Forty-year-old glam metal band L.A. Guns is still releasing new music — and finding new audiences.
The band will join Tom Keifer of Cinderella for a May 28 performance at the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts [BCPA]. The setlist blends classic songs with material from the band’s newest album, Leopard Skin.
Lead vocalist and occasional rhythm guitarist Phil Lewis said the fan base has changed significantly since the band’s early club days — though some of the faces are the same.
The band got together in 1983, performing at various hard rock and heavy metal clubs along the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood.
“In the old days, it would be 15 bucks to see L.A. Guns, now it’s $150,” he said in an interview for WGLT's Sound Ideas. “And I think that’s fair, to be honest. That’s all we were worth back then.”
Now performing a tour across Europe and the U.S., they frequent auditoriums and theaters. Their stop in Bloomington-Normal is at the BCPA — once known as Bloomington's Scottish Rite Temple in the 1920s — with an elegant lobby, plush seats and accommodating parking options.
The dive bar days for L.A. guns have passed. Longtime metal heads and fans will rock on in a space they can sit down that also hosts weddings, orchestras and the Holiday Spectacular.
Staying current
Some legacy hard rock bands focus primarily on nostalgia, but Lewis said L.A. Guns has avoided that approach. He said the band has been fortunate longtime fans have embraced the newer material instead of resisting it.
“A lot of fans won’t stand for it,” he said of bands introducing new songs live. “You can empty a room like that.”
Instead, L.A. Guns continues to see longtime fans returning while younger generations discover the band for the first time. Lewis said the setlist involves mandatory hits like The Ballad of Jayne, but there's plenty of new stuff to get to.
“So many songs, so little time,” he said. “We've got plenty to be nostalgic about, but we're still very current. I think we're still pretty cutting [edge].”
Lewis said L.A. Guns has continued writing and recording because the band still genuinely enjoys the process, and sounds better than ever.
“We bang out an album every couple of years, not because we have to, because we want to," he said. “We're better songwriters now. I'm a better singer. And Tracii [Guns] will probably agree that he's a better guitarist now.”
In 2016, Lewis and lead guitarist Tracii Guns reunited after years of tension and on-again, off-again spats. The band’s 2025 album Leopard Skin marks the group’s fifth studio album in seven years.
The 'mercy killing' of Girl and leaving the U.K.
Lewis’ path into L.A. Guns began after the collapse of his earlier British glam band Girl, an event he describes as a "mercy killing."
He formed Girl in 1979 as the co-founder and lead singer alongside future Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen.
He said Collen got a chance to leave when the band was "on the skids.” Lewis said it was a “terrible time” for Girl as complications with management and their label intensified.
Lewis said the industry was quick to pick up guitarist Collen.
“He got a call from Iron Maiden, and then he got the call from Def Leppard,” Lewis said. “He needed persuasion because he didn't want to leave his band because we formed it, and it was ours.”
But to Lewis, the band was “never meant to be.” Collen would soon leave to play for Def Leppard, and the rest of Girl would dismember to join various other British groups.
“I see it in terms of novels,” Lewis said. “You have bands like Iron Maiden, like Def Leppard, who were our peers and contemporaries at the time. But I would describe their work, their existence, as like a series of novels … There's a lot to write about.”
Girl, active until 1982 under Don Arden’s Jet Records, "was a one-page poem," a band Lewis describes as a "punk-rock, androgynous group with a flamboyant, provocative glittery image in a landscape of heavy metal in the U.K. rock scene.
“We didn't really want to be very good,” Lewis said. “There's this incredibly militant, blue collar, working class movement in England called the New Wave of British Heavy Metal — and they f***ing hated us.”
With the label demanding Lewis and his bandmates align closer with the new wave of British heavy metal, he said the band “made a weak, futile attempt to get heavy.
“They gave up and we gave up at the same time, truly a mercy killing,” Lewis said.
Uninterested with the “dire” music scene in England, in the mid-1980s, Lewis accepted an invitation to audition for the Los Angeles band L.A. Guns and relocated to California.
“England was rainy. It rained for 23 days, literally nonstop before I left,” Lewis said. “I would have died if I'd stayed there. It was just terrible.”
A foot in the door
Lewis said he had his foot in the door to the U.S. music scene with a connection to L.A. Guns' manager.
“He'd been over in the summer and he was telling me about how there's this new band, Guns N' Roses, they're blowing up all over the place,” Lewis said. “The band he managed, L.A. Guns, the guitar player was in Guns N' Roses and now he's doing his own thing.”
Tracii Guns, the “Guns” of Guns N’ Roses, had left the band in 1985 to reform L.A. Guns with former lead singer, Dogs D’ Amour.
Short a guitarist, L.A. Guns already had a lead vocalist. But few weeks later, management called Lewis back.
“He goes, hey, you know, that band I was telling you about, you know, it's L.A. Guns,” he said. The next day, he was on a plane.
"It was just like it was the biggest relief of my life," he said.
Industry pressure, costly technology and bandmate feuds
Leopard Skin follows 2023’s Black Diamonds and continues the band’s recent rock revival. Lewis said the newer material draws more heavily from funk, soul and 1970s rock than the band’s earlier glam-inspired sound.
Lewis said modern recording technology has also made the creative process less stressful than it was during the band’s major-label years in the late 1980s.
“In the old days, we didn’t do stuff on laptops at home,” Lewis said. “We were put in a studio — a $300-an-hour studio.”
Back then, label and industry pressures created friction inside the band. At the time, acts like Cinderella and Bon Jovi were rapidly selling millions of albums, and Lewis said bands were constantly pushed toward commercial success.
“There was a lot of pressure,” Lewis said. “We were on the same label as Poison, as Cinderella, and these bands are like platinum acts. These guys are putting out albums, and they'd hit platinum status before the thing was even released in advanced sales.”
Lewis said those pressures damaged relationships inside the band, especially between himself and Guns.
“We went from just loving each other and getting in a Volkswagen van and driving 300 miles across the desert to not being able to be in the same room together,” Lewis said. “That's definitely because of external pressure.”
With tensions high, and industry pressure intensifying — Lewis and Guns, had a “checkered past.”
“There was a terrible rift between me and Tracii, but I don’t think it was our fault,” Lewis said. “I think it was encouraged. They liked a little bit of spice.”
The two musicians eventually reunited after nearly a decade without speaking.
“When we finally did get in a room together after all that time, I was looking at him and going, this guy is my nemesis,” Lewis said. “And then we just sat down like two guys backstage in a dressing room.”
That tension, Lewis said, dissolved almost instantly.
“We realized what a couple of silly monkeys we’d been,” he said.
Since then, Lewis said, the two have returned to good terms.
“We were good fighters, but none of that now,” Lewis said. “It's all good vibes and good music and good tours and good food.”
L.A. Guns opens for Cinderella's Tom Keifer on May 28, at the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts, 600 N. East St., Bloomington. Tickets are $38-$105 at 309-434-2777 and artsblooming.org.
