L.A. GUNS BIOGRAPHY

L.A. GUNS
Biography

Overview

L.A. Guns is a hard rock band started in Los Angeles in 1983 by the guitarist Tracii Guns. It reached the centre of the Sunset Strip with its 1988 debut, after Phil Lewis — previously the singer in the British band Girl — joined in 1987. Cleopatra Records, the band's current label, introduces them as "L.A.'s longest standing Sunset Strip era hard rock outfit".

The name is also, quite literally, half of another band's. The L.A. Guns Tracii Guns led merged with Axl Rose's Hollywood Rose in 1985 to become Guns N' Roses; Guns left soon afterwards and rebuilt L.A. Guns. King Records, introducing the Japanese editions, describes him as the guitarist who worked alongside Axl Rose in the Hollywood Rose days.

This site carries sixteen records: the fifteen studio albums from the 1988 debut to Leopard Skin in 2025, plus the 2026 concert album Live from the Guild Theatre.

1983 to 1987 — where the name divided

Tracii Guns started the band in Los Angeles in 1983. In 1985 it merged with Axl Rose's Hollywood Rose to become Guns N' Roses, but Guns did not stay long in the new group. He left, took the L.A. Guns name with him and put his own band back together. From that point the two followed completely different roads: one became a worldwide phenomenon, the other built itself up from the clubs of the Sunset Strip.

In 1987 the band brought in Phil Lewis, who had been singing with the British hard rock band Girl. His voice had a different texture from most of the singers working in Los Angeles at the time, and that one choice is what turned the band from another Strip act into one that could make records.

1988 to 1994 — the Vertigo years

The debut, L.A. Guns, came out on Vertigo in January 1988. In Japan it has always carried a Japanese title of its own; the pressing at the time was PPD-1043, and Universal Music Japan reissued it as a limited budget edition (UICY-78616) on 14 March 2018. "Sex Action", "One More Reason", "Electric Gypsy" and "Hollywood Tease" are all already here — four songs still in the live set nearly forty years later.

The second album, Cocked & Loaded, released in August 1989, is the record the band is known by. The line-up was Phil Lewis on vocals, Tracii Guns and Mick Cripps on guitars, Kelly Nickels on bass and Steve Riley on drums. "Rip and Tear" went out as the first single 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 Kelly Nickels and Phil Lewis wrote it, with the credit split across the whole band because that is how they divided songwriting. On the subject, Lewis has said that Nickels had the actress Jayne Mansfield in mind while he himself was thinking about every unsuccessful actress ending up a waitress and fading into Hollywood.

On the third album, Hollywood Vampires (June 1991), the opening "Over the Edge" was used in Point Break that same year and went out on MTV alongside "Kiss My Love Goodbye", "Some Lie 4 Love" and "It's Over Now". This is the record from the point where the band reached furthest. Universal Music Japan reissued it on SHM-CD on 25 March 2026 as UICY-16387 with a bonus track, "Ain't the Same".

Vicious Circle, the fourth album, came in 1994 and was the last the band made under Vertigo / PolyGram. Fifteen songs, leaning towards weight and speed, with a cover of Ten Years After's "I'd Love to Change the World" at number eleven.

1996 to 2005 — labels and singers change

American Hardcore (1996) came out on CMC International. It brought in programming and an industrial surface, taking a deliberate step away from the Sunset Strip sound of the eighties, and it remains the most divisive record in the catalogue. BMG Funhouse issued the Japanese edition on 21 November as BVCP-984.

Phil Lewis left after it, and Jizzy Pearl of Love/Hate sang on Shrinking Violet in 1999 — the only studio album this band has made without Lewis. The Japanese edition appeared on 24 July 1999 as ZACB-1008.

Lewis returned for Man in the Moon (2001), and Waking the Dead followed in 2002. That record was the last Tracii Guns played on before leaving; Lewis and Steve Riley then carried the band, and made Tales from the Strip in 2005.

2006 to 2016 — two L.A. Guns

From 2006 there were two groups working under the name at once: one led by Phil Lewis and Steve Riley, the other by Tracii Guns. Hollywood Forever, which the Lewis / Riley line released in 2012, is the last studio record made in that period. The title comes from the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, and the album deals fairly directly in the memory of the city the band came out of.

MusicBrainz keeps the name as three separate artists, and this site follows that line. Renegades (2020) and The Dark Horse (2024) are records by Riley's L.A. Guns, the band Steve Riley led until his death in 2023, and they are not in the discography here. They stream under the same name, which makes the confusion easy, but they are a different band's work.

2017 onwards — the reunion, and Japan

In 2017 Phil Lewis and Tracii Guns returned to the same band. The first record of it was The Missing Peace that October, and the title says outright what it closed. In the same month the band played Loud Park 17 at Saitama Super Arena on 14 and 15 October, their first Japanese show in a long time. Writing about Leopard Skin years later, King Records noted that the band had been releasing records steadily ever since that visit.

The count bears it out: The Devil You Know (2019), Checkered Past (2021), Black Diamonds (2023) and Leopard Skin (2025) — five studio albums in seven years. Leopard Skin turns away from the metallic direction of the two before it and back to the sleazy rock and roll the band was built on; King Records introduced the Japanese edition as a record on which "the passion of the early days and hard rock and roll explode".

On 10 July 2025 the band played a launch show for Leopard Skin at the Guild Theatre in Menlo Park, California, and that night became the following year's concert album, Live from the Guild Theatre. The line-up at that point was Phil Lewis on vocals, Tracii Guns and Ace Von Johnson on guitars, Johnny Martin on bass and Shawn Duncan as touring drummer.

For 2026 a long tour of the United Kingdom and Europe has been announced, with the band then coming home to Los Angeles to play the Whisky a Go Go on New Year's Eve — the room they came out of in the first place.

Members (as of 2026)

Name	Role	Note
Phil Lewis	Vocals	Joined 1987; previously of the British band Girl
Tracii Guns	Guitar	Founder, 1983; left in 2002 and returned in 2017
Ace Von Johnson	Guitar	Named as current line-up on the official site
Johnny Martin	Bass	Named as current line-up on the official site
Shawn Duncan	Drums	Touring drummer; plays on Live from the Guild Theatre

A note on sources

This article was written against the band's official site lagunsmusic.com, King Records' own artist page and its product page for the Japanese edition of Leopard Skin (KICP-4098), Cleopatra Records' product page for Live from The Guild Theatre, TOWER RECORDS ONLINE's product pages for the Japanese editions (KICP-1858, KICP-1974, MICP-11659, MICP-11777, UICY-16387 and UICY-78616), the release data MusicBrainz holds for artist 87684162-ab42-4cfa-bf22-ebe237035f54, the Apple Music Japan catalogue, Songfacts' entry for "The Ballad of Jayne", and articles published by Blabbermouth (26 June 2026) and Loudwire (17 April 2025). Release dates, labels and catalogue numbers are taken where the MusicBrainz original-pressing rows and TOWER RECORDS ONLINE agree. Every video was checked against the channel that uploaded it, and no fan re-upload is included.