Shooting Gallery was ready to take on the world the day we got together, but we were forced to wait more than a year for the green light from Mercury Records and their parent corporation, Polygram. In the spring of 91, we demoed 18 songs in an old warehouse in North Hollywood in only three days. Our music was raw, abrasive, ironic, out-of-control and over-the-top. We were sitting on a great album, but the suits didnt understand me or the band, so they passed on it, and told us to wait. Their lack of understanding and absence of taste was why I left the US and moved to England in 89, and now here I was, just two years later, faced with the same American corporate cluelessness again. When Andy Wood died and Mother Love Bone fell apart, they left a musical void that Shooting Gallery was ready to fill, a bridge between the excesses of mindless 80s metal and the tongue-in-cheek, intelligently experimental spirit of Grunge/Alternative. After all, we all had the right pedigree, with one foot firmly planted in punk, the other in classic hard rock, and all this a full nine months before the Seattle scene broke on MTV. The label tried to replace me, so I shot heroin, secretly afraid that they might be right. The band stood behind me while I got strung out and fell apart, and while Shooting Gallery was going stale, the world moved on. In early 92, I found myself in the recording booth of an expensive Hollywood studio, sweating and dope-sick, Shooting Gallerys gritty, desperate version of the pretty song that Andy wrote for Michael and Hanoi Rocks blasting in my headphones. Through the glass, I watched producer Ric Browde telling my beautiful young wife, Irene to get as far away from me as fast as she could, that I was a junkie, a loser, that I would take her down with me. While Ric talked, our engineer, Tom and I worked on take after take of Dont Never Leave Me until late into the night. With each take, I felt my career and my life slipping away. While Andys guitar begged with me, screamed at me, my fear of the future and regret for the past, all the hopelessness, despair and disappointment I was feeling went into every edgy, rasping word I sang. My lack of self confidence tripped me up, and I just kept falling. I simply closed my eyes, and waited to hit bottom. I never dreamed that I could fall for 17 years. When I finally reached the bottom, however, I didnt die. Instead, I was reinvented, resurrected, and, ultimately, restored. When I listen to the song now, it all sounds simply spectacular. By the way, please dont call it a cover, since I never even heard Michaels version until after we were finished recording. I learned the song from Andy as we sat on the grass together with an acoustic guitar, smoking cigarettes and drinking wine, outside of his hillside home in Sherman Oaks, CA. I wouldnt change a thing, even if I could. After all, things are what they are, just as they are, wouldnt you agree? https://youtube/watch?v=NRTVzBVYma4
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 19:02:17 +0000
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