plinko said:
51. Hanoi Rocks
Most famous for - SADLY - their drummer being killed by Vince Neil, it's really too bad because they had a great story, played a lot of gigs all over the U.K and Scandinavia for a lot of years, cut some records and they had a lot of big names like Bob Ezrin and Ian Hunter behind them. They were working on taking over over the U.S... when tragedy struck.
Would they have done it? I don't know. From what I've heard of their catalog, I can't say whether or not they had the hits in them. Early on they were more New York Dolls than anything. In any case.. they sure seem like they must have been a lot of fun.
Microfactoid: Razzle, our dearly departed
Pantera passenger, was the only member of the band who wasn't Finnish. He was a fan of the band when they moved to London, pushed himself on them to be their drummer and won the job from a guy called Gyp Casino.
Taxi Driver
Don't You Ever Leave Me
Around the Bend a cover everyone should always ask for
My favorite band at age fifteen. Razzle (drums), Mike Monroe (vocals), Sam Yaffa (bass), Andy McCoy (guitar), Nasty Suicide (guitar).
They were Finnish, and had started out as the band Pelle Miljoona Oy. They were convinced to become an English speaking act, and tried, in their own way, to conquer the English-speaking world as rock stars, and they almost did. The English as a second language hampered their songwriting a touch. You could always tell something was a little off with their familiarity with the language. For most bands, a death knell. For Hanoi, it was merely a roadblock.
Led by the best looking lead singer in drag the planet had ever seen, a lethal guitarist in Andy McCoy (who would be sought out by metalheads everywhere, begging for him to teach them rhythm guitar), and a great bassist in Sam Yaffa (who would later go on to play in the reformed aforementioned New York Dolls) they played a mixture of punk, glam, trash, and pure rock n' roll in the Chuck Berry sense. McCoy would duckwalk on stage with his Les Paul, Yaffa would keep time with his upright cool, Monroe would jump around like a seven year-old girl at gymnastics class. Their live show was dizzying, a mixture of punk rockers and metalheads, generally united in their slam dancing to "Blitzkrieg Bop" and the Stooges covers that ended their sets.
Their first album,
Bangkok Shocks Saigon Shakes Hanoi Rocks was and is my favorite from them. There are no bad tracks on the album. If not for Gyp Casino's replacement with a drum machine (it seems -- either that or the production of the snare and bass are really lacking), it'd be darn near a perfect affair, joyously sloppy, frenetically played and urgent. From the opening strains of "
Tragedy," to the ludicrous ballad of "
Don't Never Leave Me" (there's that English), onto the ripping "
First Timer," and then through to "
Pretender," Hanoi rocked their way through a set, and almost instantly conquered England, where they became located.
After several albums were under their belt, they decided to conquer the States, and signed to CBS/Epic, moving from PVC/Jem, and they recorded an album entitled
Two Steps From The Move for their new label. There were promotional videos and singles undertaken, the aforementioned "Up Around The Bend" being one of them, the newly-crafted ballad "
Don't You Ever Leave Me," a re-worked version of the aforementioned "Don't Never Leave Me" another, and the band was set to tour the states, release their records, and generally live the dream. Sadly, it was never to be. Razzle got in a car with Vince Neil one night and never returned. A car wreck took his life, and Hanoi, crestfallen and unable to carry on as a band, disintegrated. You couldn't replace their drummer, they reasoned, and their careers and dreams vanished -- up in smoke.
So it's a band based in a bit of tragedy, as it were. But a lot of their stuff, if you can tolerate a bit of sloppiness in songwriting, is top notch and well worth the listen.
And their influence loomed large.
Motley Crüe, once leather-bound, copied their look, as did all the hair metal bands around. They had been the first since the Dolls to go full drag, really, and their look and influence was felt throughout the eighties and late eighties unlike any other band. If you look closely, Axl Rose has Mike Monroe's tattoos tatted on himself. Rose would re-release all of the hard-to-find PVC/Jem stuff on his vanity label later on as Guns N' Roses got big, and never denied Hanoi's huge influence on their sound and look. Slash even borrowed Razzle's signature top hat (yes, it was the departed Razzle whose hat Slash copied down to the clamshell pattern around it). I can personally remember trying to track down those PVC/Jem records in New York down in the Village and the bigger record stores on Broadway back in the day. Thanks to very patient parents, fifteen year-old rock scoured the stores in search of a recording, a bootleg, a T shirt. These guys were larger than life to him.
This is your intrepid cub reporter rockaction reporting for duty. Hope you enjoyed.
Album cover grossed me out and I was already a Lep guy
next?
