L.A. GUNS Trivia — 15 Entries
15 sourced facts about L.A. GUNS.
Trivia
In 2017 — the year Phil Lewis and Tracii Guns returned to the same band — L.A. Guns played Loud Park 17 at Saitama Super Arena, their first Japanese show in a long time. Writing about the Japanese edition of Leopard Skin eight years later, King Records pointed back to that appearance and noted that the band had been releasing records steadily ever since. Five studio albums came out in those eight years.
The band's name is, quite literally, half of another band's. The L.A. Guns that 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. The band's own site puts it more bluntly, calling Tracii Guns the man who put the Guns in both L.A. Guns and Guns N' Roses.
For a stretch of years the name "L.A. Guns" belonged to two bands at once. Tracii Guns left in 2002, and from 2006 one group led by Phil Lewis and Steve Riley worked alongside another led by Guns. Lewis and Guns reuniting in 2017 ended that particular arrangement, but the name stayed divided: MusicBrainz still keeps three separate artists under it — the L.A. Guns that began in 1983, Riley's L.A. Guns, and Paul Black's L.A. Guns. Renegades (2020) and The Dark Horse (2024) belong to the second of those. They stream under the same name and they are not in this discography.
"The Ballad of Jayne", the band's biggest hit, is about Jayne Mansfield, the actress killed in a car crash in 1967 at the age of thirty-four — or half about her, depending on which of its two writers you ask. Phil Lewis has explained that while bassist Kelly Nickels had Mansfield in mind, he himself was thinking about every unsuccessful actress who ends up waiting tables and fading out of Hollywood. Nickels and Lewis wrote the song between them; the credit went to the whole band because that is how they divided songwriting.
The 1988 debut is sold in Japan under a Japanese title of its own, a single character meaning "gun". The pressing at the time was PPD-1043; it was reissued as PHCR-4130 on 21 October 1993, and Universal Music Japan put out a limited budget edition on 14 March 2018 (UICY-78616, ¥1,100 including tax). TOWER RECORDS ONLINE still lists it under that Japanese title, with a one-line description calling it the major-label debut, and a big hit, by the Los Angeles hard rock band formed by the ex-Guns N' Roses guitarist Tracii Guns and the ex-Girl singer Phil Lewis.
The Japanese editions of this band's records almost always carry a song the import does not, and more often than not it is an acoustic version. The Missing Peace (KICP-1858) adds an acoustic "Christine"; Checkered Past (MICP-11659) an acoustic mix of "Get Along"; Black Diamonds (MICP-11777) an acoustic "Shattered Glass"; Leopard Skin (KICP-4098) an acoustic mix of "The Masquerade". The Devil You Know (KICP-1974) is the odd one out: its Japan-only extra is a live version of "Killing Machine", a song from Vicious Circle in 1994, a quarter of a century earlier.
Hollywood Vampires, from 1991, was reissued by Universal Music Japan on SHM-CD on 25 March 2026 — thirty-five years after the fact — as UICY-16387 at ¥2,000 including tax. The reissue adds "Ain't the Same" as a bonus track. The Japanese pressing at the time of release was PHCR-1085.
The 2026 concert album Live from the Guild Theatre documents a single night: 10 July 2025, at the Guild Theatre in Menlo Park, California. The show had been put together to celebrate the release of Leopard Skin, the studio album that had come out that April. Writing about the set, the band's own site singles out "Sex Action" from the debut and remarks that the song had probably not been in the repertoire since the eighties.
Cleopatra Records, the band's current label, introduces them on its own product page as "L.A.'s longest standing Sunset Strip era hard rock outfit". It is a claim about continuity: more than forty years from the band's start in 1983, without a break even across the stretch when the name belonged to two groups at once.
Asked where his music comes from, Tracii Guns has said he draws on something like twenty to twenty-five groups, and the list runs from the Beastie Boys and Poison Idea to Led Zeppelin and the Beatles. On metal specifically he is briefer. He describes Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi as the man who made the scariest guitar sounds ever, and says the intro to "Iron Man", heard when he was eleven, was his way into the band. After that, by his own account, the only metal band he ever really loved was Pantera.
Tracii Guns does not make demos any more. He said in 2025 that he writes and records at the same time, without working a song up acoustically first. The pace of this period — five studio albums in seven years — is hard to separate from that way of working.
In 2026 Phil Lewis stopped dyeing his hair. He shaved the lot off and let it grow back as it was. He has said he is done trying to look thirty, and that he will leave the costume work to Alice Cooper and go on being himself.
Shawn Duncan, who plays drums on Live from the Guild Theatre, is a touring drummer. As of 2026 the studio drumming is Adam Hamilton's, and the five names the official site gives as the current line-up are Phil Lewis on vocals, Tracii Guns and Ace Von Johnson on guitars, Johnny Martin on bass and Duncan. This site does not carry a member block for the band, and that qualifier is why: taken together with the absence of a dedicated line-up page on the official site, it is not a settled current line-up in the sense the registry requires.
L.A. Guns saw in 2026 playing the Whisky a Go Go. The club on the Sunset Strip is the room the band came out of in the first place. The following year runs the same way: after a long tour of the United Kingdom and Europe, the band returns to the Whisky on 31 December 2026.
The title of the 2017 reunion album, The Missing Peace, is itself a description of the situation. Tracii Guns had left in 2002 and from 2006 two bands had been working under the same name; the record that closed that long fork was named for a peace that had been missing — and, in the pun the phrase carries, for a missing piece. King Records' Metal Frontier imprint released the Japanese edition on 4 October 2017 as KICP-1858, and the band played Loud Park 17 in the same month.