Jetboy

Jetboy started in San Francisco in 1983, the work of guitarists Billy Rowe and Fernie Rod, and by the middle of the decade the buzz had carried them down the coast to Hollywood, where the fans and the label men took notice. They landed a record deal and moved to Los Angeles in 1986. Their influences stretched from punk through plain old rock 'n' roll and on into the blues, and you can hear all three in the swagger.

The lineup took a hard hit when bassist Todd Crew left in 1987 and died that July. His replacement was a dream hire: Sami Yaffa, from Hanoi Rocks, one of the very bands Jetboy had worshipped. Feel the Shake, their 1988 debut, is glam metal with its sleeves rolled up, all bratty choruses and street-level riffs, and Hollywood came calling: three of its songs, "Bloodstone", "Locked in a Cage" and "Make Some Noise", ended up in The 'Burbs with Tom Hanks. Charles Norman had taken over on bass by the time they hit the road behind Damned Nation in 1990.

They broke up early in the '90s, but the story didn't end there. The original lineup reunited at the Whisky a Go Go in 2012 to mark 25 years of Feel the Shake, the Philadelphia Flyers adopted the title track as their goal song, and Born to Fly arrived on Frontiers Records in 2019.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.