SKID ROW Trivia — 109 Entries
109 sourced facts about SKID ROW.
Trivia
Skid Row did not release an official live album until they were more than thirty-five years into their career. Live in London, issued by earMUSIC on 20 September 2024 together with a concert film, was the first. It was recorded at a sold-out show at the O2 Forum Kentish Town in London.
The band did not start out as Skid Row. Rachel Bolan says their first name was Darkness, an idea Dave Snake Sabo had taken from an Aerosmith song title, and that they never once played a show under it.
A story has followed the band for decades: that they paid 35,000 dollars to the Irish Skid Row, the group in which Phil Lynott and Gary Moore first played professionally, for the use of the name. Brendan Brush Shiels, who founded that band, said in 2012 that this was not true. Rachel Bolan, asked about it in 2026, said that when they picked the name in 1986 nobody in the United States knew of the Irish band, that it had not been active for years, and that no legal problem ever arose.
Sebastian Bach reached Skid Row by way of a wedding reception. On 14 June 1987, in Red Bank, New Jersey, the nineteen-year-old singer performed at the reception for rock photographer Mark Weiss. Jon Bon Jovi's parents were among the guests, and it was they who introduced Bach to the band shortly afterwards.
The drum sound on the debut is not a device. The album was cut at a studio in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and the drums were set up in the enormous hall of the convention centre attached to it. Wagener recalls that the room had held 120 cars for an auction the night before, and that most of the reverb heard on the record is simply that space. It was Roy Thomas Baker who pointed him at the studio.
The debut reached five-times platinum in the United States, and the success came with a sour aftertaste. In return for being taken on tour, the band had signed to Underground Music Company, the publishing firm Jon Bon Jovi had just set up, and had given up their rights to publishing royalties. The money went to Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora. After a public dispute Sambora handed his share back to the band.
18 and Life began with a newspaper story. Sabo wrote it after reading a local report about an eighteen-year-old who shot a friend with a gun he believed was unloaded and ended up serving a life sentence. Rachel Bolan co-wrote the song.
I Remember You nearly did not make the album. Neither Sabo nor Bolan wanted it, and it sat in the pile of songs to be passed over. The people who insisted it belonged on the record were Bach, co-manager Scott McGhee and producer Michael Wagener. Sabo says its popularity taught him humility: he had simply been wrong.
Slave to the Grind was the first metal album to enter the Billboard 200 at number one, shifting 134,000 copies in its opening week. Quiet Riot's Metal Health had reached the top before it, but only after clawing its way up; starting there was new. By the end of July the record was certified platinum.
The cover of Slave to the Grind was painted by Sebastian Bach's father, the artist David Bierk. It reworks The Burial of St Lucy by the seventeenth-century Italian painter Caravaggio, and the figure lying at its centre bears a distinct resemblance to the singer. Bach still owned the original in 2021, by which point it had survived a hurricane and two evacuations for fire.
The title Quicksand Jesus came out of Sabo's mother's back garden. A tree there was ringed with flowers, and set among them was a small ceramic bust of Jesus. The way it sat made it look permanently as though it were sinking. Bolan started calling it the quicksand Jesus, and the pair decided it would make a song title.
Bolan calls the band's biggest mistake the decision to release the title track as a single. The first single, Monkey Business, had been a certified hit within two weeks, and radio had already picked up Quicksand Jesus of its own accord before anyone had settled on a follow-up. The plan went the other way, and Bolan and Sabo were sent to phone stations and ask them to stop playing it.
In 1996 an offer arrived for Skid Row to open Kiss's reunion tour. By Bach's account he idolised the band and accepted without consulting anyone. Bolan had commitments with a punk side project he ran with Skid Row's road crew and could not do it, so the offer fell through. Bach rang Sabo, got no answer and left a furious message on the machine — a message Sabo's whole family then heard. Bach accepts that this was the last straw.
Erik Grönwall's arrival happened at improbable speed. Sabo says the job was offered three and a half weeks before his first gig, and that Grönwall met the band in person only four days before it. That first gig was the opening night of their Las Vegas residency with the Scorpions. By then he had already recorded most of his parts for the album.
Skid Row have been asked to open for Kiss on both of that band's farewell tours. They were out on the 2000 run for roughly nine months, and in 2023 they were booked for a set of European dates. Bolan reckons they may be the only band who can say so — and for him the appeal is partly the chance to watch Gene Simmons at close range.
2026 is Skid Row's fortieth year. On 5 February of that year the band announced a worldwide search for their next lead vocalist, run in partnership with the musical instrument retailer Sweetwater. No closing date was set: they said they would keep reviewing submissions until the right singer turned up.
In February 2023 Skid Row announced their first Japanese concerts in nine years: two shows, on 24 May at Cool Japan Park Osaka WW Hall and on 26 May at Tokyo Dome City Hall.
The Japanese shows were postponed on 22 May 2023. The reason was Grönwall's health; he apologised himself for the postponement of part of the Australian tour and of the Japanese dates that were to follow it.
The Japanese edition of the band's first live album, Live in London, was issued by Victor Entertainment. Skid Row put out a note pointing Japanese fans to it on 30 August 2024.
Skid Row Spirits, the band's own line of drinks, reached Japan in August 2024. Two bottles were involved — the Midnight vodka and the 18 and Life rum — and the band pointed Japanese buyers at the Miyako Shokai shop.
It would have been the first Japanese run with Erik Grönwall singing. The Japanese announcement billed it as a greatest-hits set running from Youth Gone Wild, 18 And Life and Slave To The Grind through to the new album, The Gang's All Here.
In 2025 I Remember You turned up on the soundtrack to A Minecraft Movie. The band's own note on it observes that more than thirty years after the song appeared, a generation is now meeting it in a cinema rather than on vinyl, cassette or CD.
On 12 and 13 August 1989 Skid Row played the Moscow Music Peace Festival at the Lenin Stadium, now Luzhniki. The event was mounted by Doc McGhee's Make a Difference Foundation as an anti-drug initiative, and the band shared the bill with Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, Ozzy Osbourne, Scorpions and Cinderella.
Subhuman Race was released on 28 March 1995. The band marked its thirtieth anniversary in 2025 with a video gathering the stories behind the record and a message filmed by Bolan at home.
There is a reason the live album was cut in London. The band say that as teenagers they dreamt of playing the Stone Pony in Asbury Park and CBGB in New York, and that the dream then grew until it centred on London and on headlining the city that produced so many of their own favourite bands. Scotti Hill calls releasing a live record a long-standing item on his own list and says the choice of city was the right one.
In November 2023 the band launched Skid Row Spirits, a drinks line under their own name. It consists of a vodka called Midnight and an eighteen-year rum called 18 and Life. The rum is distilled in Guyana, matured in American oak there and finished in teak casks in Europe, and it was timed to the thirty-fifth anniversary of the song it is named after, which fell in 2024.
The 2006 album Revolutions per Minute was reissued in remastered form by earMUSIC in June 2025, on 180-gram gatefold vinyl, as a CD digipak and digitally. The band's own announcement takes the occasion to point out that the record was produced by Michael Wagener, the man behind their debut and Slave to the Grind as well.
Applicants were asked for a short biography, an argument for why they should be the band's next singer, and video of themselves singing 18 And Life and Monkey Business. The band stated plainly that this was neither a contest nor a gimmick but a genuine search for a voice and a presence capable of carrying Skid Row forward.
The name arrived in a car on the way to rehearsal. Bolan and Sabo drove past an accident that had just been cleared, with skid marks running across all four lanes. Bolan floated The Skids, Sabo was unsure about the definite article and countered with Skid Row, and by Bolan's account the pair then sat in silence for about four miles thinking it over.
The announcement did not land smoothly. Bolan walked into rehearsal and declared that the band had a new name, but at that point he only really knew Sabo; the others were players Sabo had been jamming with. Bolan remembers the reaction in the room as everyone wondering who this guy thought he was.
The one name dispute they did settle was with an American solo performer, not with a band. Bolan recalls a man playing acoustic shows in the Midwest who went by the first name Skid and the surname Row. Skid Row bought him out for what Bolan describes as a modest sum, and says the man gave them his blessing on the grounds that they would do far more with the name than he would.
The Irish Skid Row that shares the name is remembered as the group where both Phil Lynott and Gary Moore first played professionally. It began with Brush Shiels on bass, Noel Bridgeman on drums, Bernard Cheevers on guitar and Lynott singing, and it released two albums, Skid and 34 Hours, in the early 1970s before breaking up.
Bassist Rachel Bolan was born James Richard Southworth. The first name is a construction: he took his brother Richard's name and his grandfather Manuel's name and fused them. The surname is a nod to Marc Bolan of T. Rex, whose songwriting had made a deep impression on him.
The idea of a man carrying a woman's name came from Alice Cooper. As a teenager Bolan wanted a stage name, reckoned that parents would hate this one, and picked it for exactly that reason; once he was old enough he changed it legally. He says people still stumble over it when he hands over a credit card.
Dave Snake Sabo and Jon Bon Jovi have known each other since they were children. Sabo says Jon grew up three streets from his own house, and that by 2022 their friendship was well past the forty-year mark.
What Jon Bon Jovi gave Skid Row went beyond a support slot. Sabo says they played him everything they wrote and always got an honest opinion back, and that the lesson he drove into them early on was that merely being good was not good enough.
Skid Row was formed in New Jersey in 1986 by Rachel Bolan and Dave Sabo, with Sebastian Bach arriving about a year later. The band signed with Bon Jovi's manager, and as soon as the self-titled debut was out they went straight onto the New Jersey Syndicate tour as the opening act.
Sabo was part of Bon Jovi's original lineup. In 1984 Richie Sambora took that place and the band took off soon afterwards; Sabo started his own group two years later.
Another young musician in the wedding band that day was about to make his own name: Jeffrey Wielandt, a twenty-year-old guitarist from Jackson, New Jersey. Before 1987 was out he had become Zakk Wylde and Ozzy Osbourne's right-hand man. For that one afternoon he and Bach played together, running through Led Zeppelin numbers and Quiet Riot's Metal Health with Kevin DuBrow singing.
The first rock concert Sabo ever attended was KISS at Madison Square Garden in December 1977. He was thirteen. He describes walking out of the building as a different person from the one who walked in, and he picked up a guitar a year later.
Bolan's instrument comes from the same source. He says Gene Simmons is the reason he picked up a bass at all, and that without him he would not even have known what a bass was.
Michael Wagener met the band by being flown out to New Jersey by Atlantic to watch them play; that show was the first time he had heard them. He liked them immediately, and remembers a group of players who were completely professional and completely committed.
Wagener has recorded Metallica, Mötley Crüe and Accept among many others, yet in 2019 he said the Skid Row debut was still his own favourite of everything he had made. His reason was not the sound but the sessions themselves: the whole room worked as a single unit.
Sebastian Bach walked out once he understood what had been signed. By his own account he quit, then agreed to return only if the arrangement with Bon Jovi were redone and he took twenty-five per cent of everything in a five-man band. The others agreed, and the record that followed entered the American chart at number one.
Bach has since said he no longer holds it against Bon Jovi. His own summary is that being put in front of that audience every night is how a band with a million rivals became one of the few that broke through. The deals were renegotiated after the first album, and Slave to the Grind, Subhuman Race and the compilation that followed all came out under the new terms.
The self-titled debut sold five million copies in America alone. The band joined Bon Jovi's tour within days of its release and rode the coverage that came with it.
The first single was Youth Gone Wild, and in America it stalled at number 99. The song that changed everything was the next one: 18 and Life climbed to number four and was played heavily on radio and MTV.
The video for 18 and Life was directed by Wayne Isham, one of the busiest names in the field at the time. It is an unusually literal reading of the lyric, and its heavy MTV rotation lifted the band into another bracket entirely.
For Sabo, 18 and Life was the song that proved the partnership with Bolan was real. He had the shape of the song in his head; Bolan took it a step further and they built it out from there, and in doing so Sabo realised the two of them could write things that reached people.
Youth Gone Wild originally carried a completely different set of lyrics. Bolan went away and rewrote them, and Sabo says that was the moment he understood Bolan was the better lyricist of the two.
When Skid Row sent Bach a cassette to learn, Youth Gone Wild was his favourite thing on it. He had the title tattooed on his arm while they were still a club band with no record deal and no manager. People assume the tattoo followed the platinum album, he says; it was the other way round.
The video for I Remember You was directed by Marc Reshovsky, who also made Bon Jovi's Livin' On A Prayer. It plays on the phrase behind the band's name, following a homeless man carrying photographs of the woman he cannot stop thinking about.
One fact explains much of what went on behind that festival: of the seven headline acts, five were managed by the same man. Doc McGhee handled Bon Jovi, Scorpions, Mötley Crüe, Skid Row and the local band Gorky Park.
Each band was given six songs. Into that short slot Skid Row dropped the Sex Pistols' Holidays In The Sun.
The title track on the record is the take the band cut live in their own rehearsal room. Co-producer Michael Wagener says the song was recorded and mixed inside an hour and was never remixed afterwards; everything on it is live.
Most of the album was tracked at Gloria Estefan's New River Studios in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Word got out that the band was inside, and the number of kids waiting in the car park grew by the day. When it reached about forty, Bach ordered five giant pizzas, walked outside and sat down with them to hand the food round. He only did it once: the next day even more turned up.
Skid Row's part in putting Pantera in front of America began during a break in the album sessions. Scotti Hill produced a copy of Cowboys From Hell and put it on the stereo, and Bach says that the moment the opening riff came out of the speakers he knew they had found the band they wanted to take on tour. Pantera duly supported Skid Row on the 1991 Slave to the Grind tour.
One unlikely name joined that tour briefly. When Pantera needed a short break, Soundgarden filled in for three weeks. Bach later wrote that Chris Cornell treated the stage like a track meet, running figures of eight, turning somersaults and bouncing on a trampoline behind the drum riser, gently sending up the heavy metal poses the headliners were striking.
There is a clean edition of Slave to the Grind. It was made to satisfy the Parents Music Resource Center, and on it Beggar's Day stands in place of Get The Fuck Out. Bach has argued that the substitute is the better song of the two.
Metallica's Lars Ulrich was in the studio on the day Bach cut the vocal for Monkey Business. Bach recalls singing it while looking straight at him, then asking how it had come out.
A model in a bikini was waiting on set the day they filmed the video for the title track. Bach refused the idea, arguing that the song was not about that, and made enough of a scene to have the concept dropped. It was an awkward thing to do at the time; he says the director came round and told him he had been right.
Sabo names Slave to the Grind as his own favourite Skid Row album. His reason is that it refused to be a watered-down repeat of the debut, and that every member of the band was of one mind about refusing.
Work on Quicksand Jesus began while the first Gulf War was under way. Sabo describes it as the first war he watched through adult eyes, and says the band was conscious that it now had a platform on which to say something about how ugly and destructive it was.
In a Darkened Room is a ballad, and its subject is child abuse. In 1991 that was still a subject people were only beginning to speak about openly. Sabo accepts that it looked strange coming from the band who wrote Youth Gone Wild, and says the point is that they were always more complicated than the first record let on.
Sabo says Monkey Business is where the second album started. The band had by then travelled and seen a great deal, the song came without being forced, and it set the tone for everything that followed.
The lyric to Wasted Time was written by Bach about his friend Steven Adler. Adler, the original drummer in Guns N' Roses, had a heroin addiction that affected his playing, and the band dismissed him in 1990.
Slave to the Grind entered the chart at number one, but its singles did not follow. Wasted Time was the biggest of them and it stopped at number 88 in America.
Bolan's fondness for Slave to the Grind is not about the chart position. What matters to him is that the complete change of sound made people hear Skid Row as a hard rock band rather than a hair metal one, as he put it in 2013.
On the 1992 covers EP B-Side Ourselves, the Judas Priest track Delivering the Goods is a live recording with Rob Halford joining Bach at the microphone. The rest of the record takes on Kiss, Rush, Jimi Hendrix and the Ramones, the last of these being Psycho Therapy.
Bob Rock's method on Subhuman Race was not what Skid Row were used to. He would pull a song apart and then direct the playing line by line. Bolan grants that the approach plainly worked for Rock and for Metallica, but says that he himself never worked out what Rock actually wanted from them.
Bolan looks back on the making of Subhuman Race as the beginning of the end. The band was already coming apart, and he says it was evident during the sessions that this would probably be the last record they made. He adds that he did not feel good about the finished sound when he walked away from it.
Breakin' Down was the first song Sabo wrote entirely on his own, and the first Skid Row song ever placed on a film soundtrack. The film was The Prophecy, starring Christopher Walken.
Sabo has described the same stretch in wider terms: success papers over the cracks between people, and when adversity arrives their real characters surface. That, he says, is what happened to Skid Row in the mid-1990s, and Breakin' Down is the song that reflects the period most accurately.
Bach fronted the band until 1996, when he was fired. Rather than fold, the remaining members took a break and carried on for a while under a different name, Ozone Monday.
Sabo ruled out a reunion of the original lineup again in 2024. He also made a point of saying that the decision belongs to three people — himself, Scotti Hill and Bolan — and that blaming Bolan alone is simply wrong. Bolan, he says, has carried that blame for years without answering back.
Skid Row restarted in 2000, and the vehicle was a support slot on a Kiss tour. The singer was Johnny Solinger, from Texas, and the drummer was Phil Varone, formerly of Saigon Kick. With Sabo, Scotti Hill and Bolan alongside them, that lineup released Thickskin in 2003.
Thickskin carries a re-recording of I Remember You, retitled I Remember You Two. It is taken at a far faster tempo, reworked to suit Solinger's range, and it was not well received by the band's longer-standing listeners.
Thickskin took two years to finish. Bolan explains that the band was touring almost constantly at the time — with Kiss, and then on the Rock Never Stops tour — so the record had to be made in short bursts: write on the road, write some more in the gaps, record, repeat. His own image for it is learning to drive in the middle of a demolition derby. It was the first Skid Row album for both Solinger and Varone.
Thickskin came out on the band's own imprint, Skid Row Records. It had been set for 22 July 2003 and slipped to 5 August at the distributor's request; the band were unhappy about it, since the publicity had already gone out with the earlier date. A film following the making of the album, Under the Skin — The Making of Thickskin, was released alongside it.
The one rule the band set for Revolutions per Minute was that it would carry no ballads. Scotti Hill says they had done that already. Beyond that, the plan was to get in a room, play, and let the record be whatever came out at the end of the day.
One track on that album, You Lie, is a country song. Hill describes the record as straight-ahead rock with that single exception, and says the Ramones are permanently perched on the band's shoulder whenever they play.
Revolutions per Minute was the first Skid Row record Michael Wagener had worked on in fifteen years. After the album was mixed and everyone had heard it, Wagener rang the band himself to say he was not happy with the mix and wanted to do the whole thing again. Hill puts it down to a German insistence on getting it right.
In May 2010 Skid Row announced that they had parted with drummer Dave Gara and that his replacement was Rob Hammersmith, from Atlanta. Hammersmith has held the seat ever since.
Hammersmith was thrown in at short notice. Sabo's summary of it is that they handed him a lot of songs and very little time to learn them, and that he came through anyway.
Johnny Solinger left Skid Row in April 2015 after fifteen years, having shared stages with Aerosmith, Bon Jovi and Kiss along the way. No other singer has held the job in Skid Row for as long.
Solinger died in June 2021 at the age of 55. He had announced on social media that spring that he had been diagnosed with liver failure, and Skid Row posted their own tribute when the news broke.
Solinger's immediate successor, in April 2015, was Tony Harnell of TNT. That tenure was brief, and the seat passed to ZP Theart.
ZP Theart's arrival was made formal on stage on 14 January 2017, at a show in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Before singing the Ramones' Psycho Therapy, Bolan told the audience that the man beside him had already been their lead singer for a year. Theart, South African by birth and based in Britain, came to Skid Row by way of Dragonforce, Tank and I Am I.
By 2019 Wagener had teamed up with Skid Row once more. The project was the closing chapter of their United World Rebellion trilogy of EPs, and it was also the band's first recording with ZP Theart.
Sabo has explained how Grönwall came into view. The band knew of his 2009 audition on a Swedish television talent show, where he sang 18 and Life, and around the time they began thinking about changing singers they heard a newer version of the same song from him. They sent him a few tracks to sing; the takes came back inside twenty-four hours, and everyone understood at once that this settled it.
Three or four songs for The Gang's All Here had already been recorded with ZP Theart singing. Sabo says Theart is a good singer and a good man and that there is no animosity, but that by then the two parties were heading in opposite directions.
Producer Nick Raskulinecz pulled the band out of its habits by deconstructing every song before putting it back together. At one point his instruction was to take a passage and write something in the spirit of the second verse of Big Guns, from their own debut. Sabo says the effect was to reintroduce them to what Skid Row had originally been.
When the band decided to change singers, Sebastian Bach's name never entered the conversation. Sabo, noting that he is regularly asked this, says Bach was not even part of their thinking, and that they had been past that point for a long time.
The Gang's All Here, produced by Nick Raskulinecz, reached top-twenty chart positions in nine countries. The band followed it with a European tour and with the Las Vegas residency alongside the Scorpions.
Sabo says the idea of a live record had been floating around for years without ever feeling right. Going into the Forum in London the band felt they were hitting on all cylinders, and decided to capture it on the grounds that the chance might not come round again. As it turned out, that decision is why the Grönwall era is documented at all.
Grönwall announced in March 2024 that he was leaving Skid Row. Diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in March 2021, he explained that it had become too difficult to put his health and his recovery first while fronting the band, and that he had told the others that if he could not prioritise his health he was not the right man for the job.
Sabo has given the band's side of it. Grönwall had come through a bone marrow transplant and into remission, and wanted to sing again; the band rang him and asked him to sing on the record they had just made. Once touring began, both sides could see early on that his health was not there yet. They tried to reshape the schedule around it, but after conversations with his doctors and his family the conclusion was that it worked neither for his health nor for the band's finances. He had been in the band for close to three years.
The stand-in was announced on 27 March 2024, the same day as Grönwall's departure. The band described Lzzy Hale as a long-standing friend, and Hale posted her own acceptance on Instagram that day, wishing Grönwall well in whatever came next and signing off with a joke about which pair of leather trousers she ought to wear. The four dates fell on 17 May in Illinois, 18 May in Iowa, 31 May in Nevada and 1 June in California.
After Grönwall's departure, the four concerts already in the diary were sung by Lzzy Hale of Halestorm. The first was on 17 May 2024 at Walker's Bluff Casino Resort in Carterville, Illinois, and the set opened with Slave To The Grind.
Hale's fourth and final show with Skid Row was on 1 June 2024 at Hard Rock Live Sacramento in Wheatland, California. All four concerts fell inside the short stretch between 17 May and that date.
Hale prepared for those four shows the way an athlete prepares. She sang the entire set while riding a stationary bike, checking that her voice would last and that the high notes would be there. Working from the setlist Bolan and Sabo sent her, she went deep into Bach's phrasing, the arrangements and the timing, and describes the assignment as an opportunity she had wanted since childhood.
Having seen Hale stand in, Jon Bon Jovi publicly urged her to join Skid Row during a video question-and-answer session in June 2024. Hale's own response was that the teenager inside her was astonished that Jon Bon Jovi knew who she was at all.
The response was warm, but Hale did not join Skid Row permanently. After the four shows she thanked the band, the crew and the audiences, and made clear that taking the role on a lasting basis was not something she could do.
The shows with Hale also changed how the band thought about what came next. Skid Row said the run had shown them a side of themselves they had not seen, and that gender would not be a criterion when they chose their next singer.
By the summer of 2024 the band were saying they had no intention of rushing a replacement. At a question-and-answer session at a horror convention, Bolan said they were writing constantly and searching for a singer at the same time, that two or three people had caught their attention, and that auditions would follow.
Bolan lists three requirements: strong pipes, the stamina for heavy touring, and being good company. He says the third matters most, and that a candidate has to have all four of them — Bolan, Sabo, Scotti Hill and Rob Hammersmith — completely on board.
Producer Nick Raskulinecz is part of the selection process. By early 2026 Bolan was saying a couple of names had risen to the top, and that they had no intention of setting a deadline — their booking agent, he notes, has told them the shows will still be there in two years, or three.
Four singers have held the Skid Row microphone since Bach left: Solinger, Harnell, Theart and Grönwall. Grönwall was the fourth of them.
Scotti Hill, interviewed at the end of January 2026, named two difficulties with the job. One is simply that the material is hard to sing. The other is that the four of them get on like a family, so whoever comes in has to be able to be family with them.