(L.A.) Gun(s) Control
March 2nd, 2008 at 9:33 pm by Gerard
(Mother Mercy, above, include no members, original or otherwise, from LA Guns, Faster Pussycat, Odin, D’Molls, Pretty Boy Floyd, Foxx or Reinkus Tide.)
The LA Times’ Neal Shah on the sort of legal wrangling that sounds terribly familiar to anyone who ever purchased a Dead Kennedys ticket and ended up watching Brandon Cruz.
Steve Riley is a survivor. At 51, he still plays the drums for L.A. Guns, a biker-themed hair-metal band famous mostly for once featuring Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose. Riley and first mate Phil Lewis, who sang L.A. Guns’ only Top 40 hit, “The Ballad of Jayne,” toured Australia last fall before joining Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil for a show in St. Paul, Minn.
But Riley and Lewis are finding life on the exurban nightclub scene harder these days. Promoters want them to play for less. That’s because lately there have been not one but two L.A. Guns bands milking the nostalgia circuit — locked in a mutually destructive price war and consequently dueling, like a growing number of their shred-ready brethren, over the band’s name.
Guitarist Tracii Guns, who formed the band in 1982 and was the original “Guns” in Guns N’ Roses, says his crew is the real deal since it includes one of the band’s earliest singers, Paul Black. “Phil and Steve were not even the original members of the band,” Tracii wrote in an online post after declining to be interviewed for this article. “Now they . . . say that I am not the ‘real’ version of L.A. Guns?”
The standoff persists because Guns and Riley each own 50% of the L.A. Guns name. Riley discovered in the mid-’90s that their manager had never secured the rights to “L.A. Guns.” With the other founding members gone, Guns and Riley trademarked the name together.
Taime Downe faced a coup similar to that of L.A. Guns last year, but — unlike his friend Tracii Guns — he prevailed. Downe, who made a name for himself as the leader of late-’80s sleaze-rock group Faster Pussycat, sicced his lawyers on fellow founder Brent Muscat after the guitarist started touring as Faster Pussycat without him.
Without Downe’s knowledge, Muscat had trademarked the name in 2002, after it had lapsed, Downe says. Threatened with a lawsuit, Muscat settled out of court last summer. (He could not be reached for comment.)
Downe, 43, says he rejected an overture from Muscat to share the band’s name. “It’s my company. Someone from Starbucks is not going to go out and form another company called Starbucks.”
For perhaps the first and last time in his career, Downe has made a salient point. Perhaps Muscat should start a band called LA’s Best Guns?
