Yet Another Feature On The Wonderful "AUTOGRAPH"!

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Yet Another Feature On The Wonderful "AUTOGRAPH"!

Sylvie Simmons

Another dandy L.A. band! “Best New Band Yet!” according to the cover of last August’s CREEM, and would they lie to you? We’re talking all vital requirements taken care of: bandanas, black stuff, birdchests, tattoos, scalp hair, spandex, anorexia, close personal friendship with Motley Crue, and, if that’s not enough, all of them—for the convenience of rock writers whose brain cells have been finally reduced to the two or three needed to find their mouth, nod at appropriate moments, and say “Charge this to RCA" to barmen, cab drivers and pizza delivery boys—are called "Steve”! A revolutionary new idea that all bands should pick up on! There’s Steve Plunkett, a man bold enough not to change his name, who sings, plays guitar and looks like Michael Des Barres bonking Little Orphan Annie at a David-Lee-Roth-Facial-GestureLovers convention, there’s Steve Lynch, lead guitarist, whose stints with Greg Lake and Savoy Brown have done nothing to soil his H.M.-heartthrob looks, and Steve Isham, who looks as a metal man should, and him with a history doing sessions for Mike Chapman’s Dreamland and all, and there’s Randy Rand (OK, I lied: hell, his real name's probably Steve) who plays bass, exquisite taste in hair-dyes, is something of an artist (as in Picasso), and has wisely supplemented his rock earning by trashing journalists at poker (and wisely won this gush by not trashing your author) and finally Keni Richards, who as Roy Trakin pointed out, looks a lot like John Belushi, but a lot more like all drummers except Carl Palmer, Cozy Powell and others beginning with ‘P’ look, i.e. not someone you’d mess with. He probably looks even more tattooed by now, since he was telling me about meeting up with Nikki Sixx to visit the world’s ace skin-pricker. Collectively they're known as Autograph.

Hell, you know them! They had a hit single with “Turn Up The Radio," a hit alhum Sian In Please, and it wouldn’t surprise me if “Blondes In Black Cars" has taken over MTV, as it rightly and justly should. But I hadn’t the foggiest who they were when I flew over from London (where their second album hasn’t even been released yet!) to Chicago to meet them. Until the splendid smell of leather and Jim Beam and those other signals to the olfactory glands that ROCK BAND is within radar distance hit me, I was wondering why Motley Crue wanted that godawful govt.-sanctioned Loverboyinfluenced Soviet Band Aid band to open up on their tour...

I have before me a bowl of nuts, several cups of coffee, Marlboros (Randy’s), Heinekens, and two men thinner than the hairs on Kevin DuBrow’s head pre-rugtransplant; one with copious red curls, the other with dyed black hair sticking over the matching visor like several octopi dancing at a Hawkwind gig; and I’m asking them why it is that all these L.A. bands have got the look, the sound, the stance, the attitude, and Plunk is telling me, “It’s the environment. That’s how you live in L.A. when you’re a rock ’n’ roller and we’re exactly like that.” And Randy is telling me, “If you have five dollars, you go and drink instead of eat. That’s the attitude there. It’s a good-time thing. Because everything is so expensive, you almost know you’re not going to make it, so you might as well have a great time anyway. We all got together and said, ‘We’ll never make it, so we might as well all dress up as weird as we want to and have fun...’”

John Mendelssohn would say they dress weird. I don’t think they dress weird. Then again, my family has refused to be seen in public with me since I was 10 years old. There was a businessman in the hotel lift with us who seemed to think they looked weirder than weird, like they’d just crawled out of a cave, like they look intent on ravishing his daughter, ravishing his wife as well! Is Autograph the sort of band parents wouldn’t want their kids to grow up like, let alone listen to, I ask? Tippa Gore has made me conscious of my responsibility here.

“We’re a bit borderline on that one,” says Randy. “I think we’re the kind of bands parents would not want their kids to grow up to be like,” Plunk interrupts, “but I don’t think they would mind the kids listening to our music. We’re very positive. We have a party attitude, a let’shave-a-good-time attitude. But we definitely don’t have a typical heavy metal attitude.”

All together now: What's a typical heavy metal attitude?

“Generally, it’s let’s go out there and show the audience who's boss, us against the world! And with us, it’s fuck it, we’re all here together, let’s have a good time.”

“You guys are feeling as bad as we are,” says Randy, “so we might as well do it together.”

“If we weren’t up onstage,” says Plunk, “we’d be out in the audience anyway.”

“We’re rock ’n’ roll fanatics,” says Randy. “We can’t wait for the new albums to come out. We’re just like little kids, too.”

They don’t particularly, as Trakin pointed out, look like little kids. Then again, few of these L.A. bands do. Before the transplant, Kevin DuBrow looked older than my father, and probably was. Unlike England, which we all know is topdog when it comes to instant superduperdom in rock, overnight sensations your side of the water can take up to 10 or 15 years. All of Autograph are veterans of the L.A. rock circuit. Plunk and Randy were together in an L.A. band called Wolfgang, which they reckoned was pretty big, though I can’t say as I remember them. Anyway, Wolfgang got passed by in the Big Signing Binge during the Years of the Crue, but Plunk is man enough to say “I don’t think we had the material or the right chemistry anyway. If we’d been signed I don't think we would have made it.” The other little Wolfgangs faded back into obscurity, and Randy moved on to Lita Ford’s backing band, while Plunk went up to San Francisco wimp-rock band Silver Condor. Now I remember Silver Condor! I got dragged along to meet them on a particularly dull day midway through an even duller Journey junket, what with being on the same label and there’s no such thing as a free Heineken. “Well, it paid the bills,” says Plunk. “What it was is Earl Slick and I were good friends, so when he wanted to put the band together at the beginning I did some writing with him and we wrote a song for the first album, and then that band kind of fell apart, and I was friends with the singer, so I just kind of came in and helped them get a second album done.”

“After we put the Covergirl on...we’re enjoying it!” —Randy Rand

Which only goes to show you, you should be careful who your friends are. But to move on. Where did they find all these Steves?

“We were just all friends, you know— you meet people, play with certain people, and you say ‘I like the way that guy plays’ or ‘I like his attitude.’”

“We also knew,” says Randy, “that if we all got together we couldn’t get fired!”

If they won’t tell you / will. They found Keni in an A&M band I’ve never heard of called the Coup. Steve Lynch was doing session work while writing a guitar instruction manual called The Right Touch, and Steve Isham seems to have played with everybody in Los Angeles. Autograph started as something they did on the side—they made a demo, were talked into making a better demo by producer friend Andy Johns, which got them a manager, a record deal, and an offer from David Lee Roth, another friend, to tour with Van Halen. At which point they thought they might as well give the other stuff up and do it full-time.

“We didn’t want to make a commitment and quit all our other stuff just to become another bar band,” says Plunk, ‘‘because we’d all done that before.”

Keni got them the Van Halen gig. Apparently Keni and David go jogging round L.A. together. At least they’re sensible enough to go for a drink afterwards. One particular drink happened to be consumed at the Troubadour where Autograph’s demo just happened to be in the tape recorder, ‘‘and that’s where David heard our tape and said, ‘Why don’t you guys come out on the road with us.’”

That easy.

“No, it was rough. It was rough touring with Van Halen without a record deal, without any money. We were lucky to get from town to town.”

“We were in a motorhome that kept breaking down on us,” says Randy, “and we were hoping to get to the gig on time. It’s a funny story, but I wouldn’t want to go through it again.”

Those of sensitive dispositions are asked to move to the next paragraph, as Plunk is about to describe Keni Richards throwing up on Edward Van Halen’s foot!

“It was scary as shit. When we got off the stage our drummer threw up on Edward Van Halen’s foot! But luckily it all worked out.” Sounds like it did.

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So they get the hit single and the hit album (“Not that quick! The band got together, made an album, had a hit’—that’s what it looks like. We were sweating bullets, believe me. For three months it did nothing, didn’t sell more than 5,000 albums, so we were scared.”) and now they’ve got the ultimate accolade of a second CREEMrelated appearance, where they get to answer questions like, what records do you have in common in your record collection?

“AC/DC.” Randy. “We love Bon Scott. Talk about attitude! If we don’t hear Bon before we go onstage we’re a little shaky.”

“We all grew up listening to the same kind of metal music.” Plunk. “Early Deep Purple, the Who...”

“To me,” Plunk continues, undaunted, “everything basically has been done in rock ’n’ roll at one time or another. The only thing to do now is to redo a theme in a different way. The only thing to me that can make a band or an album different now is the individual chemistry of the people playing on it. And I think that’s what we have going for us.

“And it’s real” (“It’s loud,” Randy interrupts.) “If we were living in castles and doing black magic we’d be writing about that. But we’re not.”

“And we’re not political at all,” boasts Randy. “We could give a fuck, to tell you the truth, because that’s going to work itself out one way or the other and there’s nothing we can do about it. Our job is to have fun at all costs.”