RJ JUKES INTERNET OUTPOST

Young Man's Blues:
Ringo Jukes on Rock City Angels
By Sleazegrinder

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There’s only about four Ringos in the whole world, so I hardly think this one needs an introduction, but if you insist, he’s the drummer for the Rock City Angels, one of the best American rock n’ roll bands of the 80’s, a boozy, bloozy blast of black-eyed soul, greasy, glammy thunder, and good ol’ boy swagger. Their story is legendary, but often garbled, filled, as it is, with movie stars, multi-million dollar deals, corporate espionage, and even attempted assassination. For the skinny on what they meant to all the rocker kids and beautiful freaks back in the ol’ daze, might I suggest you check out Pepsi Sheen’s Flash Metal Suicide entry on ‘em?

But for now, take a little ride with me. It’s somewhere in Arkansas, 100 miles away from Memphis, the crickets are singing and Ringo Jukes is tellin’ a few tales…

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So, Young Man’s Blues is being re-released on Gott Discs, a German label.

I just found about that a few days ago. I guess we’re just gonna let it ride and see what happens. I’m glad someone is doing it, to be honest, although I’m not sure how they did it. I’m surprised that Geffen hasn’t jumped in yet. You know, we’ve got the original version of that record, we’ve been trying to release it for awhile now. See, it was originally recorded in Memphis by a guy named Jim Dickinson, and it was a little different. Geffen didn’t like it, they didn’t think it was ‘hard rock’ enough. So we’re trying to release the ‘original’ one, and sell it on our website. So I’m thinking that the one they’re releasing over there, that’s just settin’ us up for this one nicely.

More tangled webs for the Rock City Angels, man.

I’m sure all bands got their stories, but this shit just don’t go away! I got four original members all talking now, though, so who knows, maybe we can get a little reunion happening at some point soon.

I thought there WAS a reunion record already recorded, called “Use Once and Destroy”?

That one was recorded in 2001 in LA, but it’s not finished yet. So we figured if we put out the Dickinson record, we could use the money we make to finish that one.

Did you play drums on it?

No, I didn’t, I couldn’t get out there, I was touring.

Who were you touring with?

Oh, for years I’ve been playing with this guy Jason Williams, he’s like the son of Jerry Lee, the piano player. Same kinda deal, only with more of a 90’s edge. I just got out of that, I been traveling with him, shit, about 12 years now. I met him through Bobby Durango, matter of fact.

How’s it feel to be off the road after all these years?

Gettin’ kinda boring. I got a little band together, we play the roadhouses, but I’m looking to get some shit going around here this spring. I’m hoping to get at least the three core members, me, Bobby and Andy, and we’re gonna play at least three shows, Florida, LA, and Memphis. Maybe Europe, too, seems like they’re more interested in rock over there these days.

Well, that was basically a demo. Ann Boleyn, she’s the one that got them out there to LA. They were all from Florida, originally. So, they got there, and everything wasn’t as peachy-keen as it was supposed to be. They figured they were gonna be stars once they got there, since they got a little of that in Florida. I think their drummer, Punky, left after two weeks, and then I joined up. But the drummer on that album is Dirty Dave, from Florida.

Did you have to deal with Ann Boleyn at all?

Oh yeah. I still am!

What about the infamous death threats?

I was wondering how long it would take to get to that. She put out this shit, it was like some bad b-movie.

Well, wasn’t she crazy?

A little loony. Into that black magic shit, yeah. That’s a good point, it mighta been her own paranoia trying to kill here, but I don’t think it had nothin’ to do with us. She just worked it into a good story. I tell you what, though, she’s got this tape that I would really love to get, it’s pretty much why I still stay in touch with her. It’s of this public access show we were on after being in LA for about a month. It’s the original line-up of the band, and we were like the New York Dolls. There were people shooting up in the bathroom and we all just way too fucked up. We flipped off the producer and really cussed him out, and Ann’s got this all on tape somewhere. She won’t let up on that one, either; she’s got a lot of stories, but that one is true.

I really didn’t talk to her for along time, until she released that record. You know, I think she got about $30,000 for that, and it was just a demo. I remember there was a bonfire burning party with the jackets, she printed them up but not the actual album. I still have one, it’s pretty cool.

But, she got paid not to release the album, and 14 years later, she released it anyway? Did the statute of limitations run out, or something?

Shit, I dunno. I shoulda studied law. It’s like that thing in Germany – I’m starting to get the impression that you can pretty much do whatever you want, until somebody stops you. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The day we signed the contract, they gave us $10,000, just BAM, here it is. So we each had $2500 to run around LA with, but most of the money just went right into the band’s account. A few weeks later we got all our gear at the Guitar Center, and that cost about $60,000. That’s the first time I really called them on all this stuff. I walked in their and picked the most expensive drumset, some Sonar drums, the Signatures, thinking, “They’ll never give me these, but if I ask for them, they’ll give me something else, and it’ll still be nice” and I’ll be damned if I didn’t get ‘em. And when we went to Memphis, they set us all up with nice houses and cars. But we were on a per diem, it’s not like we were running around with shitloads of money like some rap star. I think we got $1500 a month. But our rent was paid, and all we had to do was sit around and write songs. Which didn’t help, in some cases. We had a LOT of free time on our hands.

There’s a theory that you got signed to Geffen so that you couldn’t be competition for Guns N’ Roses.

I don’t put much stock into that. I never saw any similarity between the bands. The look was kinda there, but the music was completely different. I know it kinda goes along with us being sequestered in Memphis, but that’s more like Ann’s death threat shit, I think, just more controversy about the band getting stirred up.

Well, why do you think they put you in Memphis?

Well, Jim Dickinson had just made that Replacements album, Pleased to Meet Me. That’s why we wanted to do the record with him, and he wasn’t gonna record anywhere but Memphis. He was pretty steadfast, and that was fine with me, because that’s where I’m from, this area. But I don’t think we were ‘sequestered’ here, or anything. For one thing, it was cheaper to live in Memphis. If we weren’t gonna tour, and we were just supposed to sit around and write some songs, then our money was going to go way further in Memphis than it would in LA. And number two, to be quite honest, there weren’t nearly as many drug connections. Because everybody knew about us in LA, the band was just littered with that shit. Eventually we made those connections anyway, but it wasn’t like in LA, where everybody was like, “Oh, when’s their singer gonna OD?”

Was it really that bad a situation, were you guys really considered a ‘drug’ band?

Oh yeah. I stayed clear, I just smoked pot and drank whiskey, but Bobby was such a focal point of the band, and he was a junkie since he was 14. They got him off the stuff in Memphis though, they got him a doctor and got him cleaned up. I don’t think a label would put up with a situation like ours nearly as long these days. Nowadays, I think you’d get dropped in a minute. Shit, I remember sitting in (then Geffen president) Eddie Rosenblatz’ office one day for a half-hour, waiting for my damn singer to show up for a meeting, and he tells me, right over the Geffen telephone lines, “Dude, I gotta cop, I can’t make it”. I was like Jesus, I don’t trust Geffen not to record their calls, you know? They knew what was going on and they tolerated a lot, but to tell you the truth, I don’t think a lot of that album could have been made in any other kind of circumstances. It’s not fabricated, you know.

That’s one of the things that resonates about that record, its authenticity.

How long were you out there for?

About a year and a half. We went to Nashville and auditioned guitar players first, that took about 5 months, and then we had pre-production and recorded, that took another 8 months. Then we sat around for another 6 months waiting for our tour and for the record to be released, so it was almost two years.

Is that why it was a double-album, because you had so long to record?

Yeah. There’s so many songs in the can, studio quality demos, probably more than a hundred unreleased songs. We’d go in an do a session like every town months, because we figured we had to look like we were working, since we were collecting these checks every month. Every time we went in, we probably recorded about 12 songs. I’ve always kept a few under my bed, and Bobby’s kept some, and Andy’s kept some, so there’s a shitload of stuff out there.

It still looks real cool. Double gatefold!

Yeah, I thought it was weird, a double album for a debut. I think that might have been a first. But it looked like the records I had growing up, so I thought that was cool.

Well, we were damn happy, I tell you that much. The main thing that freaked us out was getting on the Jimmy Page tour, because that guy was like a god to us. We went from hanging out in all the late night bars in Memphis, thinking we were never gonna do anything, to being told we were going to open up in the Forum in two weeks. We also played some shows with Joan Jett and the Georgia Satellites, but the Jimmy Page tour, that was the biggest deal to us, to see that every night. He would play “Stairway to Heaven” every night and the whole crowd would sing along, it was like being in some weird church. In retrospect, I think it would have been better to go out on the road after the record had been out for awhile, because it was a little Spinal Tap-ish. We’d play in some town, and the record wasn’t there.

That’s not good.

I didn’t get it, they spent all this money on us, you think they’d make sure they promoted us so they could make their money back. Now that right there, all the rumors about Geffen shelving us to keep us out of the way, it might hold some water, because why else wouldn’t they have out damn records in the store? What the fuck? I really knew something was up when they didn’t want to do a second video. It was for that song “Mary”, which was a Depp song. It would’ve been cool, because no one really knew who he was yet, either. I really figured that would have been the breakthrough song, but they wouldn’t do it, and they gave us every excuse in the world. But there was so much turmoil going on with our A&R team, we were like the children of a divorce getting shuttled between two A&R reps. We like the bastard childs of the label for about 8 months. But I never got a straight answer about why we never made that video. We still managed to milk the deal for another seven years, although they stopped paying us after awhile. They figured as long as they had Bobby on retainer, they didn’t really give a fuck about what we did.

So, what did you guys do after the Jimmy Page tour was over?

We went back and made our second record, which was real good. It was the natural extension of Young Man’s Blues. But the label didn’t like it, and send us back to record more. And then we started losing band members, because people lost interest. Me, Bobby and Andy stayed together, but we kept getting new guitar players. The label kept us on a retainer, but they never liked anything we recorded. In the past year, I’ve been digging that shit out and listening to it, and thinking, “This shit’s great!” So I don’t know what the theory on us was, or why they didn’t want to release any of that stuff, because they definitely could have made money on it.

So then what happened?

We moved back to LA, we figured, nothing was happening in Memphis. That’s when I ran into Jimmy Bain, you know, from the Dio band. You know about the Brian Robertson thing, right?

No.

Ok, so I’m hanging out at Jimmy’s one night and I tell him about we can’t get our guitar player to move out to LA, and he figures out the time zone and calls fuckin’ Glasgow or someplace and gets Brain Robertson on the phone. Now, I’d have killed somebody when I was a kid if they said something bad about Thin Lizzy, and here I am talking to Brian Robertson. So I sent him a tape, and he was all into it. So then I talk to Geffen, and I say, I know he’s a little older than us, but listen to this guy play! They sent us to London and we recorded with him. I think there’s a 4 song demo of that session. And Geffen paid for it, and then they just sat on it. So we kept trying stuff, and nothing happened. But we were playing shows and some guy from Atlantic saw us at the China Club, and asked us to audition for the label. So went and told Geffen, and somebody, I think our lawyer, came up with this idea for us to declare bankruptcy. I think they swindled the shit out of us, really. They said, “You’ll declare bankruptcy against the Geffen contract and everything you owe. You’ll be off the hook with them, and then you’ll sign this deal with Atlantic.” So we did, and a week later, nothing was happening with Atlantic. I think it was all a scam by Geffen to get out our contract. It’s like leaving your wife for a hot girl, and then she won’t have anything to do with you once you’ve thrown your wife out.

So what year was this, now?

About 1990. We didn’t know what else to do, so we booked ourselves a tour of Japan.

It was great. It’s no wonder bands love going over there. It was expensive as hell, but everybody treated us real good, and the fans were great. But anyway, when we came back from that, that’s when we spit up. We got to the airport, and went out separate ways. I didn’t see ol’ Bobby Durango for about 8 years after that.

But you’re in touch with him now?

Yeah well, he moved back to Memphis, which was good for him. But he’s real reclusive. I think maybe now that I’m doing stuff like this, he might get into it a little more. I played with him a couple times, but the thing about Memphis is, it’s not easy finding rock musicians to play with. That’s why we all went to LA in the first place, to find people to play with.

-Sleazegrinder

 Some Video of the ROCK CITY ANGELS

This one was taken while on tour with JIMMY PAGE in 1988

at the

LOS ANGELES FORUM

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