Put A Red Rose On Their Grave

Just press play:

Here’s an unfairly forgotten LP that nobody apart from me seems to have treasured down the years, Roxx Gang Things You’ve Never Done Before from 1989. I loved it the first time I heard it in my girlfriend’s car and I love it now in a far less excited state. Opener ‘Scratch My Back’ just sounds like the good bits of my late teenage years, all flash, promise and dashboard lights.

You come around my door just about midnight
Well I can’t say no to somethin’ feels so right
I don’t care who knows or who sees
I just want to feel you wrapped around me

---

Roxx Gang hailed from St Petersburg, Florida and Things You’ve Never Done Before was their debut LP on Virgin Records*, made after original guitarist Eric Carrell died. The LP cover tells you a lot of what you need to know about the chaps, I like the whole tight pleather and cowboy boots chic; very practical for performing a wide range of household chores in, as long as no bending was required I imagine. I would like to single out guitarist Wade Hayes for his spotty boots and bassist Roby ‘Strychnine’ Strine for rocking some seriously bouffy hair, well played those men.

Mandatory sartorial daftness aside, Roxx Gang were a serious unit on their debut album. There is an expected cut and swagger involved in making this type of music, granted but they have a great way with a tune and throw in a lot of unexpected melodic choices and curves. The first four tracks on Things You’ve Never Done Before are way up there with the best of any of their direct contemporaries and deserve a lingering fingering.

You have heard the opener, I love the snap and bite of it and the big gang chorus and it fulfils 1537’s 145th Law which is that ‘the opening track of any glam rock LP has to be about sweet sweaty trouser concerns’**. Word up.

Second track ‘No Easy Way Out’ was far better, even. There was something slightly ominous, eerie and powerful in the guitar intro, certainly for a glam metal track. The whole cut was slower paced and menacing, it also really showed Kevin Steele’s voice off to absolute best affect. Top marks.

The Devil looked at me with an evil smile
He said, "We're racin' for your soul this next quarter mile"

Third up is ‘Race With The Devil’ which is just bloody great, the bastard love-child of Gene Vincent’s song of a similar name and that one about the devil going down on Georgia, plus added eighties guitar nitrous injection. Even at the age of 52 I still love driving to the sound of this, it excites me, the guitar work is bloody great from Hayes and Taylor. Spoiler alert, Mr Roxx Gang wins.

Again we switch into the decidedly downbeat spaghetti-Western-tragedy vibe of ‘Red Rose’, an 80’s ballad that really does sound different and much less sickly than 99% of its contemporaries. The military drum bits are especially welcome.

---

Okay, okay I’ve done my usual and blown 4,000 words on four tracks but whilst there are a couple of lesser outings on Things You’ve Never Done Before, there are some other goodies too. Let us deal with them in a laughably perfunctory way now; the last three tracks really aren’t worth too much consideration.

‘Live Fast Die Young’ is way better than any track with that name had a right to be in 1989. Again Roxx Gang slow it down to Judas Priest in stately mode speed. You could turn this track into a power metal banger without too much work.

‘Too Cool For School’ is better than any track with that name had a right to be in 1989 (slight return). As an insecure 17 year-old this was exactly the type of manly swaggering braggadocio I aspired to, even if I couldn’t afford skin-tight pleather trews.

---

There is always a danger writing about excitable music that you first encountered at an excitable time in your life that its merits were all bound up in time and place and it sounds crap now that you’re bald, boring and wear looser jeans. It is immensely gratifying to report that despite being bald, being generally less excitable and wearing looser trousers than I did in 1989 Things You’ve Never Done Before^ really stands up, in part.

Its a favourite theme of mine, I know, but this LP would have made the greatest mini-LP of the whole glam era, basically just stick the first 7 tracks on it, job done. The playing and performances are of a really high quality throughout, some crunching riffs and guitar flourishes abound. The production of Beau Hill is of its time, but not oppressively or distractingly so.

Things You’ve Never Done Before was the band’s debut and due to a certain instabilities, personnel and record company related and a certain looming Seattle-based extinction-level event, Roxx Gang didn’t follow it up for 6 years, by which time they were a different band in a different world. I think this LP is a great-sounding portal back to when the world was young, fresh and glittery.

Caroline try to understand
The road to glory our lives pave
And as the angels take my hand
Leave one red rose on my grave

1265 Down.

*seemingly a bad label to sign for if you were a hard rock/glam band, almost as bad as Chrysalis for failing to break bands.

**quoted direct from lines 114-116, scroll 6 of 1537’s Canticle Of Canticles; as established at The Council Of Trent (1546), which set the deuterocanonical books of blogging.

^which did potentially soundtrack several of those things I hadn’t done previously.