Doug Aldrich recently caught up with Mark Rockpit to talk all about The Dead Daisies latest single ‘Bustle and Flow‘ and a the end of the interview talk turned to the 30th Anniversary of Hurricane’s ‘Slave to the Thrill’ album and also Doug’s former band ‘Lion’.
As a long time fan of Doug’s band Lion I asked him if he still kept in touch with Kal?
Doug replied “It’s funny, I just had a catch up with Kal Swan, we live close but we have separate things going on. I’d seen him about two years ago when he came to a gig with Jerry Best and Mark Edwards, it was at a club in L.A. Mark actually put it together. Anyway he called me the other day and he said he’d had an offer from a company to make another record, and he’d been going through his stuff. He did quit music years ago, and so he’d packed up everything he had, and put it away when he got in to another aspect of the entertainment business.
Anyway he told me he’d pulled out all the old stuff, and all the old gear we used to record on, some stuff still worked, some stuff didn’t! He said he’d found a couple of things that he and I had been working on and he said he’d love to add them to his record that he as putting together, and I said of course, you’ve 100% got my blessing.
So, I’m really excited, he’s coming back!! He’s going to put something down, and then we talked about one day maybe getting together, and I said I was happy to play on anything if you need anything or whatever, but it’s just really cool, because he had that fire burnt out of him, he just couldn’t take the music business the way it was. We’d got so close with Lion and then it just fell apart, we had a little success with Bad Moon Rising, but never quite got there. But I’m so excited he’s in the process of doing something.”
I asked him if it was true that the label Lion we on had ‘gone bust’ as is often stated, and if that had been what had led to the end of the band?
Doug added “Well they didn’t go bust. They basically weren’t in the business to break bands they were in the business to help a band get a record out but they really didn’t help you support it. The reason that they could do that was because every band that they signed they got an advance from their big parent company which was Epic Records or CBS. So they’d get the advance when they signed the band, so they’d already made money and then they’d have the band go in their own studio and they’d charge us, and this was high back then, $250 an hour and we worked for months on it so they’d end up making a bit of money on both ends! So it was just bad (laughs). But we wanted a deal so bad and we were so naive. Our attorney told us that if we signed the deal we wouldn’t be able to pay him so he had to let us go. But we just wanted it really bad and we thought that our music was good enough that it would break through and be able to renegotiate, or whatever. But it didn’t happen and so the band broke up.”
And that is the story. Doug and Kal of course produced some great albums over the years both with Lion and with Hericane Alice’s rhythm section as Bad Moon Rising. It’s a catalogue well worth checking out.
Lion discography: 1986 – Power Love | 1987 – The Transformers The Movie: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | 1987 – Dangerous Attraction | 1989 – Trouble in Angel City
Bad Moon Rising discography: 1991 – Full Moon Fever | 1991 – Bad Moon Rising | 1993 – Blood | 1993 – Blood on the Streets | 1995 – Opium for the Masses| 1995 – Moonchild (Single) | 1995 – Junkyard Haze | 1999 – Flames on the Moon | 2005 – Full Moon Collection
