LARRY MAZER Ratt and Guns and Mötley and Dokken and whatever, they all looked at each other. There was not a Rainbow-type place in Philadelphia or New York where people hung out. And New York never really developed a hair band scene—it was always more punk rock and that type of stuff. There was no Philly scene. If you look at Kix, from Maryland, or Twisted Sister, from Long Island, East Coast bands lived in their own world.
BILLY CHILDS There very much was a Philly scene, actually. But it was never really more than three or four clubs at the same time. Philly’s a big sprawling area. It’s not like L.A., where you have all these clubs clustered in one spot. From South Jersey up to, like, Philadelphia and the outlying suburbs, that’s a pretty good reach, man. But I guess it was a smaller scene compared to some. You’d always run into the same thousand people.
EDDIE TRUNK Those were places where you would go and there would be people there no matter who was playing.
DAVE “SNAKE” SABO The scene was thriving. You had so many different clubs to play, down in Philadelphia and Trenton and Asbury Park and Newark and Staten Island and Long Island, New York City, Brooklyn. It was great. And those clubs had original bands every night. It was amazing to watch. There were bands making a living on the club circuit. And that’s unheard of in this day and age. You weren’t making a good living, but you were putting a couple bucks in your pocket playing your own music. It was really exciting.
MISSI CALLAZZO (DJ, WSOU; executive, Megaforce Records) There were other stations that had specialty shows, but when WSOU, which is the station at Seton Hall University, switched to an all-metal format in 1986, we were the only ones doing that. And I think that we definitely played a big part in bands like Skid Row and Winger and Kix getting their careers to the next level. It was like, where else can a record company get a major market radio station to support a developing artist and see if there’s a spark when you put it in front of people?
SCOTTI HILL Our scene was very scattered out, from Westchester down to Jersey, Long Island, the tristate. There was no actual place to go and see people walking around on the street, like the Sunset Strip.
MARK WEISS No one actually wanted to go into Manhattan, you know? They wanted to go to the suburbs, where they could drive to gigs. That’s where all the rock happened. We didn’t like the city. You go to the city to go to Madison Square Garden.
MISSI CALLAZZO Skid Row had sold out the Birch Hill in Old Bridge Township, New Jersey, and L’Amour in Brooklyn.
SCOTTI HILL L’Amour was the epicenter of everything.
STEVE BROWN It was the big step for any band.
MISSI CALLAZZO George and Michael Parente, who owned L’Amour, they ran a good business. They were legit humans, you know what I mean? They managed White Lion. They managed Overkill.
BOBBY “BLITZ” ELLSWORTH (singer, Overkill) They were fun guys; local guys. If you’re from here, you know that if you’re not getting your balls busted, it means somebody doesn’t like you. If everybody’s being polite all the time to you, then it’s probably that they don’t like you. But if they bust your balls, there’s a certain camaraderie with that.
DEE SNIDER One of the guys in Overkill told me that they came in to the management office because they had a problem on the road and the Parentes said, “Hold on—is it a gun problem or a bat problem?”
BOBBY “BLITZ” ELLSWORTH It wasn’t a gun problem. They treated their bands as friends and wanted to do the best for them because the band’s success would highlight their own success.
KEITH ROTH It had a very family-oriented kind of vibe; you’d see the same faces at L’Amour every week. The shows started really late, so I’d go home and get up at midnight by myself, get in the car at eighteen, and drive up there because I’d see my friends. And you’d grab at least one to take the ride home with you.
MISSI CALLAZZO After the show ended, the party would continue on the street. People would just, literally, hang in front of L’Amour until four a.m.
PHIL ALLOCCO (guitarist, Law and Order) L’Amour was a big venue for us because national acts would come through New York, and they would play with local unsigned bands as support. That was a great way for fans to get exposed to us before we signed to MCA. Kids would come, and when you can play a show in front of two thousand people or one thousand people and you get to work and play with a crowd like that … it really helped develop a band.
ROB DE LUCA (bassist, Spread Eagle) L’Amour was far from the East Village, where we lived, so we would go there to see shows, but that wasn’t our hang. We always stayed in Manhattan, and it was a different place every night. Sunday was Limelight, Wednesday was the Cat Club, Tuesday was Danceteria, which had a heavy metal night. Then after all those places, you always went to the Scrap Bar on MacDougal Street to end the night.
PHIL ALLOCCO A scene really started to build in New York. It was kind of an eclectic group of bands. Circus of Power was one of the first bands that got signed. And then White Zombie, Raging Slab, Princess Pang, the Throbs … we could sell out clubs before we were signed, which is kind of unheard of today. We’d be playing L’Amour, Limelight, and the Cat Club in Manhattan. That one was interesting because whatever celebrities or bands were in town would be there. So, you would have Johnny Ramone or whoever in the audience and if you were a new band there, you might get a lot of people with their arms folded in front of you, just standing there. Whereas if you played L’Amour, people were jumping up and down.
EDDIE TRUNK The Cat Club was the closest thing we had in New York to the glammy thing in L.A. The guy who ran it was very androgynous. I think he was half Asian, half black, and he had a very strong look and he was cultivating this whole scene. In New Jersey there was Studio One, which I saw Skid Row and Trixter break out of.
STEVE BROWN We opened for Skid Row at Studio One. It was the first American show they ever did with Sebastian Bach and that was pretty much the night they got signed. And Trixter, we weren’t far behind them.
BRUNO RAVEL Danger Danger first heard about Trixter when we were making the video for “Naughty Naughty.” There was some girl that we were friendly with that was friendly with someone who knew them and she was like, “Hey, there’s this new band, Trixter.” And we just looked at them and said, “Oh, these young punks. Fuck them.”
STEVE BROWN When we finally did a showcase, we played a club called Sanctuary in Manhattan. We opened up for Law and Order. It was kind of a weird pairing. They were like a dark city band, and here we are, fun, good-looking dudes. But it was that yin and yang that worked. The place was packed. This guy Steve Sinclair from Mechanic, MCA Records, came out to see us and he basically said, “This is the band that’s going to make me a millionaire.” He signed us within a month. That was May of 1989, and September of ’89 we were on a plane out to L.A. to do our first record.
MISSI CALLAZZO New York was always … if there were men wearing any kind of makeup, it was definitely just more smudgy black around their eye. Their hair was more a mess because it was a mess, not because they were teasing it for three days before the show, you know what I mean?
ROB DE LUCA We looked at our music as street art, like subway graffiti. Some people think it’s dirty and other people think it’s beautiful. I personally think it’s beautiful.
ANDY SECHER (editor, Hit Parader Magazine) I think the East Coast bands, for whatever reason, had a little more substance to them than some of the West Coast bands, the L.A. bands.
PHIL ALLOCCO I always remember being very envious of bands who weren’t from New York because it was easier to be a band in other places. To be a band in New York, the cost of living was so high. There is no room. It’s hard to find a place you can make noise in, period. The terrain is very challenging to even put a band together.
ROB DE LUCA I mean, in Alphabet City, probably 30 percent of the buildings were empty, dilapidated. When you look at our video for “Switchblade Serenade,” it was so easy to find locations that looked like that because there was just blocks and blocks of burned-out buildings.
STEVE WEST Everybody just wrote songs, put bands together, and got rec-ord deals on the East Coast. That’s how it worked. There were no bands on the East Coast that were playing clubs, doing originals, and getting a huge record deal because they were the biggest draw in town like Mötley Crüe or Poison or Warrant had done in L.A.
ROB DE LUCA We were rehearsing at a place called Loho Studios, which was a low-level recording studio and a rehearsal space, and we also recorded our demos there. So we had this demo, we started sending it out, and people were reacting incredibly strongly to it. The labels start setting up appointments to come down and watch us rehearse. We had about maybe five or six songs and had shows booked but hadn’t played one yet. MCA came down and they said right away, “We want to sign this band, like, tomorrow.” And we were like, “Holy fucking shit!” So then we canceled all the gigs we had and went right into recording and songwriting mode and pre-production.
BRUNO RAVEL Danger Danger started writing and recording and then just started submitting demos. We only submitted one demo, and we got interest from Lennie Petze at Epic. And so in a way, that’s great, although sometimes I wish we had suffered a little more.
STEVE WEST Since the lineup we had on the demo had never played a show, Lennie said, “I need to see you guys play and make sure you’re the guys on this tape.” So they booked us at SIR, which is the big rehearsal studio in Manhattan that all the biggest acts in the world go to. And Lennie Petze sat down in a chair right in front of the stage by himself and we played five or six songs. And he said, “Okay, you’re the guys. This is great.” Whatever, the rest is history. It was interesting because he had done the same thing with Twisted Sister and he had actually walked out before they were even finished. So at least he didn’t leave for us; he liked us and he signed us. And again, then we actually had to learn how to be a band, which was the opposite of all those West Coast bands that were already gelling and playing. We were just like, “Okay. Now we better figure it out!”
ROB DE LUCA Maybe we didn’t make anywhere near as big a mark as the Hollywood scene, but there were a lot of bands here trying to get signed on the East Coast … and making it happen.