JimmyR
Lord
Tracy came about after I moved to Dallas, Texas in the summer of 1985. After
Creed had come to an end the previous summer, I put together a band with drummer
Chris
Craig in Memphis that was what we hoped would be something really special. The
band wasn’t but it had finally gotten Chris and me together after talking
about doing a band for years. The plan was to move to Dallas and get Kinley
Wolfe to play bass with us, find a singer, and conquer the world. It didn’t
quite happen that way, but we had a shot at it and it sure was fun while it
lasted!
Chris moved to Dallas first and rejoined the legendary band Lightning with his
close friend Kinley ' Wolfe. The band finally came together after Chris and
Kinley quit and joined up with me. We jammed quite a bit and
played out a time or two always realizing that we needed a fourth member, namely
someone who could actually sing! We found this member in Terry Glaze when he exited
Pantera in the spring of 1986. The first time we all jammed together it was a magic combination, just like you read
about in the Zeppelin stories, and we knew we had that special band at last.
It wasn’t easy getting noticed, however. We had knocked around in all kinds of
bands all our lives and were ready to do something exactly the way we wanted.
The three of us Memphians had played in semi-original bands and wanted to go all
the way, and Terry had been playing in Pantera which had three self-produced
albums out at the time and we could see no reason to try and sound like anybody
else. The energy level was always at a peak, and ideas were flowing like crazy.
Terry was really coming into his own in regards to his writing and was coming up
with cool riffs and words almost daily. Chris and Barney (as Kinley was known in
Dallas) were the best rhythm section imaginable, and if anything I felt a bit
overwhelmed and just glad to be there!
We were never really accepted in Dallas, as we did things the way we wanted to
and most of the clubs could just not dig it. The one place we could play treated
us like shit every other time we gigged there. We did build a small core of fans
who were tuned into what we were all about.
In Memphis it was a different story, and when we made the drive up there to play
at the Stage Stop, we would pack the place. And so the break we were looking for
finally came in Memphis, the town we fled to move to Dallas. Wouldn’t ya know
it! The lady who owned the Stage Stop in Memphis was named Nita, and she gets
the JimmyR Lifetime Achievement Award as The Best Club Owner to Ever Walk the
Earth. This woman put up with more shit from us and all the other bands, but
could give as good as she got. She was like Mom to all of us long-haired party
boys, and she took care of us like we were her own. There was a producer in town
who had a spec deal with a record company and she let him showcase his acts
there. She was on him time after time about us, but he just didn’t want to
know. She finally said something to the effect of "Look, I let you come in
here and showcase your crap acts so you gotta do me a favor and have my boys
open up for one of them. And make sure you’re in the audience early to watch
them eat your act’s lunch!" And that friends, is exactly what happened.
3D was the name of the band at that time. It jokingly stood for Doctors of Death
and Demonology. 3D as a name sounded like it should belong to a Holiday Inn
band. None of us liked it, but it is harder naming a band than a child, I’m
convinced. One late night after we had been tracking in the studio, we were
watching some naughty videos and talking about our favorite porno girls. The
producer said, "Hey, here’s a name for the band! How about Tracy
Lords?" We all said, no man, no way. It’s such a direct rip-off that
nobody would like it, and besides we’ll get the holy shit sued out of us if we
ever land a deal. But he went and wrote the name of the band as ‘Tracy
Lords’ on all the demos he sent out, and during the next months when we were
trekking back to Memphis every two weeks to showcase for one label after
another, that’s who the record guys were coming to see. I have to admit, it
DID kinda fit us. If you ever caught a LT show, we were a bit pornographic!
We landed a deal with UNI Records, which was to be a ‘boutique’ division of
MCA. In the end it turned out to be not-so-boutique and we were thrown up
against the wall with all the other rock bands they had that year. But we
didn’t know it was going to turn out that way then and just went out to LA and
did our thing the best we could with producer Mark Dodson, just a wonderful guy
with whom we had the greatest time hanging out. The record came out in October
of 1989.
We got to play some good shows in LA with a few bands like Bad English, the band
that contained members of Journey and The Babies. We came home to Dallas and
were instant heroes in that town that loves winners and hates losers! We would
pack the Basement until the walls were almost blowing out. A quick trip to
Florida where we were getting lots of airplay before Christmas rounded out our
year.
The next year we toured with Ace Frehley and had the absolute time of our lives.
I think if that tour never ended, we’d still be on it! We did the rock star
thing with the tour bus and everything, it was great. Still we realized that the
record company wasn’t going to get behind us in any way, shape, or form and
pestered the living hell out of our manager until he put us on the road. We got
hooked up with an agent out of Oklahoma (through Nita from Memphis, natch!) who
booked the hell out of us, and also picked up a sponsorship from the Miller
Brewing Company that gave us better promo than the record company ever did. I
always say you can trust beer when the chips are down! We proceeded to tour in
1991 until Death.
Knowing that we had no chance with the record company we were with, our manager
got us out of our contract. We worked very hard, even through losing my appendix
in Pittsburgh, to build the fan base we should have had before the first record came
out. We had hopes of getting another deal and putting out a second album and
building on what we had achieved by all that hard work, but it was not to be.
Tensions within the band grew to the point that Terry just went home. We got
another singer to fill in, a great guy out of Atlanta named Doug, but the
fire had gone out of us by then. When Barney got a chance to go tour with The
Cult, Chris and I didn’t have the stomach for picking up two new guys and
calling it Lord Tracy, which it wouldn’t have really been. That’s the
sanitized version of the story, you won’t get the dirt here in this lil’
bio!
You always gotta ponder the ‘what if’s’ of your life, and this is
certainly one of the major ones in mine. I would speculate that it probably is
for the other guys, too. But what can you do? You have to pick up and move on.
And I did.
