Tracii Guns Interview: Sex, Booze, and Tattoos Unplugged

By: Robert Cavuoto

The band that lit up the Hollywood Strip in the ‘80s like an M-80 in a garbage can, have now come full circle and released a live acoustic CD entitled Acoustic Gypsy Live. It’s their first acoustic release in their 29 year history and recorded at The Hotel Cafe in Hollywood CA.

What makes this release exciting is the nuanced attention to the songs details, a musical awareness that LA Guns never diluted. From the CD’s opener, “Crystal Eyes” with Tracii Guns guitar solo to “Rip a Tear,” the CD is packed with great songs that take you down memory lane with a twist. I had the chance to speak with Tracii about the CD as well as his formidable years in New York and LA.

Tracii Guns

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Robert Cavuoto: Was it difficult to take your classic songs and rework them acoustically? ,p>

Tracii Guns: It wasn’t so much difficult as a lot of experimenting. Especially on the more rockin’ tunes, changing the rhythm so they still sounded full. It was just slightly altering the rhythm of the acoustic guitar to be able to strum as opposed to chunking.

The other songs lend themselves to being acoustic. With those it was more about arrangements and who was gonna play what role. That was actually the most fun of doing the CD, the rehearsal process. Having all these guys in one room staring at each other going, “Okay, how are we gonna do this?”

We hit a lot of stinkers while we were rehearsing and almost threw some of them out, but we were patient and worked through the stuff. I feel pretty good about them.

Rob: I realized that many of the fills and runs in the rhythm parts were not in the original versions but they still fit and hold the integrity of the songs.

Tracii Guns: You make a good point. Especially on a song like “Never Enough”, where we did a Randy Rhodes thing on the original record, but realized it doesn’t translate on acoustic. So I decided to do some country chordal runs. That’s one of the reasons why we didn’t do an unplugged thing 20 years ago when it was the craze.

At the time, I don’t think that we were prepared to go in a rehearsal situation and really pick the songs apart and rework little parts. Nowadays I’ve got a lot more time to sit back and look at music and do different things. I’m lucky to still be here doing it.

We really wanted to take more of a Neil Young, Crosby Stills and Nash approach to the old songs. We didn’t want to change the songs, but we definitely wanted to use some of our other influences and inject them into these types of songs.

Being associated with this kind of half-hearted heavy metal stuff from the ‘80s and being able to kind of quantify it into something that actually makes a little bit more sense was very satisfying for all of us guys. “Ah, we get to play real music.” That was a better excuse to do the album than anything else.

Rob: In the liner notes you mention that you had some apprehension about playing acoustic guitar live. What was your apprehension?

Tracii Guns: Acoustic guitar playing is a delicate thing. There’s two ways to play acoustic guitar. You either sit around the campfire with your friends and have a good time or you’ve got to approach acoustic instruments as a serious musician. The acoustic guitar has always been a starting point for me. It’s always been a place where I can sit in my music room and make mistakes. You get so much clarity out of an acoustic guitar that it’s always an experiment for me. I use an acoustic guitar for trying out new things.

Very rarely when I’m sitting in my room will I sit there with an acoustic guitar and get all the way through a four-minute piece of music or something like that. For me, it was about rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal. Your fingers hurt when you play electric guitar all the time and then you put an acoustic on and you do seven days of rehearsal and two full hour and a half shows. I was more concerned with my fingers getting weak on my left hand or the tips of my fingers burning and not being able to do the things I wanted to do.

I remember when I was in junior high school our teacher was a real disciplinarian. All those fears came back of having him looking over my shoulder, “You’re a note off and you’re reading music. How can you be a note off? You’re a bastard son of a shitty piano player.” Those were my apprehensions, more than anything. The guitar demons in my head, saying, “You’re gonna have to achieve if you’re gonna pull this off.”

Rob: Yeah, when playing acoustic all the mistakes are a little bit more glaring than when playing an electric. [Laughing]

Tracii Guns: You ain’t kiddin’! The Clapton theory is: give me a guitar that’s out of tune and I’ll play it in tune. You’re absolutely right. An acoustic guitar is like playing with a Gretsch through a Fender Twin on one. “Oh! You just really hit that note.” [Laughing] “Yes I did, and I really didn’t want to.” But you’ve got to have that attitude when you’re playing guitar if you don’t want to completely demonize your head and beat yourself up and crawl under a rug. You’ve got to let those things happen.

Rob: What acoustic guitar did you use on the CD?

Tracii Guns: Dean sent me a beautiful single cutaway, dreadnought guitar with the smallest neck they had available. I really wussed out and put .10’s on it. I still had a wound D string, but it’s pretty pliable. I could bend the notes and get around it. We did was use a DI on it because it’s acoustic/electric and also we miced it and the mic actually sounded better. We used a lot of ambient micing on the overall band and pretty much what you hear on there is a pretty good blend of that.

We could have had the opportunity to go back and clean stuff up, but it was all 98% there with the blend at work. We really didn’t move faders up for solos or anything like that. We kind of just let it be how it was in the room. It’s pretty dry and pretty in-your-face. I noticed a little bit of flat back delay on the high ends. I don’t know why. We weren’t in a reverb tank. [Laughing] That’s the only thing I really noticed about all the mixes overall was that the audience has this little bit of flat back on it.

Obviously there are some solos that I wish were pushed a little bit, but that’s just being a complete egotistical guitar player. Other than that, it’s probably the most honest record I’ve done, really.

Tracii Guns

Rob: I heard you have a female vocalist for LA Guns, how did that come about?

Tracii Guns: Yeah, we got Dilana Robichaux, who’s on the second season of the rock star TV series. I’m good at getting runners up. [ Laughing] When Izzy got tired of traveling in a van, because that’s how we tour nowadays, I thought, wow, here’s an opportunity to take another step and experiment and try something different again with the band. My agent was actually was trying to get Dilana on tour with L.A. Guns as a solo act. She’s the one who brought it up, “What about having Dilana? You like going outside the box,” and blah, blah, blah. I’m going, “Dilana is pretty far outside the box.”

The whole female thing, it’s a decision. Her first day of rehearsal, she pulls up on a Harley with all these tattoos and I’m like, “Well, that’s pretty damn L.A. Guns like,” if you’re going back 20 years. That’s what we really stood for. She has a lot of these primitive L.A. Guns qualities. She’s real rough around the edges, but again, a spectacular voice. The ability to break some ground this far into the game, whether everybody loves it or people walk away from it, it’s something that I feel real strong about doing just as an artist. We’ll see how it goes. The mystery is still there.

Rob: Can you believe it’s been 29 years since you first started L.A. Guns? Does it seem that long?

Tracii Guns: No. It’s weird. I remember I got into Zeppelin on Led Zeppelin II, which was late obviously, because it came out in ’69. I think I got into it when I was about six or seven years old. I remember how long the time it seemed between that and Coda, yet it was like only seven years. Then I remember thinking, “Led Zeppelin, before John died, they were together like 10 years. That’s a LONG time.”

But as far as me still playing “Sex Action” 29 years later, and now recording it acoustic, and now I’m gonna have a woman singing it on stage live…these changes have to happen to keep it interesting, at least interesting for me. So, no, to answer the question, I can’t believe it’s that long. I still feel like I’m in my mid to late twenties, and that’s how I approach music. I have a three-year old son which would be about right for a 28-year old. So no, 29 years going by this quick is actually kind of disturbing.

Rob: I remember seeing LA Guns at the Cat Club in New York City back in the ‘80s.

Tracii Guns: Wow! What a great gig! That’s one of the gigs of my life that sticks out to me. I remember sound checking even. I lived in New York when I was just out of Guns ‘N’ Roses and just restarted L.A. Guns, so I was about 19 years old. I went to New York City to play with Cheryl Rixon, who was Penthouse Pet of the Year and she had gotten a record deal with Atlantic.

That was the first time I went to go play with somebody else and I remember we hung out at Danceteria and the Cat Club. That’s what was happening then. I think I was probably 22 at that show, but I remember you could peek out the little tiny backstage and I remember seeing like Ritchie Stotts and the Plasmatics, and Paul Shaffer from Letterman. Joey Ramone was there and Deborah Harry and I was losing my mind. I was completely losing my mind going, “Oh my god! Every punk rock staple that I grew up worshipping is here and they’re gonna see my band play.”

This was one of the turning points in my psyche. Going out there and being aggressive and doing what we did and being the snotty rock band, the whole image we had back then, it was such a perfect moment in time. L.A. Guns was so suited, even being called L.A. Guns, to be part of that New York scene. It really fit into the New York street, St. Marks kind of lifestyle. I don’t think I’ve ever been more comfortable or excited at a gig as that one.

Rob: That was a great place. You could go there and see Axl Rose walking around one night and Yngwie Malmsteen another. It was a plethora of seeing people.

Tracii Guns: Yeah, great times, because you think about it 29 years, 30 years ago, but if you put your head right back into those times and it really seems like last year. That’s tripping me out.

What a great time for New York City and music with the Ritz and Scrap Bar. It was probably the last real communal, international place to go to hang out with other rockers. Because people always talk about the Sunset Strip, The Sunset Strip had nothing on New York City down in the Village.

Rob: I’m surprised to hear that considering band like yours, Guns ‘N’ Roses, and Motley Crue, really glorified the Sunset Strip, that where all the New York guys, wanted to go and make it.

Tracii Guns: Because people move to the sunny weather regardless and everybody wants to go to Hollywood and be a movie star or a rock star. I think the volume of human beings that moved here or were part of the scene was larger than the New York scene, but of course, we glorified it because we had to hype what we were doing and make it seem like Hollywood. A lot of people don’t realize that we were starving, doing anything to get attention and a draw.

And it did: it drew people and when you draw people, you draw money. All of a sudden, everybody had an apartment for $250 a month and life was good. The thought of even Motley getting signed or L.A. Guns getting signed or Guns ‘N’ Roses getting signed, we didn’t know what getting signed was. We just didn’t know what that was.

We just took it because we were doing independent stuff, like L.A. Guns did an independent EP. Motley’s first record was an independent release. Ratt’s first record. With the likes of Quiet Riot, and Ozzy getting Randy in his band and things like that, L.A. became a powerhouse. Not to mention Van Halen. These types of things solidified L.A. as a force for a new type of heavy metal.

That was great for L.A. obviously. Axl being from Indiana, Izzy being from Indiana, me spending time in New York prior to L.A. Guns and things like that, I think we all had a greater sense of the street vibe, the 24-hour vibe, the 4 a.m. waffle, all those things that New York City had that L.A. didn’t have. In L.A. at that time, it was over at 1:45. [Laughing]

If you weren’t going to someone’s house to party, you were going home and you were asleep by 3 a.m. In New York, you’d have your last drink at 5 a.m., and by the way that’s when the drinking age was 18 as well. So if you’re talking about party central, New York City was party central.

Rob: Any chance of a 30th anniversary, with the original members of LA Guns to celebrate?

Tracii Guns: I wouldn’t mind doing something like that. I think L.A. Guns doing a reunion might be a really cool, maybe one in New York, one in Dallas, one in L.A., something like that to make it more special, more exclusive. It would be really hard to get Mick Cripps (guitar) onstage. I think he’s resigned to the fact that it’s a lot more comfortable to sit in his garage with his kid and jam than to get up onstage.

Kelly Nickels (bass) lives in New York again. He’s got a completely new life and obviously Steve Riley (drums) and Phil Lewis (vocals) have their own L.A. Guns and there are some real shitty issues between me and Steve. That won’t ever happen. Steve would never be involved with something like that.

But Phil and I, we talk every once in a while. It’s just kind of where it is. But yeah, 30 years is a good reason to do some shows, give those die-hard fans what they really want, and that is what they really want. I’m not fooling myself by thinking that’s not what they want.