Rhoads fan in Ozzy. However, that Quiet Riot picture remained on the Starwood. So just doing my research about Randy and all that stuff when I was about seventeen, I found out who Quiet Riot was and I bought the records they had made at that time and I was in a music store on Sunset called Freedom Guitar and Kevin was in there one day. I was seventeen and I recognized him and I said, “Hey man, I know who you are” and blah blah blah and I thought he was a rock god. Locally, he was definitely a rock god but Quiet Riot wasn’t big yet. And he took the time to talk to me about music. He was with a really beautiful woman but yet he spoke to me about a half an hour/thirty-five minutes talking to me. He just really made me feel good about wanting to be a rock guitar player and what the reality of doing it was but you just got to do it. He really gave me a certain amount of confidence.
Then through all the years, LA Guns was on tour with Quiet Riot, like way later, in the late-nineties or something, and I told him, I go, “Hey Kevin, man, I met you at Freedom Guitars” and blah blah. I don’t remember what he said but he was like, “Oh my God, that’s amazing.” And I go, “Yeah, you always meant a lot to me.” The last conversation I really had with him was I had joined Quiet Riot for a minute in 2005, the end of 2005, and he took me out to dinner the night before we were going to rehearse together and we had this really, really great musical conversation for a couple of hours. I ended up not wanting to do the band cause it didn’t make sense for me to do it at the time but that was really the last time I had a conversation with him and it was like amazing that that man came into my life, and for whatever people’s judgments and opinions are, in my life he was a big, huge positive thing.
If anybody has, you’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly in the music business. What do you think was the worst time for you as a musician?
There’re so many variables in every day of your life, you know what I mean. I think there were times where we were selling millions of records where I didn’t have a fucking pot to piss in. And when I say that I don’t want anybody to go, “Oh, he was broke.” No, it wasn’t that. You conform to a lifestyle of spending money that you just feel required to do and I remember just arguing and fighting with people at the label or management and just trying to get things straight. I mean, I was so young. I was twenty-one when we got signed and all of a sudden it’s money coming, money, money, money, and you just don’t know what to do with it. And I wasn’t going to let anybody else handle my money. I was twenty-one. I was on Guitar Player magazine. I knew what I was doing. So advice did not exist in my life (laughs). I carried the attitude and the attitude was real. I was like, fuck you, yeah, fuck you.
Then it turned into fuck me, I’m broke. And I think it’s a really common story with everybody that plays rock & roll. You get to a point in your life where, “Wait, I spent all that money on me.” Then you wake up and you’re like, oh shit, I’ve got to figure this out. Cause you’ve got to stay alive somehow to do it. So my basic principle in life since I was probably twenty-seven years old was like, “Alright, make enough money so you can keep playing music.” That’s how it becomes. It’s not the other way. It’s not like, yeah, play music so you can make a bunch of money. It’s the other way. Obviously, this is what I have to do for the rest of my life. So, I’ve got to figure out how to hold on to all this money and make it work for me. So a hard lesson that I think most of the guys learned at some point.
But you’re happy now
I am one happy motherfucker (laughs). In September, Gunzo is in Europe; October, we’re in Mexico; in November, we’re somewhere; and December, South America. Right now the only thing that we’re looking at is a lot of touring, and of course this whole time I’m writing material and storing it up so when we get into that bigger rehearsal/writing situation there will be plenty of stuff to work on. Right now it’s about getting the word out about the Devil City Angels record and I really believe that if people get an opportunity to hear it they’re going to like it. So that kind of dictates next year. If people like the Devil City Angels record and people like the band, then we can go do something with it.
To you, what is rock & roll?
It’s sex. I mean, the bottom line, that’s what rock & roll really is and rock & roll is the soundtrack that’s supposed to make your sex life better. Cause you’ve got to go back to the beginning and when I think of rock & roll, I tend to lean toward more Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry and stuff like that, Elvis Presley, cause when you graduated up to Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin and things like that, yes, it’s rock & roll and there’s enough sex in there to get laid every night if you want to. However, the basic origins of rock & roll is just sex. It’s straight out a feeling of wanting to get nasty with somebody that you are really digging on that day. And that’s really what it is.
Live photographs by Vera Harder
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