BLACK'N BLUE TRIVIA
Trivia
Black 'N Blue first played Japan in November 1984, the year of the debut album. The artist profile by Marquee/Avalon, which released Hell Yeah! in Japan, says the catchy songs of the debut, "Hold On to 18" among them, caught on in Japan and the band made their first visit that November. In 2020 Tommy Thayer posted on X the photo for his Japanese visa application, taken on his birthday in 1984, noting that the band toured Japan in November that year.
Black 'N Blue first appeared on record on Metal Massacre, the compilation that was Metal Blade Records' very first release, out on 14 June 1982. Their track was "Chains Around Heaven", and it sat alongside the label's pick of unsigned Los Angeles acts such as Metallica, Ratt and Malice. On the vinyl reissue Metal Blade put out for its 40th anniversary in 2022, the song opens side two, which closes with Metallica's "Hit the Lights". The Geffen deal came afterwards, and "Chains Around Heaven" went on to close the debut album, Black'n Blue.
The Lost Tapes, the EP Tommy Thayer and Jaime St. James released on 3 June 2022, collects five unreleased songs recorded in the late 1980s. Only the two of them play on it, so it came out under the name Thayer – St. James rather than Black 'N Blue. The recordings had been kept for over thirty years on two-inch multitrack tape and quarter-inch two-track mixes, the pair explain on their site, but both had deteriorated beyond use; after some searching, a DAT and a cassette were the only usable sources left, and the songs were finished from those with some digital polishing. The tracks are "Sweet Sensation", "American Man", "Time", "Ballad of the Bullet" and "Work It".
According to Tommy Thayer, Black 'N Blue started in Portland, Oregon, in 1981, when he, Jaime St. James and the others set out to form a new heavy metal band: the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was beginning to reach America, and Mötley Crüe had appeared in Los Angeles. St. James had been the drummer in the band they had before. One night at a Portland club, Thayer recalls, St. James moved up to the front of the stage and took over as the band's frontman. The official timeline dates the formation to the autumn of 1981.
Tommy Thayer told Burrn! magazine that the band first met Kiss at a pre-show meet-and-greet at Long Beach Arena on the Animalize tour, just after their debut came out. About six months later, with Without Love out, their manager Warren Entner called to say they would be opening Kiss's Asylum tour, starting a month later. The first night was in Little Rock, Arkansas. Early in the run, Gene Simmons walked over to Thayer and Jaime St. James after a soundcheck and suggested they change the announcement that brought them on stage, because it sounded too much like the one used by a certain band that had been around for a very long time. They agreed on the spot.
Ron Keel of Keel sings on "Best in the West", the closing track of Nasty Nasty, and Kiss's Peter Criss is on it too. Jaime St. James says he brought Criss in himself after running into him and his wife at the Rainbow. Criss was reluctant because he and Gene Simmons had not spoken for years, so his wife later gave St. James his number and urged him to talk him round. On the night Criss finally came down, nothing at all was recorded: Simmons and Criss spent it swapping stories in the studio. The brass on the song was Tommy Thayer's and St. James's idea; Simmons was taken aback when they brought in a horn section, St. James says, and conceded they had been right once he heard the result.
Hell Yeah! began life as a Jaime St. James solo album. Around 2003, he says, he had a solo deal in England and called Jeff "Woop" Warner, who had a studio, to suggest they make it a Black 'N Blue record instead. In May 2003 the album was reported as due that September through the British label Z Records, but in February 2004 St. James became Warrant's singer, and their touring stalled the record. The band started up again in 2008 after he left Warrant, yet there were more delays: Warner lost his studio and they had to find another, and the band, then on a different label, ran out of money to finish. In the end their manager Jeff Keller brokered a deal in which Frontiers bought them out of the old contract and put up a little more money, and the album finally came out in 2011.
On 9 October 2010 Black 'N Blue were inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame, and the classic five-piece, Tommy Thayer included, reunited for the ceremony at the Roseland Theatre in Portland. Their introduction came from Peter Tashjian, son of their manager Garo, who told how five young rockers barely out of high school had set off for Hollywood in 1983. After receiving their plaques they played a 30-minute set that took in "Hold On to 18", "Miss Mystery" and "Nasty Nasty". Thayer needed clearance from Kiss to take part, Jaime St. James noted, but this was a night he could not miss. For St. James it was one of the happiest nights of his life: the band had played its own songs rather than covers, landed fewer club gigs as a result, and had long felt that Portland never gave it its due.
Hell Yeah! came out in Japan first. Marquee/Avalon's Japanese edition (MICP-10983) was released on 20 April 2011, more than three weeks ahead of Europe (13 May) and North America (17 May), with "I Smell a Rat" added as a bonus track.
The official timeline has Black 'N Blue signing to Geffen Records in 1983 and recording the debut, Black'n Blue, in Germany with Dieter Dierks, the producer known for his work with Scorpions. Released in 1984, the album gave them a single and an MTV video in "Hold On to 18". The song is credited to Tommy Thayer and Jaime St. James, and a 1983 recording of it is on Rarities, the 2007 collection of rare tracks.
In November 2025 Tommy Thayer and Jaime St. James released Bombshell, a six-song EP and the first new music they had written and recorded side by side since the late 1980s. St. James says they began at the very end of 2024 and spent most of 2025 writing and recording. Like The Lost Tapes, it is credited to Thayer – St. James rather than Black 'N Blue, because only the two of them are on it. Their site also sells an LP with Bombshell on side A and The Lost Tapes on side B.
On 27 August 2025 Black 'N Blue released 2 Song Bruiser on Bandcamp: "Lifeline", from 1984, and "The Real Mr. Green", from 1985, songs written and demoed back then but never properly recorded. The new recordings are by the three original members Jaime St. James, Patrick Young and Pete Holmes with guitarists Brandon Cook and Mick Caldwell, produced, recorded and mixed by Rob Daiker. Posting the video for "Lifeline" in October, the band wrote on Facebook that they would make more if the release broke even, and that would be all if it did not.
On the official site, the band's five current members, Jaime St. James, Patrick Young, Pete Holmes, Brandon Cook and Mick Caldwell, are followed by a heading that reads "Missing in Action", under which Tommy Thayer and Jeff "Woop" Warner are listed. Sleaze Roxx dates Cook's arrival in Warner's place to 2013. The other guitar slot went to Bobby Capka around April 2017 and to Doug Rappoport in 2021, and Caldwell plays on the band's 2025 recordings.
Kiss's Gene Simmons produced Nasty Nasty (1986) and In Heat. Jaime St. James remembers him sitting in the rehearsal room listening to the songs and giving notes, and advising St. James to make himself, not other people, the subject of his lyrics; in the end, St. James adds, the band still did what it wanted. Tommy Thayer said working with Simmons was great because they were Kiss fans to begin with, and remembered him as diligent and committed, someone who put a great deal of time into the production.
"Violent Kid" was written in 1981 and has been in Black 'N Blue's set since the club days, yet it is on none of their studio albums. Jaime St. James says the band wanted it on the 1984 debut but Geffen left it off, and that John Kalodner, the A&R man who signed them to the label, hated it. St. James, a long-time Kix fan, says the song was influenced by Steve Whiteman, and thinks it never changed because no producer ever got hold of it. They put it on the live album One Night Only simply to get it on a record, and a 1982 recording, credited to Thayer and St. James, opens the 2007 collection Rarities.
Gene Simmons's link with Tommy Thayer outlasted the two Black 'N Blue albums he produced. According to Loudwire, the two stayed in touch and co-wrote "Betrayed" and "The Street Giveth and the Street Taketh Away" for Kiss's 1989 album Hot in the Shade. Rather than re-record the songs, Kiss overdubbed the original demos, so Thayer's guitar is still on the finished tracks.
After the 1989 split, the five original members came back together for one night only: a show at Key Largo in Portland on 31 October 1997, staged to make a live album. Jaime St. James says the live record was Tommy Thayer's idea, and the band agreed to reunite for it and nothing more. With Thayer, Pete Holmes and St. James living in Los Angeles and Patrick Young and Jeff Warner in Portland, they met in Portland, rehearsed a couple of times in a warehouse and went on. The recording was handled by Pat Regan, an engineer and producer who had played keyboards on In Heat, and the show came out the following year as One Night Only – Live. Thayer has said they always knew it would be a one-off.
For every album of nine or ten songs, Black 'N Blue wrote twenty to twenty-two. Jaime St. James said in 2017 that he and Tommy Thayer wrote enough between 1982 and 1988 for two more records, recorded cheaply on a four-track during rehearsals, and that the cassettes sit in a box in his garage. Rarities, released by Crash Music Classics in 2007, is a set of demos and live recordings St. James rescued and remastered from those cassettes. It has a 1982 "Violent Kid" and a 1983 "Hold On to 18", along with his 2002 demos of "So Long" and "Hell Yeah", two titles that also appear on Hell Yeah! in 2011.
Hell Yeah! was the first Black 'N Blue album without Tommy Thayer. His replacement, guitarist Shawn Sonnenschein, had played in a Portland band with Patrick Young, and Jaime St. James says he took him on purely on Young's and Warner's word, without ever having heard him play. None of the songs were reworked old ideas: they were new songs by St. James and Jeff "Woop" Warner, with the odd riff from Sonnenschein, and St. James's own favourite, "Target", is Warner's. When St. James played Thayer the demos and rough mixes, Thayer told them they were doing fine without him.
For Hell Yeah!, Black 'N Blue brought back their original logo, given a modern touch. Announcing the album, Jaime St. James called it their first studio recording since 1988 and a cross between all their earlier records, heavy for the most part, but one that put him in mind of the debut, which was why the old logo returned.