Cocked & Loaded

Cocked & Loaded is the second L.A. Guns album, released by Vertigo on 19 August 1989. The line-up is Phil Lewis on vocals, Tracii Guns and Mick Cripps on guitars, Kelly Nickels on bass and Steve Riley on drums. It came eighteen months after the debut and it is the record the band is known by. Fourteen songs, about fifty-five minutes. "Rip and Tear" went out first — fast, and very much this band — and did nothing on the charts. The ballad that followed it, "The Ballad of Jayne", took hold on MTV and became the band's biggest hit. Songfacts records that bassist Kelly Nickels and Phil Lewis wrote it, with the credit split across the whole band because that is how they divided songwriting. "Never Enough", "I Wanna Be Your Man", "Rip and Tear" and "The Ballad of Jayne" are all still in the live set: four of the closing songs at the Guild Theatre in 2025 come from this album. The Japanese pressing was PPD-1032, and a Japanese single of "Rip and Tear" (PPDS-9) followed on 25 September that year.