It’s an interesting and telling twist of rock and roll fate that Los Angeles-based rock band Little Caesar has now been back touring and recording more than three times as long as their first incarnation. Formed by vocalist/songwriter Ron Young in 1987, the band began making a name for itself on the crowded local club scene, standing out from most other bands with their no-nonsense, frill-less approach to hard rock music.
The band eventually earned a record deal with Geffen after releasing an independent EP to great acclaim in 1989. Their self-titled debut for Geffen came out in 1990 and spawned two hit singles/videos, one was a blistering cover of the Aretha Franklin classic Chain of Fools and the other was an original entitled In Your Arms.
But as with many of the L.A. bands, be they hair metal or not, Little Caesar got caught up in the seismic changes within the record industry brought on by corporate takeovers and the onset of grunge and soon found themselves out of a record deal after a second album, Influence came out in 1992. That year, the band reformed, with Young and his confreres going in different directions before coming back together due to popular demand for some live shows in 2001.
A few lineup changes later and the band released its first album of new material. Redemption, in 2009, followed by American Dream in 2012 and a live album in 2015. After a rotating cadre of guitar players, a solidified Little Caesar roster has released Eight, its first studio album in six years.
Young feels Eight is the band’s best work in a while and gives a good deal of the credit for the cohesive sound and rockin’ vibe of the album to the solidification of the Little Caesar lineup with the addition of guitarist Mark Tremalgia early in 2017.
“We were having a problem keeping a regular guitar player. It’s really plagued us since the first record. I think Mark is now the seventh guitar player we’ve had in this band and the fourth in the last 10 years. I just told Loren and Tom that I don’t want to make a record until we get that fifth guy. It has to be a guy who is locked in and is the right guy personality wise. So, we decided to put out a double live record in 2015 [Brutally Honest Live from Holland] because we had it in the can and I just held off on new material until we had the right fit,” he explained.
“And then when we got Mark Tremalgia in the band he just fit like a glove, musically and personally – everything about it was awesome. And now we’re back to being a band. To me, there’s something special about five guys in a band slogging it out together. It’s like a motorcycle club, there’s something about it where everybody is contributing, and everybody’s creativity is take in. Once that all fell into place, I knew it was the time for a new album.
“So, we sat down, and we had all these great song ideas and all these other ideas that had been brewing around for a few years and we just pulled them off the phones or recording devices and it all just came together really quickly.”
The album was produced by Bruce Witkin (Hollywood Vampires) a good pal of Young’s and recorded with a sense of urgent intensity over a comparatively short period of time.
“We did the record in like 22 days. Since day one we’ve always wanted to record like the records we loved growing up. We knew we had the songs, so we went in and just pic up the microphones and Bruce and his team got great sounds and captured great performances by the guys in the bad. We did a handful of takes, mixed it, mastered it and it’s done. Don’t overthink it, don’t overwork it. Make it be a moment captured in time and get the best energy and feeling out of the song,” he said.
“That doesn’t require the hundreds of thousands of dollars that we needed when Bob Rock was being beamed in. For us this approach is very freeing because it forces us to make the record that we’re committed to making and capture the live energy. We went in and did that.”
The album – and the band itself for that matter – is essentially an indy operation, with Young handling everything from the graphic design to booking the travel for the band. There was some discussion about releasing the album independently as well until Young was approached by an up and coming rock label in Australia called Golden Robot Records.
“A lot of bands have to either make do with very little money from labels or do it themselves and do a distribution deal to get the album out there because the labels know exactly what they’re getting that way and they get it and can yes this has some commercial viability. So, it’s very freeing for us because we don’t have any A&R guys looking over our shoulder. But there is a very famous A&R guy named Derek Shulman, and he’s worked with AC DC and a million people, and was also in the band Gentle Giant. He is a big fan of the band and has started working with this label out of Australia that wants to become more of a worldwide thing and looking to expand their roster,” Young said of Golden Robot.
“So, it was perfect timing for us. I said let’s finish the record and I will send them the masters and if they liked it we could finish the discussion. And that’s what happened. They were really excited about the record and thought it was really good. And I just said for them to match what I put into making it with promotion and we created this modern relationship that is different than many bands who just want tons of money thrown at them like in the old days. Those days are long gone.
“We have learned how to be lean and mean and we have learnt how to be realistic. Lower expectations lead to no disappointments. So, it all works out well. We’re happy and having a great time and making some of the best music in our careers.”
As fiercely independent as he has ever been Young said he and fellow Little Caesar co-founders Loren Molinare (guitars) and drummer Tom Morris chose to reform the band in 2001 for the sheer joy of making, recording and performing original music again – record industry be damned.
“When we got back together the first thing we said was we’re doing this purely for fun and not for commerce. It’s got to be a labour of art and a labour of love and we have to be fully prepared to do this. Some guys go fishing, some guys go golfing, some guys go hunting – we’re going to go play music. The focus has got to be on the music, on the camaraderie, connecting with the fans, all that sort of stuff. It can’t be focused so much on any of the business stuff, so there’s none of the politics,” Young said.
“By doing it that way for the past 17 years or so has made it incredibly pleasurable. We are all incredibly focused and I am grateful for it. People have said for years that we should be huge, almost as if they lament for me. And I try to tell them, listen if I really got what I wished for, I would be dead or an asshole – one of the two. And I don’t want to be either.”
As a band that had lots of critical success but perhaps didn’t reach the sales heights of many of the bands of that era – the so-called hair metal era of which Young adamantly insists Little Caesar was no part of whatsoever – they enjoyed their success, and when reuniting in 2001 had no pressure to live up to a mega-huge past.
“I know a lot of guys that sold a couple million albums which is enough to get them hooked into this as a means of support. And as the industry has gotten smaller and tighter and harder to deal with, especially as you get older, I have serious empathy for those guys. They have to pay so much attention to budgets and tour routing and have to look at what they’re doing under a completely different light than we do. And it’s hard on them, it’s a real grind. And because of the nature of the industry, they have to cut way back on what it was like for them 25 years ago, so they’re humping their own gear, and doubling up on rooms and travelling in vans. And these are guys in their late 50s or early 60s. I really have a lot of respect and admiration for their tenacity, but man oh man I do not envy that lifestyle,” he said.
“It’s easy for us to go out for three or four weeks and do that a few times a year because we’re not counting on it as our main revenue stream. For these other guys, they are trying squeeze as much revenue as they can out of VIP packages and stuff like that. And it isn’t like you’re 25 years old again and can just jump on the bus and go wherever life takes you.”
To a degree, the lack of obnoxiously massive success for Little Caesar came partially because there was more than a little confusion amongst label marketers, the press and fans as to the band’s identity. They were often lumped in with the hair bands of that era but looked like bikers and sounded like a mix of AC/DC, Thin Lizzy and 1970s ZZ Top.
“We have been really trying to dodge the hair metal label since 1989. People think that just because we come from L.A. and come up through the ranks with all these other bands we must be the same. We’re just a straight-ahead blues-based rock band. We’re not a hair metal band. We’re not a pop metal band. I have been working hard to get us lumped in with the likes of AC/DC, ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bad Company, not the Wingers, Warrants and Poisons,” said Young.
“We were always fans of music before we were makers of music and we have a reverence for the bands that came before us and who still influence us to this day. We never broke any new ground and we never claimed to break any new ground. We just happened to pull in some different musical spices, put it in the pot and created something that has a unique flavour. It’s like chili: there are many types and brands of chili, but its still chili. We just do our own brand of chili and we’re totally comfortable with that.
“We’re always going back into our blues records and our R&B records. I was influenced by a lot of the blues and R&B guys of the 1960s, just like Paul Rodgers [Free, Bad Company] and Rod Stewart. They all heard Motown and it was like oh my God this music is magical. So, when we sit down to make new music, we’re looking to just go to the cupboard and pull out all these things that we love and mix and match it all up. We see of the hook is strong enough, is the chord change good, is the lyric not moronic. We take a little bit of humour, a little bit of intelligence and a little bit of life observations and try to match it to the music we’ve composed.”
One of the standout tracks on Eight is the song Vegas, a raunchy rocker that takes a serious poke at the modern cult of celebrity and the commodification of so many things we used to hold near and dear in life.
“It’s sort of my personal observation of the selfie stick generation – the Kardashianization of our culture here in America, where you have these people who think they’re hunters, but they are really grazers. And they are delusional in their thinking that they are going to find fame and glamour and success just by overexposing themselves. In this piece of music, one individual realized that they want to be hunters, but they can’t make it in L.A. or Hollywood, one for aesthetic reasons and the other for lack of intelligence.
“Vegas is the perfect town for them to wind up in because it’s the only city that’s even more plastic than L.A. I know this isn’t going to win us many fans there, but I got stuck there for six months building a venue and I was ready to put a bullet in my head. Hollywood is a city based on creating illusions of things that don’t exist. But Vegas has taken that and turned it into a combination of Disneyland and a whorehouse. It’s every bad thing in the human element that’s possible: consumerism, excess, greed, illusions, everything. And it’s wrapped up in one city and it’s elevated and propagated and keeps growing and sustaining itself.”
Crushed Velvet is another commentary on the illusory nature of fame and how some people try anything to maintain their glamour and glory and youth.
“It’s our little story about so many women in Hollywood who still think that they are in their glory days and are really way past their expiry date. You can see many of them at the Rainbow Bar and Grill every Friday and Saturday night. It’s actually the song that’s been around for the longest. We did it for the live record but wanted to re-record it in the studio for this new album because it went down so well with audiences. It worked out great because Mark came in and we cut some new slide guitar stuff and added it to what we had, and it really reinvigorated the song.”
Time Enough for That is a pensive, thoughtful song whose lyrics were actually written by bassist Pharaoh Barrett, who has been in the band since 2015 – the first time Young didn’t have a hand in the words on a Little Caesar track.
“He came to rehearsal one night during the writing process for Eight and he said, ‘remember that ballady thing we were working on the other night? I wrote a melody and lyrics to it. Are you cool with it because I know you always write the melody and lyrics?’ And I said let’s hear it. But I also told him on principal I don’t care, if something’s good, it’s good. And he sang it and I was blown away. He is an award-winning effects and CGI guy so he’s smart and I really liked it, and his words were so appropriate to the music and I thought it was a good story, because we are always sitting around talking about stuff. And this song is about being in the moment and being grateful for the fact the we still get to do this thing, and how that concept of gratitude should be built into your relationships and everything in life and how we’d all be better off if we did that. It makes it a lot easier to sing a lyric that you actually believe in and he nailed it with this one.”
Judging by the great reviews and raucous reception at Little Caesar shows thus far, it’s fair to say that Young and his bandmates ‘nailed it’ with Eight as a whole.
The band will be touring Europe later in May and into June before returning to North America for some shows over the summer. Young said he is working on solidifying some Canadian dates as well.
For more information, visit www.littlecaesar.net.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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