Songoftheday 4/13/17 - She was always something special, diamond shining bright in the rain...
from the album Cocked & Loaded (1989)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #33 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 4
Today's song of the day comes from the hard rock/metal band L.A. Guns, who came together in Los Angeles in the mid 1980s. Guitarist and band namesake Tracii Guns started the group in 1983, then got together with Axl Rose, who at the time was in a band called Hollywood Rose with Izzy Stradlin. With Izzy and Axl joining with Guns and combining their names for Guns N' Roses. But still on the bar circuit and before any records came out Guns left the Guns N' Roses to themselves, and formed his own new reincarnation of L.A. Guns. Though lead singer Phil Black wrote a big chunk of their self-titled first album, it would be Phil Lewis that actually came on board by the time recording came. Although it didn't have any hit singles on it, the album did respectably, reaching the top quarter of the albums chart in the U.S. and going gold. The band's second release, Cocked And Loaded, came out in 1989, but it wasn't until a year later when the obligatory "power-ballad" from the record got to radio. "The Ballad Of Jayne", written by Tracii and the band about pin-up queen Jayne Mansfield, came at the right time between G N'R singles to give radio a fill-in slot for...
"The Ballad Of Jayne" became L.A. Guns' sole top-40 pop hit in June of 1990. The track also made it to #25 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart. Across the ocean in the UK, the song climbed to #53 on their singles chart as well.
A year later, the band would release their third effort, Hollywood Vampires. The lead single, "Kiss My Love Goodbye", which sounded like the blues-rock shuffle of Aerosmith, reached #16 on the Mainstream Rock chart, while the midtempo rhythm guitar jam "It's Over Now" got to #25, but the latter did manage to hit the pop Hot 100 at #62. Another track from the set, "Some Lie 4 Love", was a minor hit in England (#61). That same year Guns would join musicians from Ratt, Vixen, the Scorpions and Shark Island in the "supergroup" Contraband, which would have a top-20 rock hit with a cover of Mott the Hoople's "All The Way From Memphis". Tracii would return to L.A. Guns by 1995, and since the band's released a myriad of albums with a carousel of line-up changes, including a stint without Tracii Guns altogether and the dreaded two different incarnations of the band at one time. Their most recent studio album, without Guns but with Phil Lewis back on lead vocals, came in 2012.
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Here's a clip of the band live in 1989...
Finally, here's the band performing acoustically in concert...
Up tomorrow: Rebuttals are forbidden for this classy English lass.
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