LEAVING TRAINS BIO

While the Leaving Trains were hopelessly inspired back in high school in the late '70s by punk rock, what makes the Los Angeles group unique - then and now - is the way they alternate punk fury with evocative lyricism, romantic balladry and psychedelic expansiveness. The band's shifts from punk intensity to arty experimentation to countrified desert idylls predate and influenced many better-known grunge, garage and indie-rock musicians, including folks you might not expect, like No Depression troubadour Ryan Adams, who recently cited the band as a primary inspiration in Spin magazine. Disparate performers who've covered Trains songs range from Mark Lanegan and The 440s to Cobra Verde, Snatch, The Purrs, Vanilla Trainwreck and Rainy Day Saints.

The Leaving Trains were formed out of sheer boredom and suburban desperation in Los Angeles in the summer of 1980 by Falling James and brothers Manfred and Tom Hofer after their 1978-1979 high school punk band, the Mongrels, broke up. Hunter Crowley was the best drummer on their side of town, and, after much persuasion, he eventually joined. Other early drummers included Hilary Laddin (the Martyrs), Raoul Endara (Smog Marines), Terry Graham (Bags, Gun Club) and Jason Kahn (Universal Congress Of). The Leaving Trains' first recording, "Virginia City" (an ode to a tumbleweed cemetery in Nevada, with an ethereal keyboard solo by Sylvia Juncosa), appeared on the KEATS RIDES A HARLEY compilation (Happy Squid Records) in 1981 alongside the Human Hands, Earwigs, Toxic Shock and debut recordings by Gun Club, the Meat Puppets and 100 Flowers. The following year, the Trains released a 7-inch single on Happy Squid Records, and had two songs on the WARFRAT TALES LP compilation (with the Last, Wednesday Week, Rain Parade, 100 Flowers, and Hector & the Clockwatchers). WARFRAT TALES (UNABRIDGED) was released for the first time on CD in May 2005 on Avebury Records, with new liner notes to go with Falling James' original liner notes, and a wealth of rare bonus tracks from Sylvia Juncosa, the Gun Club, Earwigs and Urinals.

The Trains came to wider attention with the 1984 release of the alternately jangly and idealistically punk rock first LP, WELL DOWN BLUE HIGHWAY, co-produced by the band with brooding Rain Parade/future Mazzy Star guru David Roback. Among the album's guest stars were the Gun Club's Terry Graham and Green on Red keyboardist Chris Cacavas. At the time, there weren't a whole lot of groups like the Trains, mashing together terse one-minute hardcore blasts ("You Can't See"), jangling pop ("She Knows the Rain"), sinister pre-grunge heavy rock ("Always Between Wars"), glittery psychedelia ("Creeping Coastline of Lights") and epic, multi-part desolate-highway-slide-guitar rambles ("Going Down to Town"). The album's trippier digressions and the band's friendships with members of the Last, Green on Red, the Three O'Clock, the Pandoras, Rain Parade, the Bangles and Dream Syndicate linked them to Los Angeles' briefly magical '60s-revival scene the Paisley Underground.

Conversely, the Leaving Trains went off in a more stubbornly punk rock direction on their second album, KILL TUNES, on SST Records. The band now had Marshall amps, the songs were shorter, louder and recorded with much more power. Apart from a couple of the Trains' trademark morbidly heartbroken ballads ("Kinette," "Warning Track"), most of the tunes (including a crunching remake of the Saints' "Private Affair") were straight-up punk blasts with a more direct social defiance ("10 Generations"). A shocking amount of positive press led to the Leaving Trains' chaotic but ultimately successful first North American tour in 1986, sadly without the Hofer brothers and Hunter Crowley, who departed for other projects.

That was the year that the New York Times' influential music critic Robert Palmer named KILL TUNES as one of his Top 10 releases, and around the time when Tom Waits declared in the British music press that the Pogues and the Leaving Trains were his two favorite new bands. Waits even namedropped Falling James in the first line of the shaggy-dog yarn "Gun Street Girl," from his "Rain Dogs" album, so James jokingly responded by singing "waiting for Tom Waits to finish the sequel" during "How Can I Explode?" on the Trains' next album, FUCK. Produced by former Last keyboardist Vitus Matare and with a title that predictably stirred up censorship controversies and retail bans, FUCK was crammed with such essentially manic, trashy garage-punk rockers as "Temporal Slut," "Sleep" and "27 Days" and contrastingly dreamy, Stones-y ballads "With Dr. A.W.O.L." and "So Fucked Up." Even with ever-evolving lineups, the Leaving Trains toured regularly after the release of the 1987's FUCK album, and had many wild & scary adventures across North America and Europe, getting as far east as Budapest and Dresden when the Berlin Wall was still up.

Guided by magic-man producer Earle Mankey (the Weirdos, Runaways, Concrete Blonde), the Trains recorded two diametrically opposed albums in the late '80s: the short-&-sweet, hard-&-fast punk barrage TRANSPORTATIONAL D. VICES, with guitarist Sam Merrick (Bobbi Brat, the Nymphs); and the languorously obsessive collection of interwoven doom-ridden love songs, SLEEPING UNDERWATER SURVIVORS, recorded with Nymphs guitarist Bobby Belltower during Falling James' 1989-1990 stormy marriage to pre-fame Courtney Love (before everything fell apart, James also produced Hole's debut single). When the Trains weren't busy, James seemingly spent just as much of his "buckets full of time" in the late '80s wandering from Nevada to Arizona with Howe Gelb, writing and recording together. James sang lead and backup vocals on several early Giant Sand albums, and Howe Gelb's painting on the hood of his old Barracuda was used as the front cover of the T.D.V. album.

Eventually, Sam Merrick went back to Idaho, Bobby Belltower moved to Manhattan, and James found a new partner in crime, Chris "Whitey" Sims, a tireless New Orleans party animal, provocateur and prolific writer, who persuaded James to write remorselessly about the absurdities in the world around him instead of just dwelling on old girlfriends. Their often-tasteless satires ("Bob Hope," "You Don't Need a Doctor," "Women Are Evil," "Fuck You, God!"), from the LOSER ILLUSION, PART ZERO E.P. and THE LUMP IN MY FOREHEAD CD, either delighted or alienated old Trains fans. Some felt betrayed that Falling James was now dressing in drag full-time, even offstage. Falling James' ongoing, quixotic anarchist campaigns for U.S. president, meanwhile, started to get a surprising amount of mainstream media attention. Whitey's onstage nudity and jock-baiting instigated frequent onstage riots, arrests, pulled plugs and daily police harassment for over several years until, inevitably, everyone cracked. Guitarist Aaron "Mo-Ron" Donovan moved to Mexico to study art, and Whitey escaped to San Francisco, where he edited one issue of the sacred-cow slaughterhouse, BEHAVE, before dropping out of sight.

James reconfigured the Leaving Trains in 1993 with guitarist-bassist Miss Koko Puff and longtime drummer Dennis Carlin. Former Social Distortion producer (and Eddie & the Subtitles bassist) Chaz Ramirez played bass on most of THE BIG JINX recording sessions, before he died in a tragic warehouse accident. Chaz was replaced by Gwynne Kahn (the Pandoras, Mad Monster Party), who was followed in the '90s by a series of bassists: Fred Manchento (the Helpful Nuns), Jimmy Green (Penetration Moon), Miss Koko Puff (Pointy Kitty) and Andrew Buscher. Dennis Carlin came and went and came again, and was replaced on drums at times by Allen Clark II (Fearless Leader, Hot Damn) and early L.A. punk legend Maddog Karla (the Controllers, Legal Weapon).

In 1994, James' longtime idol from the Pandoras and the Muffs, guitarist Melanie Vammen, joined the Trains, revitalizing the band by co-writing many of the best tunes on their garage-rocking next CD, SMOKE FOLLOWS BEAUTY, and sticking around for the next decade. A greatest-hits compilation in 1997, FAVORITE MOOD SWINGS, was the Trains' final release on SST Records. In recent years, the Leaving Trains performed at the first Las Vegas Shakedown in Las Vegas in 2000, went on North American tours with the Humpers and Honeyburst, and backed up Radio Birdman/New Christs singer Rob Younger on a California tour in 2003.

The band found a simpatico new label, Steel Cage Records in Philadelphia, and released their most recent CD of all-new recordings, EMOTIONAL LEGS, in 2002. The leggy hourlong CD includes the tripped-out power ballad "Dumb as a Crayon," a song that was later included on the FREAKS AND GEEKS soundtrack CD alongside classics by the Who and Joan Jett. LEGS was followed by the Leaving Trains' first-ever live CD, AMPLIFIED PILLOWS, released in 2004 on Steel Cage Records (www.steelcagerecords.com). The CD definitively captures the Melanie-Andrew-Dennis-James era during a 2002 radio broadcast, along with bonus tracks from two concerts in the late '80s.

www.steelcagerecords.com

Contact Falling James:
fallingj@aol.com

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