Jet
Boys
This article originally appeared in NFH #19 in
the summer of 1990.
I'm going to bury you
in French band features in the next couple issues. Almost nobody talks about French bands,
and the rare times one gets mentioned, either it's one that doesn't deserve to be
mentioned, or the writer pans them unfairly. But I don't think I'm playing all these
French records all the time by accident...there's some good stuff there. It deserves to be
heard, and my job is to make sure you hear about it.
Elsewhere in these
pages you'll read about the Real Cool Killers; but the Jet Boys, who hail from Paris,
bring a different set of influences. They aren't much into the garage rock type of thing;
instead they have a sound that mixes New York Dolls, Mott The Hoople, Rolling Stones, and
most of all the Hollywood Brats into a really cool glitter punk hybrid. You probably
haven't heard of the Hollywood Brats...but you ought to; they independently conjured up a
sound remarkably similar to that of the New York Dolls at about the same time, but since
they released their lp only in Norway, there wasn't much made of them. It sounds too
coincidental to believe, until you remember that the Saints developed into a wild punk
band without hearing the Ramones but at very nearly the same time. These things happen.
That Brats sound has a slashing guitar style similar to Johnny Thunders, and also includes
horn charts, piano bits, and vocals done in a similar style to the Dolls. But the Brats lp
has far punchier sound than the Dolls, and I would be willing to argue that they had
better songs, too.
Anyway, the Brats lp
was reissued by British label Cherry Red around 1979, whereupon it was ignored again. It
was probably ignored even more fastidiously in France than in England and the US. But Jet
Boys' lead singer and guitar player Freddy Di Angelo (who goes by the nomme de guerre
Freddy Lynxx) was listening, and he felt that that sound along with the other bands
mentioned above were a good place to start. But he also heard the Clash and the Pistols,
and this tempered his ideas about rock and roll music.
"I think that
fake music put a poison in the industry in 1976 with Saturday Night Fever", says
Freddy in his thick French accent. His English is none too strong, and my French is
non-existent, so getting ideas across is difficult. "This was the start of this
mechanism in this music. But I always was involved in the rock music and the rock bands
that played guitars. I always preferred this. It's more real, it's more sincere."
The Jet Boys started
in 1984. Freddy had been playing in a band called the Aristocats, which had featured three
women and two guys, and on one Aristocats gig they had supported Johnny Thunders. Upon
hearing that Thunders was due to come to Paris again, Freddy and the other guy from the
Aristocats put together a new band to open once again. This band consisted of Poker Alice
on bass, Vic Vixen on guitar, and Nick Hell on drums. It was meant to be just for this one
show; they rehearsed for three weeks before the show and that was meant to be it.
According to Freddy, they couldn't decide on a name for the band; they put three choices
to Johnny Thunders, and he picked the Jet Boys. In retrospect, Freddy wishes they had
chosen one of the other names, Vendetta, because it is apparently the name of a comic he
is a big fan of, and it would have reduced the perception people have of the Jet Boys as
being a Dolls clone band, a perception that Freddy strongly resists.
"I think that
their reaction is just because we have this name", he says. "But we don't look
like them, we don't play like them, and we don't take dope like them. The audience
sometimes tells us we are just a clone of the New York Dolls. Sometimes we're a clone of
Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, but I don't feel like them. I feel more like the
Rolling Stones, not like the Dolls."
It's only been
recently that Freddy has decided to put all his energies into the Jet Boys. For quite some
time he was also playing guitar in another French band called Who Watches The Watchman,
and he appears on their first single. But a recent stint in which he played a batch of
shows in southern France with the Jet Boys and then had to come north for three more with
the Watchmen convinced him that he couldn't do both, so he left the Watchmen. In the
meantime, the Jet Boys have also experienced some personnel turnover since the lp was
recorded, with a new bassplayer named Mad Engine and a guitar player who goes by Fuzz Foxx
replacing Poker Alice and Vic Vixen, respectively. No explanation for the shuffle has been
offered.
But all these bands
are only a third of the influence on the Jet Boys. The other two parts are comic books and
movies. Most of the comics Freddy mentioned are British ones that I've never heard
of...things like Alan Moore, David Lloyd, Dave Givens, Watchman, and Judge Dredd.
"When I was younger I preferred some stuff like Spiderman", says Freddy,
"All the Stanley comics. But I only read the French version of these comics."
As for movies, Freddy
goes for the more serious sort of thing...sober movies and thrillers. "Yeah", he
says, "Robert DeNiro, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price...all the movies
from Sergio Leone; Fistful Of Dollars, Once Upon A Time In America." One of the songs
on the Jet Boys debut lp, Larger Than Life, is dedicated to Sergio Leone. "It
was the atmosphere; the feeling of this song. A good feeling, like in his movies."
Talk turns to a
French movie that Johnny Thunders has done in France, called Mona And Me. Thunders
plays a poor junkie (he has to act?). Freddy thought it was lame and had no plot.
"It's even worse. You can see some scenes made four years ago in Paris mixed with
scenes from one year ago. It's out of time."
Since Freddy is
pretty convinced of the evils of doing dope, and Thunders is his one of his influences,
it's got to be a bit depressing seeing how he's getting on with his life. "I don't
know", he says. "I think that maybe Johnny has nine lives like the cats. I've
seen him sometimes totally out, and I've heard people say "You know, Johnny Thunders
died two weeks ago", but he's always alive, and I think that he's going to stay like
this. But I don't know how he's going to finish. But he doesn't play well any more. I was
just influenced by his guitar style, not by his life style."
Of all the influences
on the Jet Boys style, movies, comics, and whatever else, it'll be the musical approach
that's most important to anyone who buys Jet Boys records, and it's the way the Jet Boys
pull their roots together to make their sound that makes them so good. Although Freddy
talks of mainstreamish influences like Aerosmith or the Rolling Stones (even liking their
material through the 70s), the Jet Boys don't sound mainstream at all. Their album has a
wild, rocking sound that isn't dampened by the presence of horn charts and pianos. Maybe
that's because of how they recorded it; Freddy heard some demos from this little studio
fifty kilometers outside of Paris, and he found that the place was cheap, so they went
down for five days. The studio only has an eight track recorder, which is tough enough to
use when your band has only bass, guitar and drums (recording drums well usually takes at
least five tracks, and many people would be unhappy with less than 8). The Jet Boys got
around this by recording the drums first on 6 tracks and then mixing them down by
themselves to two, leaving six tracks for the rest, which is still pretty minimal for
bass, two guitars, horns, piano and vocals. But unlike the vast majority of records
recorded this way, Larger Than Life has great punch and vitality with no loss of
energy. It's certainly a far superior piece of recording to the two New York Dolls lps.
Part of the success
of the recording was due to the fact that they recorded a demo of the lp ahead of time at
a studio in the suburbs of Paris. This session yielded their "Just Want To Talk To
You" single (see last issue), and oddly enough in a country normally regarded to be
seismically stable, they had an earthquake in the middle of the sessions. "I had the
headphones on to play my guitar", says Freddy, "and I felt something in the
ground, and I thought it was a truck that came in the studio, but the producer of the
studio went out to take a look, and we saw that it was an earthquake, and it was very
strange. I had a feeling that we just escaped death. Very strange." This experience
inspired the song "Shooting Star" from the lp. It's probably the one song that
brings to mind the Rolling Stones; sounds like something from Goat's Head Soup like
a slightly tougher "Angie". As for the rest of it, I think the Hollywood Brats
comparison is the best one.
Like many other
French bands, the Jet Boys also bemoan the lack of good producers for rock and roll bands
in their native country. Most of the people in the recording studios are only experienced
with bands playing chart material, or trying to play chart material, so a lot of French
guitar bands go to Belgium or England to record. In the case of the Jet Boys, they
produced themselves.
The lp has a fistful
of great songs, but one that'll really catch your attention is a rollicking version of the
Undertones "Teenage Kicks", complete with blasting Thunders style guitar licks
and a butt-kicking pace. Freddy explains: "Yeah, it's the Jet Boys sound...we think
that it's not good to play a cover the same way...we prefer to change it, and we play it
more aggressive and with more speed. I never saw the Undertones on stage, but I think that
they played it the same fashion on stage...more speed than on the album, I think. I'm not
sure. But now the music has changed...everybody wants more speed songs and stuff like
that. Every time we play it on stage we get good reaction."
For the future, the
Jet Boys are planning to do some more touring and then another lp. They've had some
discussions with former Dead Boy vocalist Stiv Bators about singing a song with them on
it, and they're hoping to get some other guest appearances from other French musicians.
But all this is very much in the early planning stages right now. In the meantime, their Larger
Than Life lp is definitely worth working to find; try writing to their label, Sucksex
Records, at 130 rue de la Republique / 92150 Suresnes / FRANCE.
