Category Archives: Unsung Heroes

A to Z of Making It, Music, Unsung Heroes

When Trixter Thought the Party Would Never End – Guitar World June 1991

June 1991.  

Hair spray was a performance enhancing drug, MTV still played music, and four kids from Paramus, New Jersey had just hacked the suburban‑teen lottery.

Trixter weren’t supposed to “make it.” They were mall rats from a shopping town, grinding 200 shows a year, aiming no higher than the Meadowlands and maybe, if the gods were drunk, Madison Square Garden. Then the planets lined up: a grimy New York club called The Sanctuary, a label guy in the room, a contract on the table a week later, and suddenly they’re on MTV every hour pretending this is all just happening to them. 

That’s the moment frozen in this Guitar World interview: the exact second where the rollercoaster is still climbing and nobody hears the chain starting to rattle.

On the surface, it reads like standard early-’90s rock-mag candy.

Origin myth.

Garage rehearsals.

High-school sleep deprivation.

Parents pretending they’re annoyed but secretly proud.

Then the montage: endless club gigs, the one basement venue that matters, the industry guy who changes everything. Numbers follow, sales, tour slots, rotation, framed as disbelief.

And the quote. The wall-poster quote.

“All the fame and fortune… is great, but we’re just some dudes from a shopping town in New Jersey who play music.”

That line isn’t accidental. It’s the formula.

The band must be aspirational and accessible at the same time. Superheroes who still feel like kids from homeroom. Big enough to worship. Small enough to imagine becoming.

That’s the business model.

So is the GW interview a PR piece?

Of course it is. This is Guitar World, 1991. The structure is pure promo:

Build the myth (kids + garages + malls + mishaps).

Flex the numbers (MTV, tour slots, sales).

Humanize the product (parents, girlfriends, pizza on the bus).

End with some variation of, “We’re just grateful to be here, man.”

But buried under the sugar, Steve Brown keeps slipping you protein.

He admits they designed themselves as a teen band after reading about Def Leppard. He talks about carefully arranging guitar parts, thinking in terms of Desmond Child‑style songcraft instead of just riff‑vomiting. He’s obsessed with Van Halen’s first record and wants to capture that “as live as possible” energy on a big‑budget debut. He knows MTV rotation is a once‑in‑a‑lifetime weather pattern and they’re trying to build as many houses as possible before the storm passes.

That’s not just PR. That’s a 20‑year‑old already thinking like a lifer.

The tragic part is that no one knows the meteor is already in the air. Grunge is loading in at the other end of the decade while he’s still talking about opening for Poison. Everyone in the piece sounds certain they’ve cracked the code forever, when in reality they’ve rented a very small window in a very specific era.

It’s not deep journalism, but it accidentally becomes deep nostalgia: a time capsule of what it feels like to be young, ascending, and completely wrong about how long the ascent lasts.

So what happened when the lights finally came up?

The short version: the wave crested, then physics did what physics always does.

Trixter rode that first record hard. Tours, videos, magazine covers, the full package. Then the wheel turned. The second album didn’t hit the same, the climate shifted, radio and MTV moved on. The band dissolved in the mid‑’90s, another casualty of a genre that went from omnipresent to punchline in about as much time as it takes hair spray to dry.

Steve Brown didn’t vanish into the suburbs to sell insurance and tell bar stories about “that one time on tour.” He kept going. Other bands. Side projects. Session work. Cover gigs. Tribute projects. Reunion tours. New Trixter records. The guy turned being “that dude from Trixter” into a 30‑plus‑year career by refusing to treat the early ’90s as the peak.

This is what nobody tells kids in bands: the story doesn’t end when your video falls out of rotation. It keeps going, just on smaller stages with fewer free drinks and way more self‑awareness. It stops being about winning the rock‑star lottery and starts being about whether you actually like the work enough to do it without confetti cannons.

Steve clearly does.

So why did I bother digging through a yellowing Guitar World piece in 2026?

Because it’s the perfect diagram of how the machine used to work and, honestly, still does, just with different haircuts and platforms.

You can see:

The fantasy: four normal kids “accidentally” becoming rock stars.

The marketing: humble‑brag quotes, carefully curated struggle, the illusion that this is reproducible.

The truth leaking out the sides: obsessive grind, calculated image choices, a main songwriter already thinking like a producer.

It’s easy to mock bands like Trixter from the safe distance of hindsight. The clothes, the lyrics, the Aqua Net. But when you strip away the clichés, what’s left is familiar: talented kids trying to turn obsession into a life, trapped inside a trend they don’t control.

The interview captures the moment right before they discover a hard rule the industry never prints in glossy pull‑quotes:

You are not your chart position.  

You are not your MTV slot.  

You are what you keep doing after the world stops caring.

In 1991, Trixter thought the party would last forever.  

In 2026, Steve Brown is still playing guitar for a living.

Turns out that’s the better ending anyway.

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A to Z of Making It, Music, My Stories, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit, Unsung Heroes

Always a Few Years Too Late: Why Australian Hard Rock Albums Missed Their Moment

Talent was never the problem. Songs weren’t the problem. Crowds weren’t the problem. Australia produced world-class live acts with world-class songs, often before the rest of the world caught on.

But.

The albums arrived late because everything around the music moved slower, sideways, or backwards.

This wasn’t coincidence. It was systemic.

Australia didn’t just sit far from the US and UK/Europe, it existed in a different time loop.

By the late ’80s, LA scenes moved in months. UK trends turned over in seasons. And Australia lagged by years.

Not because musicians were behind, but because infrastructure was.

Touring overseas required money bands didn’t have.

Labels wanted proof that bands had an audience before investment. Proof required exposure. Exposure required travel.

That circular logic delayed everything. By the time an Australian band secured a deal, the sound they pioneered locally had often already peaked internationally.

When albums finally arrived, they sounded right, just not right now.

If geography slowed bands down, management actively sabotaged them.

The Australian industry of the era was full of managers with control clauses but no leverage. Contracts restricted bands from signing deals independently.

Bands routinely received offers they couldn’t legally accept.

Deals were turned down “to get a better one.” Momentum was paused “to build hype.”

Albums were delayed “until the timing was right.”

The timing never was.

Candy Harlots are not an outlier here, they are a case study. A Virgin Records deal offered early, declined by management, then re-offered years later after the band had already fractured. Multiply that story across dozens of acts and you start seeing a pattern, not bad luck.

BB Steal finally released their Def Leppard influenced record “On The Edge” in 1992, however the first single of the album came out in 1988.

Roxus released their excellent melodic rock album “Nightstreet” in 1991, and like BB Steal, they had a few years between the first single (1989) and the album release.

But.

Australian hard rock thrived live.

That was both its strength and its trap.

Venues were packed. Residencies mattered. Reputations were earned face-to-face.

Bands became mythical locally without leaving physical evidence behind.

But labels don’t sign myths, they sign masters.

Many bands, gigged relentlessly without recording. Rewrote sets constantly instead of committing songs. Waited for “the real album” moment.

By the time that moment arrived, line-ups had changed, scenes had shifted, or the industry had moved on.

Albums became memorials instead of weapons.

Delay kills cohesion.

The longer an album takes to materialize, the more likely, members age out of the lifestyle, internal politics harden, financial strain builds resentment and key writers leave before the payoff.

Australian bands often lost founding members before recording debut albums.

Not because of ego, but because people don’t wait forever.

When albums finally arrived, they were frequently recorded by survivor line-ups, not the ones that created the original sound. That created a strange historical dislocation: the record didn’t fully reflect the band people fell in love with.

Australian mainstream media didn’t discover hard rock, it reacted to it.

By the time a band reached Triple M rotation or national press coverage or television exposure …the scene had already peaked locally.

Specialty radio (like 2RRR’s Metal Show) carried enormous cultural weight, but limited commercial reach. Those DJs broke bands, but couldn’t break markets.

So albums were greenlit after proof, not during ignition.

That delay mattered.

The final nail wasn’t grunge, it was speed.

Between 1989 and 1992, Glam fragmented and Alternative exploded and the Labels pivoted instantly.

Australian albums arriving in 1991–1993 weren’t bad, they were misaligned. They sounded like records that should have come out in 1989.

And many of them should have.

But systems don’t reward “should have.” They reward timing.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Australia still struggles with this. It’s better in the streaming era but it’s still a problem.

Different genres. Same mechanics.

Local scenes ignite.

Momentum builds.

Gatekeepers (the ones that still exist) hesitate.

By the time support arrives, the moment has shifted.

The lesson isn’t “work harder.” It’s compress the timeline.

Scenes don’t wait. Audiences don’t wait. History doesn’t wait.

An album arriving late doesn’t mean it failed. It means it arrived as evidence, not influence.

That’s why records like “Five Wicked Ways” still hold up. They weren’t chasing trends, they were documenting one that had already happened. That gives them a strange durability, even if it robbed them of impact at the time.

Australian hard rock didn’t miss because it lacked vision.

It missed because the system was built to move after the fire, not during it.

And by the time the album hit the shelves, the fire had already moved on.

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Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Music, Unsung Heroes

Megadeth

The album didn’t just arrive, it was staged.

Announced in August 2025 with Vic Rattlehead literally on fire, rolled out through four singles across four months, and framed as the final Megadeth statement.

Not a late-career album. A closing argument. The farewell tour wasn’t an afterthought; it was embedded in the release plan.

Production began quietly in late 2024 with producer Chris Rakestraw, largely remote at first. Mustaine and guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari traded ideas while the room was empty. This will be the only Megadeth studio album Mäntysaari will ever appear on, which gives his playing a different gravity, it’s not contribution, it’s inscription.

Mäntysaari arrives with a pedigree that matters more than hype: classically trained, composition-literate, and forged in the Scandinavian metal ecosystem where precision, melody, and structure are non-negotiable.

Best known for his work in Wintersun, he comes from a lineage that treats guitar not just as a weapon but as an architectural tool, stacked harmonies, modal phrasing, neoclassical discipline, and an almost orchestral sense of movement. You can hear influences ranging from European power metal and melodic death metal to classical and film-score logic, where riffs aren’t just aggressive but directional.

As a co-writer with Mustaine, Mäntysaari doesn’t challenge Megadeth’s DNA; he refracts it. The result is a distinctly Euro-metal contour, tighter harmonic logic, cleaner thematic development, and a sense of inevitability baked into the riffs, less street brawl, more war plan.

His presence subtly modernizes the band without diluting it, giving these songs a colder, more surgical feel that contrasts with Mustaine’s snarling, American thrash instincts. It’s not a takeover; it’s an overlay. And because this is his only Megadeth studio document, that influence feels permanent, etched, not experimented with.

By June 2025, vocals were being tracked. By January 2026, the album was positioned as history.

Tipping Point

This is the mission statement.

Flat-out thrash. No apology. No warm-up. The title is a tell, this isn’t about balance, it’s about inevitability. Musically, it does exactly what a “final album” lead single must do: reassure the base. “Yes, we can still do this. Yes, the hands still work.”

What’s more revealing is what it doesn’t do. No experimentation. No curveballs.

Mustaine knows the first impression defines the entire conversation.

And it works.

“Today I may bleed, but tonight you will die”

Patience weaponized.

“You buried the truth under layers of lies”

Self-inflicted decay. The deeper the stack, the more violent the reckoning.

“Push me, I push you back”

Symmetry established. You set the terms; I enforce them.

“Hiding your secrets out in plain sight”

Collective denial. The secret survives not by concealment, but tolerance.

And then the outro riff lands like a body blow.

“You won’t define me, you’ll never find me”

Refusal of containment. To define is to reduce. To find is to fix. Autonomy is reclaimed through disappearance.

The tipping point isn’t rage. It’s clarity.

I Don’t Care

Three minutes. Punk bones. No fat.

This reconnects Megadeth with the sneer that predates thrash orthodoxy. It’s not refined, and it’s not trying to be. That’s the point. Precision was never the whole story; attitude was.

Releasing this as the second single is a message: don’t expect reverence. This isn’t a victory lap. It’s a shrug with distortion.

“I don’t care what the headline said”

A rejection of outsourced reality. Headlines collapse complexity into verdicts built for attention, not truth.

“You know a rat never learns”

Not an insult, but pattern recognition. Repetition without reflection. Once behavior stabilizes, hope of reform disappears. Expectation shifts from change to containment.

Hey, God?!

Classic Mustaine: theology as confrontation, grievance elevated to cosmic scale. Musically solid, structurally familiar.

“The years are passing by like days”

Time compression, not aging. When days lose distinction, life accelerates.

The fear isn’t death, it’s unused life.

And make sure you stick around for the guitar solos.

Let There Be Shred

The most Megadeth song here, and the most ridiculous. Which is why it works.

Creation myth rewritten as guitar doctrine. No irony. No wink. Just total commitment. Mustaine dares you to flinch first.

“On the day I was born, a guitar in my hands”

Identity fused to function. Not “I chose this”, this chose me. Careerism disappears.

What’s left is vocation.

“Destroying pretenders, only ashes remains”

Authenticity under pressure.

Puppet Parade

The curveball.

Mid-tempo. Melodic. Built for repeat listens. The kind of song late-’90s Megadeth fans pretend never happened, and yet it’s arguably the best-written track here.

The irony is precise: the song about manipulation is the most controlled thing on the record. Hooks are intentional. Dynamics are measured. Accessibility was never incompetence; it was choice.

“I punch your clock, I play a role”

Labor as submission. Performance without belief. Effort is real; meaning is outsourced.

“Where the lies are truth / And our lives are trade”

The moral core. Reality assigned, not discovered. People reduced from ends to inputs. Exploitation normalized through redefinition.

Once that switch flips, marching doesn’t need enforcement. It’s automatic.

Another Bad Day

Functional. Efficient. Disposable.

Nothing offensive. Nothing essential.

“My life’s a mess, but I call it mine”

Ownership without redemption. No fixing. No reframing. Just authorship claimed.

“Every scar is a line I drew”

Pain turned into power. Not innocence, responsibility. The quiet weight that follows.

Made to Kill

Thrash returns, lean and calibrated.

This is Megadeth on autopilot, but it’s a well-tuned autopilot.

Mäntysaari proves he understands the internal math of Megadeth riffs. You don’t remember it for the message. You remember it because it moves.

“Taught to pray, yet made to kill”

Contradiction as training. Belief installed alongside violence. Prayer as insulation, not restraint.

“Truth is sold in streaming lies”

Propaganda as infrastructure. Truth isn’t erased, it’s monetized and drowned in volume until disbelief feels pointless.

What survives isn’t ignorance.

It’s exhaustion.

Obey the Call

Shadowy control. Puppetmasters. Faceless systems. A reflection of Mustaine’s conspiratorial gravity.

“It feeds on faith, but it bleeds gasoline”

Belief exploited as fuel. Devotion weaponized. The cost is always physical.

“And the pawns will rise / And empires fall”

Not heroics, structure. Collapse seeded by control itself.

I Am War

Shorter. Sharper. More effective.

Less sermon, more declaration. It knows exactly how much energy it has, and spends it carefully.

“To know you, I become you”

Empathy weaponized.

Understanding as assimilation.

Victory through total cognitive immersion.

“I am war, I am hurt and pain”

Not metaphor, identity. War isn’t something enacted; it’s embodied.

No separation between actor and action.

The Last Note

Five and a half minutes of unresolved intent.

Sentiment or defiance?

Curtain call or middle finger?

It wants both and never fully chooses. Which is fitting. Mustaine has never mastered endings.

“One more winding road that I won’t come back”

Finality without drama. Motion without return. Acceptance, not mourning.

“Each song has got beneath my skin”

Creation as accumulation. Art doesn’t cleanse, it erodes and stays.

“I can’t outrun the spinning hands of time”

Aging as pursuit. Speed once solved everything. Now it doesn’t.

“They gave me gold, they gave me a name”

Recognition as transaction.

Success always arrives with a bill.

Ride the Lightning (Metallica cover)

Not an encore, a provocation.

Ending the final album by revisiting the band that expelled you isn’t nostalgia. It’s wound management. The performance is heavier, cleaner, but its purpose isn’t musical.

It’s psychological.

“There’s someone else controlling me”

Agency surrendered to process. Terror born not from chaos, but automation.

“Consciousness, my only friend”

Everything external stripped away. Awareness remains, forced to witness its own erasure.

The cruelty isn’t death.

Its presence during death.

The “Ride the Lightning” cover didn’t drift into the middle, it drew a line. Based on a sample of X comments, fans either hear a powerful legacy statement or an unnecessary retread. The split is clean: some hear reverence and authority, others hear dilution and loss of danger, with a small group stuck in polite indifference.

For me, it works. The slightly increased tempo injects urgency without rewriting history, and the performance understands the assignment: pay homage, don’t vandalize the blueprint. It respects the original’s gravity while letting Megadeth’s muscle show through.

This isn’t really about quality. It’s about philosophy.

Do you want a cover to preserve the fire, or to replace it?

To sum it all up, it’s a controlled burn, a managed farewell that captures exactly what Megadeth has always been: brilliant, stubborn, technically elite, emotionally unresolved, and incapable of clean exits.

If this really is the end, it ends the only way it could.

Not with peace. With insistence.

And that’s the most honest thing Megadeth could have done.

P.S. i just listened to the bonus tracks “Bloodlust” and “Nobody’s Hero” on YouTube. Wow. But they will be for another post.

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A to Z of Making It, Influenced, Music, Unsung Heroes

We Sacrificed Our Lives for Rock and Roll (Jake E. Lee Edition)

Jake E. Lee should’ve been a household name.

He wrote the riffs that kept Ozzy Osbourne relevant in the mid-’80s, carved lightning out of mahogany, and made the guitar sing like a wounded animal trying to escape the zoo. Then he was gone.

Fired.

Forgotten.

No explanation. No headlines. Just silence.

And yet, he never stopped playing.
Because the lifers never do.

We came from that generation that thought music could save us. We weren’t trying to become content creators, we were trying to become gods. The Beatles had turned black-and-white lives into Technicolor, and by the time Sabbath, Zeppelin and Van Halen hit, we wanted to plug in and join the revolution.

Our parents told us to get degrees. We bought Marshalls instead.
They told us to settle down. We chose distortion.

Back then, the sound wasn’t an accessory, it was oxygen. Every riff was a rebellion, every rehearsal a prayer. We learned how to solder cables before we learned how to pay bills. We thought tone could change the world.

Jake understood that.

He was too good for compromise, too strange for the machine. When he left the limelight, everyone thought he’d vanished, but he’d just retreated to the desert, still playing, still writing, still chasing the ghost of the perfect note.

After Ozzy, Jake E. Lee should have ruled the world. He formed Badlands, and for a moment, it felt like redemption.

It wasn’t corporate. It wasn’t polished. It was alive, beautiful, human.

Ray Gillen could sing like the gods were tearing open the sky. Jake’s tone was molten iron, all feel, no filter. They had the songs, the chemistry, the hunger.

And then it imploded. Not because of drugs, or label politics, or creative differences, although they did have disagreements which carried over into the live show, but because real life crashed the party.

Those albums will never be reissued on CD. The reasons are complicated, contested, and not mine to litigate, but the silence around them is deliberate.

Atlantic Records buried the catalog. The albums vanished from stores, from streaming, from history. A digital scar where greatness once lived.

And that’s the ruinous truth about rock and roll: it’s not built to last. It’s built to burn.

For every band that becomes immortal, a hundred vanish not because they weren’t good enough, but because they flew too close to something human, desire, tragedy, ego, love, disease.

We talk about “legacy” like it’s something we can engineer. But the universe doesn’t care how good your solo is. There are no guarantees. No justice. No moral equilibrium that balances out the riffs.

Sometimes the guy who gave his life to the craft ends up selling insurance. Sometimes the band that could’ve changed everything gets wiped from the archives because life doesn’t want to play fair.

But maybe that’s the point.

Maybe rock and roll was never about permanence, maybe it was about risk. The willingness to live without a safety net. The courage to make something beautiful in a world that erases beauty every day.

Jake E. Lee is still out there, still playing, still alive, still searching for a sound no one can algorithmically predict. Badlands may be gone, but that’s what makes them holy. You can’t stream them, you can only remember them, or, if you were lucky enough, you can feel the ghost of their frequencies vibrating somewhere under your ribs. Like YouTube. Which has basically the history of music on its side.

So yeah, the world forgot. The label buried the tapes. But the lifers remember. Because some of us didn’t just listen to the music. We were the music.

We didn’t lose the dream.
We lived it, scars, silence, and all.

Meanwhile, the world changed.
MTV collapsed. Algorithms replaced A&R men. Guitar solos went out of fashion. The kids traded fretboards for touchscreens. And the rest of us, the ones who built our lives around the volume knob, we watched the dream shrink until it fit in a playlist.

But here’s the thing: the fire never dies.

A few solo albums here and there and Jake came back decades later with Red Dragon Cartel, not to reclaim a throne, but to prove the riff still mattered. It wasn’t nostalgia; it was a declaration of faith. Every note said, I’m still here. I never stopped believing in the noise.

And that’s us too, the forgotten believers. We rent apartments instead of owning homes. We have tinnitus instead of retirement plans. We can’t remember passwords, but we can tell you the exact pickup configuration Randy Rhoads used on “Crazy Train.”

We’re not failures. We’re pilgrims who never found the promised land but kept walking anyway.

When Jake bends a note, it’s not just music, it’s defiance. It’s the sound of every dreamer who refused to clock in, every musician who still hauls a 4×12 cab into a bar for gas money and applause from thirty people who actually listen.

We sacrificed our lives for rock and roll. And if you have to ask why, you’ll never understand.

Because the show, that fleeting, electric communion between the amp and the crowd, that was the home we were looking for all along.
And when the lights go down and the first chord hits, everything that never worked out suddenly makes sense.

We didn’t miss out on life. We lived it louder.

The tragedy of Badlands isn’t ancient history, it’s prophecy. Every artist today lives on the same knife’s edge. One bad headline, one algorithmic shadow-ban, one rumor whispered into the right inbox, and you’re erased. Your catalog disappears, your legacy gets rewritten by people who never even heard your work. We don’t burn on stage anymore; we burn in silence, beneath the scroll.

But here’s what separates the lifers from the tourists: the lifers keep playing.

They know the system’s rigged. They know the world rewards the shallow and forgets the sincere. And they do it anyway.

Because somewhere inside the noise, the heartbreak, the lost royalties, there’s still that kid who picked up a guitar and thought sound could save the world.

That’s who Jake E. Lee still is. That’s who we are. We keep writing riffs in an era that doesn’t believe in permanence, because the truth was never meant to be preserved, only felt.

In a digital wasteland of content and convenience, the act of creation itself is rebellion.

And rebellion, like rock and roll, doesn’t die, it just goes underground and waits for the faithful to find it again.

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Influenced, Music, My Stories, Unsung Heroes

Ace Frehley: The Solos in the Shadows

I got into Kiss in the ’80s, but the poster on my wall was from the Destroyer era, four painted faces staring down from a cosmic skyline. Courtesy of my older brothers.

The songs I blasted, “Lick It Up,” “I Love It Loud,” “Tears Are Falling,” “Crazy Nights,” “Heaven’s On Fire,” “War Machine,” “I Still Love You,” “Creatures of the Night,” and my two obsessions, “Exciter” and “I’ve Had Enough”, didn’t feature Ace Frehley. But in my head, he was there. The Spaceman. Because that’s who I saw every morning when I woke up.

Now he’s gone.

Seventy-four years old. A fall. A brain bleed.

Just like that, the Spaceman fell back to Earth.

It’s an ending that feels both absurd and poetic. A man who claimed to be from another planet, who made his Les Paul sound like a supernova, taken down by gravity, the most human force of all.

Kiss fans and casual listeners know the iconic solos, “Love Gun”, “Black Diamond”, “Deuce” and “Parasite”.

Those solos burn. They’re anthemic, unmistakable, tattooed across rock history.

But this week, I pressed play on “Calling Dr. Love” and “Makin’ Love” from “Rock and Roll Over”.

And there it was. That tone. That feel.

You can’t copy it. You can’t dial it in.

That slightly behind-the-beat phrasing, that lazy drag, that human imperfection that somehow makes the whole band sound tighter.

“Calling Dr. Love”

The solo doesn’t rush in. It waits.
That tiny pause before he hits the first note, it’s everything. The inhale before the punchline.

When it lands, it doesn’t boast; it speaks.

Ace builds the solo like a conversation with the riff, a bend that teases, a double stop that grins, a tone that growls like an idling Harley. There’s humor in it. Swagger. Humanity.

That’s the secret: Ace could make the guitar sound alive.

“Makin’ Love”

Buried near the end of the album, it’s almost an afterthought in the catalog. But play it now, loud, and you’ll hear Ace at full confidence.

The riff is heavy, chugging, primal.
Then the solo rips in, a sharp exhale of defiance. But again, it’s not speed. It’s phrasing. Every line feels deliberate, like he’s carving the air.

He slides between melody and menace, blues phrasing inside a rock cage. The bends ache. The sustain hums. There’s sex in it, sure, but also frustration, humor, and that same smirk he wore behind the makeup.

It’s one of those solos you don’t analyze, you feel. And when it’s over, you hit repeat, not to learn it, but to understand it.

We talk about “tone chasing” like it’s a gear problem, pickups, tubes, pedals, wood. Ace proved it’s a personality problem.

Your tone is your truth.

Your personality. Your attitude. You can’t fake it.

Go back now. Start with “Calling Dr. Love”. Listen like it’s the first time.
Then put on “Makin’ Love”.

Listen closer.

Find the moments where he wasn’t trying to prove anything. That’s where the soul is. That’s where the magic hides.

Ace Frehley didn’t invent rock guitar. He humanized it.

He made it fun again. Dangerous again. Imperfect again. He made every fourteen-year-old kid believe they could plug in and matter.

That’s the legacy. Not the makeup. Not the pyrotechnics.

It’s that moment when your fingers hit the strings and you realize: you don’t need to sound perfect, you just need to sound like yourself.

Ace did.

Every single time.

And now, somewhere out there, the Spaceman keeps playing, still behind the beat, still in tune with the universe.

P.S.
While this piece has a Kiss edge, Ace’s solo career deserves its own orbit.

Start with “Rip It Out” from his 1978 solo album, the definition of controlled chaos.

Then jump to “Into the Night” from Frehley’s Comet (1987). Written by Russ Ballard, yes, but Ace owns it, that melodic, bluesy solo lifts the whole track skyward.

Different decade, same truth: Ace’s guitar didn’t imitate emotion. It was emotion.

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A to Z of Making It, Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Influenced, Music, My Stories, Unsung Heroes

X Out – Extreme

When “Six” came out from Extreme in 2023, I did what we all do. I pressed play, skimmed the album, hit “like” on the tracks that grabbed me. Instant dopamine. Songs that felt like me, right now.

“X Out” didn’t make the cut.

Didn’t hate it, just didn’t hit.

Fast forward almost two years. The video drops. I click. And suddenly I’m sitting there, head nodding, totally into it. The same song I shrugged off is now on repeat.

So what happened?

This is the funny thing about music: sometimes it doesn’t connect the first time. Or the tenth. And then one day, in some random moment, it hits you like a freight train.

Maybe it’s mood. Maybe it’s life. Maybe it’s just time.

Or maybe, in this case, it’s the video.

Because visuals change everything. You see the band sweating it out, the editing, the vibe, the narrative. The song suddenly has a face, a story. And once that meaning slides into place, the music feels different. What was just sound is now an experience.

There’s probably a fancy psychological term for this. I googled my description and got a few terms which mean nothing to me like; “Mere exposure effect.” “Priming.” “Contextual reappraisal.” Whatever. To me, it’s just proof that taste is alive. It shifts. It evolves.

The truth is: I wasn’t ready for the song before. And now I am.

And that’s why I love when this happens. Because it keeps music from being disposable. Because it means an album isn’t done after the first spin.

Sometimes the tracks I skip become the ones that I like later.

So yeah, two years later, I’m in on “X Out.” All because of a video.

Check it out.

Makes me wonder: how many other songs did I dismiss too early? 

How many are just sitting there, waiting for me to finally catch up?

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A to Z of Making It, Copyright, Music, Unsung Heroes

Diane Warren — The Relentless Hook Machine

I finally got around to that old Bob Lefsetz podcast with Diane Warren. December 13, 2017. Been sitting in my “listen later” pile for years. That’s how it goes, too much to do, too many songs, too many distractions.

But Warren… she’s different.

If you grew up in the ’80s, you already know her, even if you don’t think you know her. Flip through your record collection, there’s probably a Warren song hiding in there. For me, it was everywhere.

Mannequin. “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” by Starship. Warren.

Kiss “Turn On the Night.” Warren. Their “biggest” song, “You Make Me Rock Hard” had a Warren co-write.

Heart “Who Will You Run To,” “I Didn’t Want To Need You.” Warren.

Cheap Trick’s “Ghost Town.” Bon Jovi’s “Wild Is the Wind.” Alice Cooper’s “Bed of Nails.” Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Michael Bolton, Taylor Dayne, Cyndi Lauper, Bad English. Hell, even Ratt. One of my favourite Ratt songs, “Givin Yourself Away” was co-written by Warren.

I thought I knew her range until I stumbled on “Lonely Beat of My Heart” on Steve Lukather’s “Lukather” album. Warren.

Then Vixen. Jimmy Barnes. Richie Sambora. And just when you think she’s all power ballads and mainstream rock, she shows up on Disturbed’s “Evolution” with a bonus track called “Uninvited Guest.”

And that’s just from my shelves, albums I physically own, mostly spanning ’85–’92. A fraction of the real story.

Her publishing company is called “Real Songs”. She wanted “Warren Peace”, but the name was already taken. Of course she owns the building, upgrades the studios, controls her environment. That’s what obsession looks like, build the nest so you can never be kicked out.

The obsession started early. Kicked out of school. Two weeks in juvie. A father who saw the fire, bought her a guitar, then a Martin, then built her a shed to write in. No Plan B. Just the work.

She broke in at 23 writing for Laura Branigan. “Rhythm of the Night” came soon after. But her first publishing deal was a nightmare, a five-year trap she bailed on early. Got sued. Couldn’t work for 12 months while the lawyers circled. She ended it herself by calling her ex-boss directly, settling without letting the attorneys siphon off the payout. That move, walking away from a bad deal, was the prelude to her starting “Real Songs”.

Even now, she hustles. She’ll pick up the phone and pitch a song cold. “No pressure, just listen.” Doesn’t care if they say no. Because if they say yes, she’s got another track in the bloodstream.

Her process is simple: show up, work. A song a week. She finishes the ones she loves, abandons the ones she doesn’t. Loves writing solo. Most of the time it’s love songs, ironic, since she’s never been in love.

Her biggest movie tie-in? “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” for “Armageddon”, thanks to a friend connected to Aerosmith. That’s how the real deals happen, through relationships, not résumés.

On streaming, she thinks it’s killed songwriter incomes. I don’t fully buy it, Ryan Tedder sold part of his catalog for $200 million, and he’s a post-Napster success story. But Warren’s point is valid: it’s harder now for a new songwriter to make bank without wearing the artist hat too.

Forty-plus years, still relevant, still writing, still obsessed.

That’s the thing about Diane Warren, she’s not the artist, not the star on the stage. But she’s the ghost in the machine. The pen behind the chorus you’ve been humming for decades. The one who refuses to stop.

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Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Influenced, Music, My Stories, Unsung Heroes

Twilight Cruiser

The self-titled debut from Kingdom Come took the charts by storm in 1988. “In Your Face” broke up the band a year later. A new all German version of Kingdom Come put out the underrated “Hands Of Time” in 1991, the last album on their Polydor contract. It did nothing and they lost their U.S deal, but with a proviso that no other U.S label could sign them unless Polydor allowed them to.

And Lenny Wolf refused to stop.

“Bad Image” came in 1993, and then “Twilight Cruiser” dropped in 1995.

Both albums are forgotten. But they shouldn’t be. While grunge and industrial metal took over the airwaves, melodic blues based rock was still alive and well.

Lyrically, “Twilight Cruiser” deals with isolation and loneliness. A metaphor for someone who wanders through life aimlessly, searching for meaning and purpose.

“I can hear the silence in the dark”

This isn’t just synesthesia. It’s not poetry for its own sake. This is sensing the void. Not hearing nothingness, but hearing silence as presence, not absence. Like when you’re up at 2AM, and the world’s asleep, but your mind’s loud. This line doesn’t describe loneliness. It names it, in that way only people who have lived through it understand.

The kind of quiet you only recognize after the show’s over, after the crowd is gone, and you’re left with yourself and your ringing ears. That moment where you realize nobody is coming to save you, and that’s liberating as hell.

“Closing in the distance to my heart”

What was once out there, distant, abstract, is getting personal. The silence, the unknown, the ‘thing’ we fear or yearn for… it’s now at your chest, tapping your sternum. The detachment is gone. It’s getting intimate.

This could be grief. It could be love. It could be the epiphany that comes only after you’ve burned all the other options to the ground.

“Now and then a quick glance at the stars / Coming of a deep trance, peace at large”

Here’s the shift. A quick look up, a glance at something eternal, pulls you from your hypnotic state. You’re no longer in autopilot. You wake. You feel. It’s the spiritual equivalent of ripping your VR headset off and realizing you’re in a galaxy.

This is what rock and roll used to do before algorithms turned it into background noise. It used to wake you up.

The peace doesn’t come from control, it comes from surrender. You stop needing answers and start loving the questions.

“Like a soothing shelter over me / I have come to love her mystery”

Now she arrives. But she’s not a person. Not quite. She’s the Night, the Muse, the Unknown.

You used to fear the dark. Now it’s your cloak.

What once confused you now holds you, not because it explains itself, but because it lets you dissolve into it.

You’re no longer demanding clarity. You’re falling in love with chaos.

“Making me surrender, letting go / Guiding me so tender, very slow”

You’re not driving anymore. The wheel’s gone. Control is a myth, and thank God.

You’re being guided, not pushed. Led, not dragged.

There’s a tenderness to this surrender. It’s not violent. It’s almost erotic.

Like the way a great solo builds slowly, not to impress, but to invite.

It’s permission to be human.

The problem is thinking you have to fix everything. The answer is learning how to bleed without flinching.

“When the night is falling / I hear voices calling”

This is your moment of becoming. The night doesn’t just fall like a curtain, it opens a portal.

The voices? They’re not ghosts. They’re not demons. They’re memories, regrets, desires.

They’re everything you silenced in daylight.

At night, the suppressed becomes symphony. Lying in bed with nothing but a song and a past you can’t outrun.

“Like an aimless shooter / I’m a twilight cruiser”

The aimless shooter isn’t violent. He’s drifting. Firing into the void not to hit something, but to make noise, to feel real.

The twilight cruiser is someone who lives in the in-between. Not day. Not night. Not good. Not evil. Just existing in the grey zone, free from roles, from right answers.

This is the archetype of the modern antihero, the midnight philosopher, the vagabond spirit searching not for destinations, but for feeling.

It’s the cowboy without a saddle.

The punk without a cause.

The part of you that wasn’t made for daylight.

This song is a meditation disguised as melody. It’s about drifting into mystery, letting go of the need to dominate your inner world, and falling in love with uncertainty. It’s not a love song, it’s a survival song, whispered from the edge of isolation, written for people who are done pretending everything makes sense.

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A to Z of Making It, Music, My Stories, Unsung Heroes

David Roach’s Last Stand: The Voice Behind Junkyard’s Raw, Relentless Rock

Behind the riffs and raw grit, the human story of a frontman who never pretended to be anything but real.

If you were there in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, you knew Junkyard. “Blooze.” “Hollywood.” “All the Time in the World.”

They weren’t polished like Guns N’ Roses, they looked like they’d just changed your oil and stolen your beer. I loved them then. Still do.

You could say wrong place, wrong time hurt Junkyard. They had the raw goods, a sleazy, swaggering street take on AC/DC’s DNA, twisted with punk grit, but the market was already splintering. Their debut hit in 1989, produced by Tom Werman, engineered by Duane Baron, tight as a fist and twice as loud.

Chris Gates came up with the name “Junkyard.” “Crack” was considered, until the drug hit the evening news.

These guys didn’t just appear, they’d been grinding since the early ‘80s. Gates and Brian Baker came from hardcore punk, Minor Threat, The Big Boys. Todd Muscat and Patrick Muzingo had been pounding stages with Decry since ’83.

They formed Junkyard in 1987, Virgin Records sniffed first, but at a gig with Jane’s Addiction and Green River, Geffen swooped in. The A&R guy knew their punk past. Deal sealed.

They didn’t fit the Motley Crüe/Poison mold. They weren’t aiming for Bon Jovi/Journey polish. They belonged to the third camp, alongside Raging Slab, Dangerous Toys, Circus of Power, where punk, classic rock, and Southern boogie collided. The debut was a cocktail of Bad Company swagger, AC/DC crunch, Aerosmith groove, ZZ Top dirt, Southern rock twang, and just enough Guns N’ Roses grit to catch Geffen’s eye (though they were signed before “Appetite for Destruction” blew up).

“Blooze” kicked the door in. “Simple Man” gave us “throwing pennies into the wishing well”, so simple, so perfect. “Shot in the Dark”, not Ozzy’s, was pure sleaze. “Hollywood” had a riff Gates swore came from a “Cheech & Chong”movie. MTV picked up the Jean Pellerin–directed video. “Life Sentence” roared like Motorhead. “Texas” nodded to ZZ Top’s “La Grange”. “Hands Off” had gospel swagger and filthy humor.

Then came “Sixes, Sevens & Nines”. Darker, heavier. By ’92, Geffen dropped them. The wave shifted. Nirvana landed. Labels chased the next Seattle messiah. Muzingo told Sleaze Roxx:

“We knew we weren’t gonna be millionaires doing this. We all got real jobs. No drama, no BS.”

Reality check: even with a major label deal, most bands end up back at day jobs. They had a third album, “103,000 People Can’t Be Wrong”, but Geffen’s ultimatum (use their producer or walk) killed it. The industry had moved on.

Still, Junkyard didn’t disappear. “Demos” in 2008. New songs in 2015. “High Water” in 2017 with Tim Mosher, followed by tours that proved they were leaner and meaner. 2019’s “Old Habits Die Hard”. Two more tracks in 2021. Then… silence.

Until 2025, when the silence broke for the worst reason. David Roach, voice, snarl, and face of Junkyard, had cancer. His wife, Jennifer Michaels, had saved him once, pulled him out of the gutter, gave him love, stability, purpose. She’d been the one to convince him to get that swollen lymph node checked. It was squamous cell carcinoma of the head, neck, and throat. By June 2025, it had spread to his lungs and liver. She quit her job to care for him until he passed away in his sleep.

On August 2, 2025, Junkyard posted:

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of David Roach.

After a courageous battle with cancer, David passed away peacefully last night at home, in the loving arms of his wife.

He was a gifted artist, performer, songwriter, and singer—but above all, a devoted father, husband, and brother.

Dangerous Toys’ Jason McMaster told it best. He remembered David as the cool punk kid from high school, the guy who could hang with anyone. In ’89, their bands released albums the same week. Their videos debuted back-to-back on MTV. They toured together. Men cried when it ended. In 2022, David moved in next door to Jason. A year later, he met Jennifer. And then cancer came.

The thing about David Roach, he made rock ‘n’ roll feel like it belonged to the rest of us. Not the pretty people. The real ones. And that’s what hurts. You can’t fake authenticity. You can’t fake cool. And you sure as hell can’t fake the hole it leaves.

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A to Z of Making It, Influenced, Music, Unsung Heroes

Jason Flom: The Relentless A&R Rebel Who Shaped the Soundtrack of a Generation

From The Lefsetz podcast.

Jason Flom didn’t just stumble into the music business. he was basically dared into it. His dad, legendary lawyer Joe Flom (yeah, that Joe Flom, the one Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole damn chapter about in “Outliers”), once told him he had a deal: become a rock star or go to school. Jason was ready to pick the guitar. His mom was ready to murder someone. Guess who won?

So, instead of ending up in a dive bar strumming power chords for PBR money, Flom got shoved into Atlantic Records thanks to some family favors. Sounds easy, right? It wasn’t. Because once you’re in the building, you still have to prove you’re not a poser.

Flom watched the A&R guys and thought, “I can suck less than these dudes with 30% effort.”

So he put in actual effort. Found “Zebra”, a band that nobody at Atlantic gave a crap about, but the people loved. Flom ignored the gatekeepers and went straight to the public. And guess what? The public was right. “Zebra” exploded, Flom got promoted, and boom, the kid was in the game.

Flom tells a story about the making of the album.

Doug Morris had cold feet to fund the “Zebra” album. For it to go ahead, Flom got Jack Douglas to agree to produce. However, Douglas was a mess at the time and was not the same Douglas who did the “Aerosmith” records. They had the Record Plant booked and the band was staying there as well, with Douglas booking studio time on Tuesday and arriving Thursday, meanwhile the bills from the Record Plant to Atlantic are piling up.

The budget for the album was a $130K with Douglas getting $55K of that. Morris was not happy as the record was over budget and no tracks had been delivered. The record was then at $230K spent and it was finally at mixing. Douglas then started to hear whale noises in the album tracks. No one else could hear the noises except Douglas. The manager of the Record Plant came into the studio and fired Douglas from the record as Atlantic Records had given him the news how they had pulled the financing for the album. Douglas goes “give me 10 more minutes to finish the album”. The manager goes “you have 10 minutes”. Douglas then barricaded the door so no one could come in and the record got finished. The record came out and it exploded out of the gate.

Then came “Twisted Sister”. They looked ridiculous. Nobody wanted them. Industry snobs laughed. Flom didn’t. He saw 3,000 kids packed into a venue on a Wednesday night screaming every lyric. He brought it to the bosses, and Doug Morris basically told him if he mentioned “Twisted Sister” one more time, he’d be booted. So Flom did what any stubborn SOB would do, he went around him, got them signed anyway, and helped launch one of the most iconic metal acts of the ’80s.

But success doesn’t mean immunity. Flom eventually got caught in the cocaine-fueled dumpster fire that was the ’80s music scene and ended up in rehab. And yet, even in the fog of recovery, the dude came back swinging, signing “Savatage”, “Ratt”, “White Lion”, “Skid Row” and more.

Fast forward: Flom starts Lava Records in 1995. He fakes it ’til he makes it, literally asking around how to run a label while running the label. He signs “Matchbox Twenty” after seeing them bomb a live show but spotting something special in Rob Thomas. He bets on “Kid Rock” when everyone else thought the guy was a joke. No one at MTV wanted to touch him… until they did — and then “Kid Rock” blew the roof off the damn VMAs with “Aerosmith” and “Run-DMC”.

He picked up “Katy Perry” when Columbia was about to drop her. Signed “Lorde” from a SoundCloud link when she had 200 plays and a Facebook page. Oh, and about “Thirty Seconds to Mars”? Everyone told him it was a Jared Leto vanity project. But when he saw Leto turn down a Clint Eastwood film to stay on tour, Flom thought, “That’s more rock and roll than anything I’ve seen in years.”

Every time someone said no, Flom found a way to make it a hell yes. He wasn’t trying to be the tastemaker, he let the fans decide what was great and then fought like hell to bring that to the masses.

Along the way, he helped launch “Hootie & The Blowfish”, “Jewel”, “Simple Plan”, “The Corrs”, “The Blue Man Group”, “Black Veil Brides”, “Greta Van Fleet”, the list reads like a damn Spotify nostalgia playlist.

In short: Jason Flom didn’t just sign bands, he bet on outcasts, longshots, weirdos, and artists with heart. And yeah, he fumbled, got knocked down, got high (a lot), got sober, and kept swinging. The guy helped shape the soundtrack of millions of people’s lives not by chasing trends but by giving a fuck about what actually mattered passion, authenticity, and good fucking music.

Not bad for a dude who was almost a failed wannabe rock star, right?

His mum, who had no degree or background in education, started a school called “The Gateway School”so her son could go to school. He now has a Ph.D. in Psychometrics, the Psychology of Statistics. The Gateway School is now known as the best school for children with difficulties. Try to do what you want to do and try to make the world a better place.

Twisted Sister story.

Randy from Zebra said to Flom that Twisted Sister is the greatest live band ever. So Flom goes to watch them. Twisted Sister is headlining, and Zebra is opening for them. Flom found this odd as Zebra had a record deal and Twisted Sister didn’t. 3000 kids on a Wednesday night for $6 a head.

He was sold as Doug told him that his opinion is secondary compared to the public’s opinion. He walked into Doug’s office the next day and told him he found the next big act. Morris wasn’t interested because TS was considered a joke in the music business. Flom went back to Morris’s office and every time he did, he was told to get out of the office. The debut album “Under The Blade” on Secret was still selling and they were one of the best attended live acts.

At a A&R meeting designed to get the label back in the Top 10 charts as they had a lean year, Morris even mentioned to Flom that if he mentions the name Twisted Sister again, he will never work for Atlantic again. Shortly after that, Flom saw Phil Carson, who was the head of the English division of Atlantic Records and gave him a wealth of material he had amassed on the band, plus a tape of their Secret album. Carson at that point had been in the game for a while, signing acts like AC/DC and Yes amongst other acts. Carson watched TS perform live and signed them.

As for the folder that Flom gave him, it went straight in the bin as Carson had no idea who this young punk was. But synchronicity and coincidence were in play here as TS was opening for an act that Carson went to watch. Morris could have vetoed the whole project, but he still released “You Can’t Stop Rock N Roll” as a favor to Carson, however there was no marketing budget, however Flom was doing a bit of marketing on the side for the band. The record was selling on fumes as Flom puts it.

Morris then called Flom later to tell him he was right and that Atlantic would make a big thing out of this band. Morris had the vision to use Tom Werman to get Marty Callner to direct the videos. I think Dee had a different version here, however it doesn’t really matter in the end, because the album “Stay Hungry” and the clips, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock” are iconic.

Flom couldn’t understand why they didn’t want to use Werman again for the next record “Come Out And Play” and not long after that it broke up. Dee goes into it in detail in his book and Mark The Animal Mendoza has mentioned his hatred of Werman in various interviews.

Flom at this stage was a victim of the excess of the times and entered rehab. But before he entered rehab, he signed Savatage.

Flom was also involved in getting Ratt to sign to Atlantic Records in 1983 with “Out Of The Cellar” being the first release on Atlantic for them and also White Lion in 1987 for the “Pride” album however they are not mentioned during the podcast.

Once he got out of rehab, he had some projects that didn’t do much and then he signed Skid Row.

An agent brought him Stone Temple Pilots and he signed them. Other acts included Hootie And The Blowfish and Jewel. He told a story of watching Jewel play at a coffee shop with 5 people watching and the coffee machine making cappuccinos and then a few months later, he was back there with 300 people watching and everyone being mesmerized by her.

In 1995, it all evolved into Lava Records, his own label after he turned down an opportunity to resurrect Atco Records. Flom reckons he was set up to fail. He was asking for advice, faking it until he made it.

He had people out there that were brining him good bands. A rep brought him a band called Tabatha’s Secret and he was given four songs. Flom wasn’t convinced. The rep said to listen to 3am again, and again Flom wasn’t convinced. So he want to watch em, and they were terrible, not even in tune and no one was even paying attention to em, but he felt there was something special about Rob Thomas so he signed them. Hollywood Records offered to triple the offer from Lava, however Thomas stayed to Flom. And the debut Matchbox Twenty album went crazy.

Flom and Thomas debated if the first single should be “Real World” or “Long Day”. They settled on “Long Day” and on the strength of that single, the album moved 100K units. Then a radio station in a different city started to play “Push” and the album started to sell like crazy in that city. Flom went back to the band and said this is your next single and the band said no, they wanted “Real World”, but Flom remembered the words of Doug Morris, “what we think is good is nothing compared to what the public thinks”.

And another rep brought him Kid Rock. Kid Rock had three albums before this and all three failed. He was seen as damaged goods. Flom watched him live and they had a meet. Kid Rock said he will deliver two songs to him. Upon hearing the songs, Flom called Kid Rock and said to him, what do you want, Kid Rock said I want $300K sign on and so many percentage points on royalties. Flom said done.

The soundtrack of a lot of people’s lives was possible because of Jasom Flom.

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