RIOT Trivia — 86 Entries
86 sourced facts about RIOT.
Trivia
Riot's 1977 debut Rock City reached Japan the following year under a Japanese title that translates roughly as "Rock City: Ruins of Rage". The album track "Warrior" was pulled as a single there, retitled "Maboroshi no Sakebi" ("A Phantom Cry"), and became a hit — at a point when the band was selling almost nothing at home in America.
Immortal Soul went to Japan first in 2011. Avalon/Marquee issued it there on 19 October as MICP-11020, with a live take of "Fight or Fall" added as a bonus track. Europe followed from 26 October, starting in Scandinavia and running to the end of the month, with the US and Canada last on 22 November. It was the final studio album Mark Reale lived to see released.
The live album Shine On was reissued by Metal Blade on 30 June 2017 with a bonus DVD. The DVD is footage from Club Citta on 31 January and 1 February 1998, and part of the encore comes from the second of those two nights.
The two Club Citta shows of 10 and 11 March 2018 marked thirty years of Thundersteel. Each ran about two and a half hours in two parts, the second of which was the album played end to end. The only difference between the nights was a pair of songs early on: "Still Your Man" and "Black Leather and Glittering Steel" were played on the 10th alone, and later turned up as a Japan-only bonus on the video release.
Also on the bill at Riot Fes 2024 — and a guest at both Japanese shows — was Valentino Francavilla of the Italian band White Skull. When Todd Michael Hall left in 2026, Francavilla was the man who stepped up front. The resulting live release, Riot Fes 2024 Live In Japan, therefore preserves a night on which the outgoing and incoming singers shared a stage.
The Japan-only bonus disc with Mean Streets carries previously unreleased recordings: among them the version of "Killer", from 1990's The Privilege of Power, with Joe Lynn Turner's vocal alone. The same disc holds a 1986 version of "Sign of the Crimson Storm" sung by Rhett Forrester.
In August 1979 "Warrior" turned up again in an unlikely place: Japanese mainstream pop. The idol singer Yuki Igarashi released it as a single called "Bye Bye Boy", with the original hook of "shine, shine on" rewritten into Japanese words that scan to the new title. Koji Makaino handled the arrangement.
Riot's second album, Narita, came out in Japan before anywhere else in 1979; the American edition followed. The title comes from Tokyo's international airport. Why the band reached for that name is another matter — no statement from the group itself has surfaced. Japanese writers tie it to the long protest campaign against the airport's construction, while English-language accounts go no further than naming the airport.
A two-sentence dispatch from Tokyo in the 7 March 1981 issue of Billboard, filed under International, records that Riot had re-signed with Victor in Japan. The same item names Capitol Records as the band's American representative.
Riot first played Japan in December 1989. The tour opened on the 11th at the Mainichi Hall in Osaka, with Mark Reale leading in on the intro to "Narita" and Tony Moore at the microphone.
Looking back in a 2009 interview, Mark Reale called the 1989 Japanese trip something the band had simply never experienced before. By his account they were invited back six months later for twice the money, and were voted the year's best live act while they were at it.
Mark Reale traced his decision to add a second guitarist back to Japan. In a 2009 interview he said the 1989 dates there called for very long sets — two-hour shows — which meant reaching back and playing all the material, the early songs included, and that this was why he wanted another guitar player alongside him.
That second guitarist was Mike Flyntz, and he owes his place in the band to a Japanese tour. In 1989 he took a phone call from John Dunne — Mark Reale's cousin, and Flyntz's own college classmate — saying Riot were going to Japan and needed someone to cover the tour. Reale came to his house, he passed the audition, and a few weeks later he was on stage in Japan. He has been in the band ever since.
Several Riot studio albums reached Japan before anywhere else. The Japanese catalogue records both Nightbreaker (22 July 1993) and Through the Storm (11 September 2002) as advance Japanese releases, and the Japanese edition of Sons of Society, dated 16 July 1999, came out more than six weeks ahead of the 3 September 1999 American release listed by Metal Blade.
The Brethren of the Long House, from 1995, went further still: for four years Japan was the only place you could buy it. America did not see a release until 1999. The record is a concept album about Native American history, and it opens with Riot's own treatment of a Trevor Jones cue written for the film The Last of the Mohicans.
For Inishmore in 1997 Riot went with Zero Corporation. Mark Reale said several companies had come forward with offers for the follow-up to The Brethren of the Long House, and that some of them — Sony's among them — may well have been better deals than the one the band took. What decided it, by his account, was his reading of Sony: a company content with where Riot already stood, willing to put the record out but not to do anything about widening the audience for it. EMI and Metal Blade handled Europe and North America.
"Wings Are For Angels" reached the public before Immortal Soul did, and it did so in Japan. It sits ninth on One For All, All For One, a benefit compilation released on 22 June 2011 for victims of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, with part of the proceeds going to the Japanese Red Cross. The album was built from unreleased and newly written material by artists on the Marquee roster — Sonata Arctica, Edguy and Gotthard among them.
The band became Riot V in 2013, but in Japan the albums have kept coming out simply as Riot. Don Van Stavern has said the Japanese side told them plainly that to them the band was Riot and always had been — which is why the Japanese pressing of Unleash the Fire carries no V.
There was a reason the anniversary set was filmed in Japan rather than anywhere else. Don Van Stavern has explained that Ward Records, Nuclear Blast's Japanese partner, wanted a DVD of the full Thundersteel performance — so the Kawasaki show was shot with twenty cameras. The same set was also played in Mannheim, Germany, and in Van Stavern's home town of San Antonio.
Before playing "Land of the Rising Sun" at Kawasaki in March 2018, Todd Michael Hall told the room that the band only ever performs this one in Japan — a Japan special, as he put it. The song comes from 2014's Unleash the Fire, and it is a number they are hardly ever heard playing outside the country.
Lou "L.A." Kouvaris, who played guitar on the debut Rock City, came on as a special guest at the Osaka Soma show on 3 September 2015 and joined the band for "Tokyo Rose" and "Rock City". He later said that this Japanese run with Riot V, together with Rick Ventura's own guest spot with the band in New York, was what finally got the two of them to start Riot Act.
The seal-headed sumo figure on Riot's sleeves goes by the Mighty Tior, but he answers to Johnny just as often — that is the name the band's Japanese label uses in its liner copy. Mark Reale himself confirmed in a 2011 interview that the two names belong to the same character, and he raised the mascot as an example of the band putting Japanese culture on their records.
The mascot was not the band's idea. Rick Ventura, who played guitar on the early records, said in a 2022 interview that it came from the management side, not from the group — and that it kept growing until it took over the covers entirely.
Rock City appeared in 1977 on Fire Sign Records, a label belonging to the band's own management — no American company was interested in signing them. Abroad it was a different story: labels in Canada and Japan both licensed the record.
Riot went on second at the first Monsters of Rock, held at Castle Donington in Leicestershire on 16 August 1980. Rainbow headlined a bill that also carried Judas Priest, Scorpions, April Wine, Saxon and Touch — and the first two acts to reach the stage that day were both New York bands, Touch and then Riot. Classic Rock puts the crowd at upwards of forty thousand.
Riot's third album was rejected by their own label. Capitol Records judged Fire Down Under commercially unacceptable and refused to release it — while also declining to let the band go. The trade gossip column in Billboard for 14 February 1981 records that Riot were reportedly preparing to fight Capitol in court over money owed.
Drummer Sandy Slavin has offered a different account of why Capitol balked. The label's A&R man had been pushing one song, "You're All I Needed Tonight", and Loeb and Arnell deliberately left it off the album — Slavin's reading is that they did it to put the A&R man in his place. The track finally surfaced thirty-five years later, as a bonus on Metal Blade's 2016 reissue of Fire Down Under.
The postcard-and-petition campaign the management ran is the part of this story that usually gets told. Classic Rock's account, though, is that it did not have the desired effect — it made matters worse. What actually rescued Riot was Elektra Records, fired up by a hotshot A&R man named Tom Zutaut, and it was Elektra that helped lever the band out of their Capitol deal.
Fire Down Under reached American shops in August 1981. The Cash Box rock album radio report of 22 August lists it as just shipped, and Billboard's radio column the same day mentions the new Elektra Riot release. Cash Box carried a review the following week, in its 29 August issue (Elektra 5E-546). The album entered the Billboard 200 dated 12 September 1981, peaked at No. 99 on 24 October, and spent eleven weeks on the chart.
Born in America was produced by two men working in shifts: Steve Loeb came into the studio during the day and Billy Arnell at night — and Arnell brought two bodyguards with him for protection. Arnell left the management team afterwards.
Once he had moved to Texas, Mark Reale started jamming with Don Van Stavern of S.A. Slayer and others and put together a new band called Narita, a name taken from Riot's own second album. In a 2009 interview Reale said that band morphed into the Thundersteel-era Riot.
Tony Moore, the voice of Thundersteel, had been a bass player in New York. In 1986 a friend handed him a cassette and told him to go and audition. What was on the tape was the demo of "Thundersteel".
The sessions for The Privilege of Power brought the Brecker Brothers and the Tower of Power horn section into the studio. Tony Moore has called them heroes of his, and named working with them — and with Joe Lynn Turner — as his favourite recording experience of his whole time in Riot.
Inishmore was Mark Reale's own idea, and it began with a single song: he wrote "Black Water" after getting into Celtic traditional music. He then read his way through books on nineteenth-century Ireland and built a story around the emigration forced by poverty — a young man who reaches the island looking for the woman he loves, only to learn that she has already sailed with her family.
The drummer on Through the Storm is Bobby Rondinelli, previously of Rainbow and Black Sabbath. He came in after Bobby Jarzombek, long a fixture in the band, left to concentrate on Halford.
Army of One came out in 2006 but was recorded in 2003. Drummer Frank Gilchriest describes making it shut in a small room with Mark Reale, just the two of them, over three years — two hours a day talking about music, then two hours rehearsing.
Mark Reale was too ill with Crohn's symptoms to play through much of the making of Immortal Soul. Mike Flyntz recorded most of the guitars instead, working to Reale's creative direction. Reale approved of the results and pushed them to carry on, saying he was proud of the record even with his own hands barely on it.
Mark Reale died on 25 January 2012, aged 56, in a San Antonio hospital, from complications of the Crohn's disease he had fought all his life. He was reported to have suffered a subarachnoid haemorrhage on 11 January and to have been in a coma for roughly two weeks afterwards. When the news came, the band were at sea without him, playing the 70,000 Tons Of Metal cruise.
After Reale's death the remaining members decided to carry on, and in 2013 the band became Riot V. Adding the Roman numeral was Don Van Stavern's own idea; the decision to continue was his and Mike Flyntz's. Flyntz asked to sit down with Mark's father, Tony Reale, before they went ahead, and got his blessing. They kept the name and only added to it, Van Stavern has said, so that people would still know who they were.
The V marks the band's fifth chapter and, at the same time, the arrival of its fifth singer to appear on a studio album. Don Van Stavern has spelled the count out — Guy Speranza, Rhett Forrester, Tony Moore, Mike DiMeo, Todd Michael Hall — and stated explicitly that singers such as Mike Tirelli, who handled tours or demos but no album, are not part of it.
The Unleash the Fire sleeve started with Don Van Stavern's idea of putting the seal mascot and the figure from the Thundersteel cover in one picture, Mike Flyntz has explained. The street signs reading Bloodstreets and Reale Way, and the building carrying the name Johnny, were Van Stavern's additions too; another hand did the actual painting.
The title Armor of Light was Todd Michael Hall's. Don Van Stavern has pointed out that it is also a phrase from the Bible — Romans 13:12.
The Austrian and Swiss chart databases record only two Riot chart entries, both credited to Riot V: Armor of Light in 2018 (No. 71 in Austria, No. 56 in Switzerland) and Mean Streets in 2024 (No. 59 and No. 23), each for a single week. The same databases give the German peaks as No. 27 and No. 35. Pages for the earlier records — 1981's Fire Down Under among them — are marked as having no chart placing at all.
Eight Riot titles are listed on Oricon's artist page, and the best-placed of them is Mean Streets, which reached No. 22 in 2024. Nightbreaker (1993), The Privilege of Power (1990) and Armor of Light (2018) all sit behind it at No. 33. The page covers only titles that entered the weekly album top 50 from the 5 October 1987 chart onwards.
Riot played two shows in Japan in July 2024: an event billed as Riot Fes 2024 at Club Citta in Kawasaki on the 20th, and a headline night, Riot After Riot, at Club Quattro in Shibuya on the 22nd. Masayoshi Yamashita of Loudness guested at Kawasaki. At Quattro the encore grew from a planned three songs to nine, taking the night to twenty-two songs and roughly two hours.
Mean Streets had its release date moved twice: first back to 12 April 2024, then again to a simultaneous worldwide release on 10 May. The Japanese release came in several formats; the limited CD + Blu-ray + bonus CD edition is catalogue number GQCS-91424-6.
The band's Japanese connection predates any Japanese tour. A song called "Tokyo Rose" was already sitting on the 1977 debut, and it has been treated ever since as one of Rock City's signature tracks alongside "Warrior" and the title song.
Nightbreaker exists in two different Japanese sleeves — one on Sony, one on Rising Sun. When Metal Blade finally issued the record in America six years later, they used a third cover again.
The Japanese edition of Army of One carried a live recording of "Road Racin'" as a bonus track. It reached Japan through Toshiba-EMI in July 2006; the European release followed three months later, in October.
Mark Reale explained how the track ended up on the benefit record: the band had just finished putting together their Japanese deal with Marquee/Avalon, and it was the label that then came to them with the offer to take part in the disaster relief project.
Riot's three Japanese dates in October 2009 were staged as an anniversary event for Power Rock Today, a radio show on the Chiba station bayfm78 marking its twentieth year: Osaka's Shangri-La on the 23rd, then Club Citta in Kawasaki on the 24th and 25th.
On 23 September 2018 Riot and Loudness shared a double-headline bill at Zepp DiverCity Tokyo. Minoru Niihara and Masayoshi Yamashita of Loudness walked on for "Warrior" during Riot's encore, and Mike Flyntz, Todd Michael Hall and Don Van Stavern were lined up to return the favour during Loudness's own encore later that night.
Lost baggage on that 2018 trip left Mike Flyntz without his guitar strings. He played the show on a set of Ernie Ball cobalts handed to him by Akira Takasaki of Loudness, the band he was sharing the bill with. He had also brought a Japanese-made Orville by Gibson Les Paul along for the tour — because, as he put it, he was going to be playing in Japan.
In September 2016 Riot V announced a short run of shows at which they would play Fire Down Under from end to end, with Rick Ventura, the guitarist from the original record, alongside them. One of those dates was Loud Park at Saitama Super Arena on 9 October. It followed their appearance, billed as Riot, at Loud Park 14 on 19 October 2014.
Riot were inducted on 24 January 2018 at the Hall of Heavy Metal History ceremony in Anaheim, California, in a class that also took in Bill Ward of Black Sabbath, Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater and Billy Sheehan. The Metal Hall of Fame, run by the same organisation, still lists Riot under its Class of 2018 in the band category.
Don Van Stavern wrote "High Noon", the advance track from 2024's Mean Streets, with Mark Reale in mind. Reale loved the Old West and had written songs about it — "Restless Breed", "Gunfighter" — and Van Stavern shaped the music itself to recall Thundersteel and The Privilege of Power.
The twelve songs on Mean Streets were recorded in New Jersey by Bruno Ravel, the bassist of Danger Danger, who mixed the album as well. Bart Gabriel mastered it, and the sleeve came from Gyula Havancsák, whose work includes Accept and Stratovarius — the label noting that he had kept the band's customary seal in place.
Riot's Japanese releases have moved from company to company over the years. Inishmore appeared on 12 November 1997 as XRCN-2005, catalogued by CD Journal under the label "MVP". Army of One followed on 12 July 2006 as TOCP-67977 on Toshiba-EMI's "Z" imprint. Immortal Soul came on 19 October 2011 as MICP-11020 from Avalon/Marquee. Armor of Light arrived on 25 April 2018 as GQCS-90578 on Ward Records.
When Capitol Records refused to put out Fire Down Under in 1981, manager Billy Arnell mailed a postcard to every fan on the band's list. He wrote it in the voice of the mascot's predicament: Tior, it said, was being held captive in an ivory tower by maniacal company executives.
The sleeve of Born in America (1983) reuses the Tior figure from the Narita cover. Last Rites' reviewer describes the result as that same character with its colour taken away, set on a bare background next to an American flag.
That management was a two-man outfit: Billy Arnell and Steve Loeb. They had bought a studio in Manhattan's SoHo called Greene Street and were hunting for a band to launch on their new label, Fire Sign Records, when they came across Riot playing a club in the summer of 1976. The band went into that studio late the same year to make Rock City, with the two managers producing it themselves. Finishing it took seven months.
Riot found an audience in Britain before they found one at home. By Classic Rock's account, the backing of taste-making British DJ Neal Kay won them a sizeable UK following, and in February 1980 they were offered the support slot on Sammy Hagar's British tour. It went well enough that a few months later they were back, this time on the bill of the first Monsters Of Rock.
Guy Speranza told the band he was leaving in November 1981, in the middle of a support run with Grand Funk Railroad. His last show with Riot came on 22 December that year, the second of two sold-out Rush nights at the Meadowlands in Rutherford, New Jersey.
Speranza left the music business, moved to Florida and worked as an exterminator. He died of pancreatic cancer on 8 November 2003, aged 47.
Rhett Forrester, the band's second singer, lost his first tour with them in Nashville. Sandy Slavin recalls the tour manager coming back with the news that the tour was over because Forrester was in hospital. Classic Rock's own account gives the reason: Forrester had been to a Queen show at Madison Square Garden and ingested something at the aftershow that kept him hospitalised for four days.
Forrester was shot dead on 22 January 1994, on a street in Atlanta, after resisting a carjacking. He was 37.
Riot stopped for the first time in May 1984, with a show at L'Amour in Queens; the band had just come off a support run with Kiss. Mark Reale's own account, given in a 2009 interview, is that he burned out towards the end of the Vandenberg and Kiss touring, shut the band down for a few years and moved to Texas.
Thundersteel was recorded over several months at Greene Street Recording in SoHo. The writing was split: Mark Reale and Don Van Stavern handed over instrumentals, and Tony Moore was left free to put melodies and lyrics on top of them.
Before recording that album the band demoed about fifteen songs on a four-track cassette machine. The demo of "Metal Soldiers", posted online in 2009, has Tony Moore barking a drill-sergeant order for twenty push-ups at the end, torpedo effects made on a cheap Casio keyboard, and backing vocals sung by the band and their road crew.
On The Brethren of the Long House, Bobby Jarzombek's schedule allowed him only two tracks; John Macaluso played the rest of the drums. It was also the last Riot album Steve Loeb produced.
Mark Reale said that no one in the band had agreed to the release of the bonus live CD packaged with that album. By his account the recording had never been meant to come out, and its sound quality was not what they had hoped for.
The photograph on the cover of Inishmore was taken by Mark Reale himself.
The album carries two covers and a guest. "Only You Can Rock Me" is UFO's, and the closing "Here Comes The Sun" is Mark Reale's instrumental tribute to George Harrison, layering guitars and violin with an acoustic tracing the vocal line. Tony Harnell of TNT sang backing vocals throughout the record.
The frontman changed during those three years. When Mike DiMeo joined The Lizards in 2005 the diaries stopped matching, and rather than cancel the shows the band hired Mike Tirelli to front the handful of dates that year. Tirelli went on to sing the 2006 Spanish and Japanese tours, and was still fronting the band in 2007.
The cover of Immortal Soul was created by the band's own singer, Tony Moore. The title was Moore's idea too. Mark Reale explained it as standing for a band that would not die whatever happened to it — and said the Les Paul coming back to life on the sleeve carried the same meaning.
Mark Reale described "Still Your Man", from that album, as part two of "Johnny's Back" — a song from 1988's Thundersteel whose title is also what the band's mascot gets called.
The new guitarist, Nick Lee, came out of Mike Flyntz's own guitar school — first as a pupil, later as one of its teachers. Flyntz has worked with him for ten years and calls him the guitarist closest to himself apart from Mark. He has also been clear that Lee is not Mark Reale's replacement: nobody replaces Mark, he says. He takes Mark's parts, and Nick takes his.
Unleash the Fire is a tribute record to Mark Reale from end to end, and one song on it, "Until We Meet Again", was written by Mike Flyntz for Reale and addressed to him.
Don Van Stavern's account of how Todd Michael Hall was found starts with a recommendation from someone he knew in Michigan: listen to the man singing on a Jack Starr's Burning Starr record. He did, liked what he heard, picked up the phone — and found Hall keen on the idea as well.
The saxophone and trumpet that turn up in the bridge of "Caught in the Witch's Eye" are there on purpose, Don Van Stavern says — a nod back to 1990's The Privilege of Power, the album that brought in a horn section.
The bonus track "Thundersteel (2018 Version)" was Nuclear Blast's suggestion, timed to the song's thirtieth anniversary. Don Van Stavern hesitated at first, and agreed only after being told that since he had written it with Mark, it was his song to re-record.
Only three Riot albums ever reached the Billboard 200. Fire Down Under peaked at No. 99 on 24 October 1981 across eleven weeks; Born in America at No. 175 on 11 February 1984 across six; Thundersteel at No. 150 on 28 May 1988 across ten. No No. 1s, and no top ten.
On 28 April 2026 Todd Michael Hall announced on his own social media that he was leaving Riot V. After thirteen years, three albums and more than two hundred shows, he said, he needed a break to give more time to his wife, his family and the family business. The band said at the same point that an eighteenth record was in progress.
When Mark Reale died, Marty Friedman — once of Megadeth — named Rock City, Narita and Fire Down Under as three of his favourite albums of all time, and said he had worn all three out. Neil Turbin, Anthrax's first singer, said Fire Down Under had been a very large influence on him at the time he was writing songs like "Metal Thrashing Mad".
Riot got almost no American radio play, with one exception: KISS-FM in San Antonio, where the DJ known as the "Godfather of Rock and Roll", Joe Anthony, had no qualms about programming the heavy stuff. The city's press still counts the band among the twenty acts he pushed. The bond ran deep enough that founder Mark Reale eventually moved to San Antonio himself.
Riot songs have been covered widely by the bands that came after them: HammerFall and Alpha Tiger both took on "Flight Of The Warrior", Luca Turilli's Rhapsody did "Thundersteel", Axel Rudi Pell "Warrior", Night Demon "Road Racin'", Savage Master "Swords And Tequila" and Stallion "Rock City".