Starz

There can be no doubt that Starz are one of the greatest bands of all-time. They are also one of the most under-rated. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve played either the debut Starz album or the classic ‘Live In Louisville’ promo release in particular.

There isn’t a month that goes by without yours truly pulling out either one for a spin on the ol’ ‘Death Deck’.

I’m sure the same can be said for the hordes of similar folks who grew up on a strong diet of quality US hard rock, that included the legendary New Jersey quintet amongst Kiss, Angel, Aerosmith, Legs Diamond and Cheap Trick

Despite several rumoured attempts in recent years, including one that would have included Danger Danger’s Bruno Ravel on bass, Starz finally made a real comeback last summer. Guitarists Richie Ranno and Brendan Harkin reunited with drummer Joe X Dube and vocalist par excellence Michael Lee Smith for three shows on the East Coast. Owing to original member Peter Sweval sadly passing away a few years ago, George D’Ana joined them on bass.

Two shows were filmed. And Ranno is putting them out on two DVDs that are sure to find favour with long-time Starz fanatics.

"The first night (at Jaxx Roxx in West Springfield, Virginia) is from footage shot with one camera," Richie reveals, "but the second show (from the Wreck Room in Wallington, New Jersey) was captured with four cameras. A real pro-shoot."

What happened to the proposed UK shows last year?

"Well, the interest in playing shows in the UK was actually the inspiration for the band getting back together. We were all really keen to do it. A promoter in the UK was interested in bringing us over, so we arranged the East Coast shows as warm-ups to see how things would go.

"The UK shows fell through. But we went ahead with the gigs we’d organised at home anyway. They lit the fire under us and we got an amazing reaction. I knew it would be like that, but it was a shock to the others. A nice shock, mind you!"

And so to the history lesson! A former member of Stories (fronted, of course, by Ian Lloyd), Richie joined what was, at the time, a band called Fallen Angels.

Prior to forming Fallen Angels, Peter Sweval and keyboard player Lawrence Gonsky had been members of New Jersey rock band Looking Glass, scoring a US number one hit in August 1972 with the single ‘Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)’, which rather went against the band’s harder live sound.

After the addition of Joe X Dube on drums and Brendan Harkin on guitar, the band’s singer (Elliott Lurie) quit. Thus, Michael Lee Smith (who had moved north from Georgia) was recruited (having appeared at the New York Shakespeare Festival of all things). Incidentally, Michael’s brother, Rex, was destined to become infinitely more famous. After fronting the Columbia signed hard rock group Rex, he became a popular teen pin-up solo artist and made a successful move into TV and film work.

Looking Glass toured for another year or so before the name change to Fallen Angels. They signed to Arista and recorded an album’s worth of material that remained unreleased, until it was made available (ironically by Ranno) in recent years. Two singles were issued, but I have actually only ever seen white label promotional copies of them. I own a copy of ‘The Kid Is Hot’ and a friend had ‘Romeo And Juliet’.

Richie joined Fallen Angels in September 1975, when the band still had a keyboard player.

"Yup, Larry Gonsky was still in the band," recalls Ranno. "I joined after Sean Delaney (who was working for Aucoin Management, who also discovered Kiss) ran into Peter Sweval and started hanging around. That’s how the band hooked up with Aucoin, because Sean wanted to get involved in the band. He felt they needed another guitar player. So I joined."

What led to Larry’s departure?

"I hated keyboards. Sean asked me what I thought about having a keyboard player in the group. I told him and he asked me if I wanted him out. I said yes, because he just wasn’t right for the band. Sean felt the same and got him fired!"

You opened up for Kiss as Fallen Angels, right?

"Yes, we did two shows in Philadelphia opening for them."

Sean Delaney was a huge inspiration to Starz. He was there for the band in the early years, as he had been for management stablemates Kiss. He was also responsible for coming up with the band name.

"Sean sadly passed away last year. But there was none more colourful than he was. Everything he did was big. He came to every rehearsal, six days a week, five to six hours a day. He was a very intense person, more so than the band.

"There was one day when it was snowing really badly, really impossible weather, and Sean called me to ask why I hadn’t come in. He wouldn’t take the weather as an excuse and drove over to collect me himself!!"

Following the guitarist’s recruitment, the band recorded an eight-song demo at The Record Plant in New York. Richie has, in recent years, offered these latter songs on CD entitled ‘Back In The Day’

"The material on the ‘Back In The Day’ CD was recorded in October 1975, when the band were still known as Fallen Angels."

The demo included ‘(She’s Just A) Fallen Angel’ and ‘Do It With The Lights On’. The latter song was later re-written for ‘Violation’ and became ‘Rock Six Times’.

The songs also include original versions of later Starz classics ‘Cool One’ and ‘Monkey Business’

"In February ‘76 we recorded the demo with Jack Douglas that got us the deal with Capitol. The songs were ‘Detroit Girls’, ‘Live Wire’ and ‘Pull The Plug’.

"At some point in January ’76 we were asked who could produce us. I was impressed with Aerosmith’s ‘Get Your Wings’ album that Jack had produced. I felt if he could take a band that sounded as bad as they did on their first album to what they achieved on that second record, then he was the man for us. I thought the guitar work had really improved in that band. Little did I know..…"

The first album, to me, has a real timeless quality to it. It’s a true classic. It still stands up. It’s one of the greatest records of all-time.

Some might see that opener ‘Detroit Girls’ to be a deliberate attempt to cash-in on Kiss’ success in the area and the Starz answer to ‘Detroit Rock City’, released the same year. However, it’s worth pointing out that the demo was cut in February ’76, before Kiss’ ‘Destroyer’ album was even released.

"It was pure coincidence," states Richie. "We were on tour and staying in Detroit for twelve days, despite only playing two shows in that period. Sean was actually working as our road manager at the time. We wrote that song during those days in Detroit."

Did you really know ‘every health clinic in every town’, as the song states?

"Ha ha! That was Michael’s idea! I thought it was cool. I was a big Sweet fan and I loved the way they included the band members’ names at the start of ‘Ballroom Blitz’. It was kind of inspired by that."

I remember there was a bit of a controversy over the inclusion of ‘Pull The Plug’ on that record, with Michael revealing his agony at seeing his girlfriend being kept alive on a life support machine despite the fact she was effectively brain dead. There was a high profile case of a girl in such a situation - her name eludes me - in the States at the time.

"Some people thought it was in poor taste, but it was a good song. It was my favourite song to play."

It was a prime example of the ‘tabloid’ writing style often employed by the band. Where other bands wrote songs, Starz wove musical tapestries, Michael Lee Smith painting stories with his words. Although, in the case of the legendary ‘Piss Party’ (never released on an album at the time), he just narrated lines from a porn movie….

Who did you tour with in support of the first album?

"Mostly Ted Nugent, Aerosmith and Blue Oyster Cult. We also played with Rush and Derringer."

Was sharing management with Kiss a help or a hindrance?

"Equal. What was good was that Aucoin thrust us out, but people expected us to be like Kiss. And we weren’t. Aucoin got so rich so fast from Kiss he wasn’t interested in anything else."

Why did Starz (as opposed to Fallen Angels) only ever play one show with Kiss?

"Management felt that putting two bands together managed by the same company could cause friction when put in a competitive environment. Besides, back in those days, Kiss was sort of envious of bands that didn't have to wear make-up. I guess all those years of hiding their faces was getting to them a bit."

Still, Richie did contribute to Gene Simmons’ solo album in 1978… just.

"When we were recording ‘Detroit Girls’ back in ’76, I had a dream about helping him record a solo album. It was very vivid, but who would ever think those guys would ever make solo records? But they did. And when Gene did his I was kinda pissed that I wasn’t asked. He and Sean had done the record, mixed it and then decided they didn’t like Jeff Baxter and Joe Perry’s guitarwork on the song, (‘Tunnel Of Love’) so I wound up re-doing it."

When it came time to record album number two with Jack Douglas, did Capitol have any influence over the direction taken on the record’s slightly poppier direction?

"They had no influence on us recording ‘Violation’," assures Richie. "We’d come off the road and were just writing songs. It just so happened that we decided to go in a direction that stole a lot of Badfinger and Hollies influences and added them to our own brand of hard rock. ‘Cool One’ was actually a song we’d already started playing in the early days of the group, of course."

Although it was intended as a semi-conceptual record, set in the near future when the powers that be banned rock and roll and most other pleasures, it doesn’t make too much sense the way the album is track listed.

"We had ‘em all in sequence, where it made sense as a concept originally, but Aucoin said albums are successful with the best songs on the first side, so it was changed.

"The actual concept only came up during the recording of the vocals. Michael has to be given credit for that.

"Still, poor marketing by Capitol led to its demise. Capitol just didn’t get hard rock. And they especially had no idea how to promote it to US radio."

EMI in the UK (who handled Capitol) did put your logo on a racing car in the 1977 BP Visco British Formula Three Championship though………

Richie sighs, believing full well, like I do, that the money would’ve been better spent promoting the band’s music through more relevant mediums.

"You know, some time ago a guy introduced himself to me as the person responsible at EMI in England for organising the sponsorship of that car…."

Richie wasn’t impressed.

I’m still trying to find the pack of ‘Top Trumps’ cards I had as a kid that featured the car (a March Toyota 773). For the record, the driver was New Zealander Brett Riley and he actually won two races that season. I’ve not yet discovered whether either of the wins occurred in the Starz colours…..

You didn’t play the title track too much live, did you?

"Actually, we did play it live more than you think! Quite a bit, in fact! We didn’t do ‘S.T.E.A.D.Y.’ or ‘Sing It, Shout It’ though. The latter because Michael could never hit the right notes. ‘Violation’ was in the set for the comeback shows."

It’s only been the last couple of years that I’ve really come to better appreciate third album ‘Attention Shoppers’. I always felt the production really let the record down. What is more noticeable now, however, is that ‘X-Ray Spex’ is Starz’ take on the Sex Pistols. Was that deliberate?

"To some degree, yes. Peter came in with the song. Well, at least the chords. We’d often criticised his contribution to the songwriting process as too light, but he obviously went away and worked hard and came up with a great song. He’d turned it up and the punk influence was his."

It’s pretty obvious that you missed Jack Douglas in the producer’s chair.

"We needed Jack, but he was working on other projects. But we weren’t encouraged to record with anyone else. We decided we could do it ourselves. When the management heard the mix they should’ve told us to at least wait and get Jack in to re-mix it."

The failure of ‘Attention Shoppers’ led to the split in the ranks with Brendan and Peter. Harkin quit the music business, but Sweval would turn up in Skatt Brothers, a disco band formed by Sean Delaney. They recorded one album, ‘Strange Spirits’, for Casablanca Records in 1979. Sweval had previously sung back-ups on Delaney’s 1978 solo album, ‘Highway’, released through the same label.

Erstwhile Stanky Brown guitarist Bobby Messano and ex Hydra and Rex bassist Orville Davis were drafted in as replacements.

"The problem with Bobby and Orville was that they both looked at it just as another gig, whereas to us it was our life."

For the next album, ‘Coliseum Rock’, Starz were transported to Toronto to work with Jack Richardson. Whose idea was that? After all, Richardson had produced the unreleased Fallen Angels album back in 1974.

"Alan Miller (who worked for Aucoin) came up with the idea. We had a lot of fun up in Canada; the album came out really well. It was a very solid album. Nice and clean. We felt that we needed to make a harder rocking album, because the feeling was also that we were inches away from being as big as Aerosmith were at the time before we recorded ‘Attention Shoppers’.

"The trouble was that ‘Violation’ had not been promoted. It should’ve sold four million records and we used to play night after night and get an encore each time. I think it all went back to when we were playing in Detroit one night, opening for Manfred Mann. Their crowd was really mellow, most had come over from Windsor, Ontario and Michael just lost it. He screamed: "You guys stink!" The crowd started booing us and a couple of Capitol’s guys just happened to be there……

"If it wasn’t for that Detroit gig we could’ve sold between 2 to 4 million albums. I really believe that!

"So, when ‘Coliseum Rock’ also failed to get any kind of push, we were absolutely disgusted. I had a go at the Capitol promo guy who came to one of our gigs, wound up in an argument with him and kicked him out of the room."

Starz broke up after the failure of ‘Coliseum Rock’, although, in retrospect, Richie feels they should’ve stuck at it a little longer.

"We weren’t paying attention. We should’ve held on to our deal and made one album after another, like Judas Priest and the Scorpions did, and hung on. Angel should’ve done the same."

Instead, Starz ultimately morphed into Hellcats. Ranno and Smith allied themselves to bassist Peter Scance and drummer Doug Madick to record a highly rated, five track mini album for Radio Records. Sadly, despite the record becoming a hot import item, Radio Records folded and the band split.

There was something of a Starz resurgence in the late 80s, when first Richie struck a deal with Heavy Metal Records for the release of a series of live and compilation releases, and then Metal Blade obtained the licensing rights to release the band’s back catalogue on CD.

After a disappointing second Hellcats album (recorded with vocalist Perry Jones in Brendan Harkin’s basement studio), Ranno had hooked up with Michael Lee Smith to record some new Starz material.

"We gave it a shot. We cut five tunes and offered them to Metal Blade. We asked for some money to do five more songs in order to do another Starz record. I never heard from Brian Slagel again. It wouldn’t have been a million seller, but would’ve done pretty well, nevertheless."

The five songs eventually wound up on the ‘Requiem’ release. A self-released CD of oddities, ‘Requiem’, at the time, was intended to put the band to bed. Well, not quite.

Ranno has, for more than a few years now, helped to organise a popular Kiss convention in New Jersey. Indeed, Sean Delaney was a regular guest. Although Starz were considered over, the band’s distinctive logo was still doing good business on T-shirts. Rock stars from Nikki Sixx, Tommy Thayer and Rikki Rockett to Jani Lane and Ginger from the Wildhearts were also citing the band as an influence.

Raiding his collection of live tapes and demo material has provided Ranno with a nice sideline from a rock collectibles business he’s been running for many years now. He offers a collection of live shows and other goodies on CD-R, including the full recording of the fabled ‘Live In Louisville’ show, an edited version of which was, of course, originally issued as a Capitol Records radio promo in 1978. It was once claimed to be the greatest never released live album of all-time by my ‘Kerrang!’ colleague Xavier Russell.

"We did great business in Kentucky. We were really popular down there. That record was recorded over two nights. We headlined both. It was done direct to the mobile. That album is as live as it gets. Here’s where Capitol got it wrong again. They wouldn’t put it out commercially. They didn’t think a live album would sell. Then Cheap Trick comes along with ‘At Budokan’ and it went through the roof…..

In addition to Starz, Richie also has Richie Ranno’s All-Stars, a band that also features Joe Dube on drums and George D’Ana on bass. Richie sings lead in a trio well known for inviting several special guests and celebrated Starz fans to join them. Michael Kelly Smith of Britny Fox being one such individual who has picked up the gauntlet and jammed with the band. A DVD has been released of the All-Stars (including Michael Kelly Smith) playing a collection of Starz classics and covers of Ranno’s favourite rock tunes.

But with a renewed passion for Starz, what does the future hold?

"We have two weeks worth of dates set for July. We’d like to take this overseas, but it just depends on promoters."

What about a new album?

"It’s a possibility!"

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