In 2017, Los Angeles hard rockers Junkyard will celebrate their 30th anniversary, and the band will be able to enjoy it thanks to a new deal with rock & roll label Acetate Records. It will be 29 years since Junkyard signed with Geffen Records, joining homeboys Guns N’ Roses. However, things didn’t work out quite so well as they did for Axl and co., and Junkyard were dropped in ’92.
The band has been a bit on-again-off-again since then, with members coming and going. But the current lineup is firing on all cylinders after playing a series of successful shows in 2016. This new deal with Acetate has only added fuel to that fire.
“We maybe could have gone to some of the 1980s revival labels, and I think there was some interest from some of those labels. But we wanted someone who really understood what Junkyard did,” says Tim Mosher. “It just felt like a natural fit. Honestly, how it happened was I sent an email to Rick Ballard and said, ‘Hi, this is Tim from Junkyard, would you be interested in doing a Junkyard record?’ That was the level of pursuing a record deal for us. Junkyard doesn’t do the big, grand plan thing very well––I can say that.”
“We maybe could have gone to some of the 1980s revival labels...”
Despite emerging from the Hollywood rock & roll scene in the ’80s, Junkyard never really fit in with the big hair bands such as Warrant, Ratt and Poison. The riffs were big and the melodies strong, but there was no spandex on Junkyard.
“That’s always been our stigma––that we were lumped in with the long hair bands of that era, but musically we didn’t really have that much in common with them,” says David Roach. “There was another scene going on simultaneously to the West Hollywood, Sunset Strip scene that people think about when they consider that period of rock & roll in L.A. A more alternative, garage rock scene including the Nymphs and Jane’s Addiction, that we were a part of.”
At this stage of their career, and the music business in the state that it’s in, Mosher admits that the band doesn’t really know what a record deal means to them, but he’s keen to find out.
“We don’t really know what we’re expected to sell or how we sell,” he says. “The requirements are for us to do a certain amount of shows within the year cycle of the record. 2017 will be more shows than we’ve done in the previous eight or 10 years, probably. We’re going to be out there playing and promoting it.”
Junkyard’s debut album for Acetate has a tentative release date of April 29, and Roach believes longtime fans of the band won’t be disappointed.
“Our style hasn’t changed at all,” he says. “It’s still pretty adolescent, three-chord, in-your-face, riff-oriented rock. We’ve got the same influences that we had––rock & roll with country, and punk attitude. The new album is not a departure.”
Photo by Ted Thornton
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