Shake City-s/t

Eonian
2009

The Sunset Strip scene was flooded with tons of hopefuls trying to getting a slice of the pie. The realty was that not everyone was going to make it. So numerous bands were left by the wayside. One such act was Shake City. The band has ties to Warrant as Adam Shore fronted that band for a while before being replaced by Jani Lane. In 1986 Shore met guitarist Don E. Sachs and formed Hot Wheelz. The band would soon become Shake City. This line-up included Erik Turner's cousin guitarist Michael Blair and bassist Ray Bailey and drummer Jaycee Cary rounded out the line-up. Over the next few years they managed to play at The Roxy, the Whiskey and the Coconut Teazer plus they ventured outside of the LA area playing in Utah, Florida and Arizona. All of the songs collected here were recorded in 1990 and 1991. Tommy Thayer of Black -n- Blue and Jani Lane and Erik Turner of Warrant all contributed writing to a few of the tracks. The sound is very much like Warrant which to me means they really lacked hooks, life and fire that would have qualified them as a good hard rock band. I don't know if they always sounded like this considering they were around for three years before the earliest of these recordings. Whatever the case the impression I get from this collection of songs was that the band had heard Bon Jovi and Warrant, seen the success those bands had so they set out to try and churn out radio friendly songs in the hopes of getting a record deal. The results were some stale songs, no record deal and they broke up in 1992. The production is fine and as usual Eonian records does a good job with the packaging. A lot of bands and fans may have flocked to the clubs on the Sunset Strip in the 1980's but the truth is that for every good band like Motley Crue or Ratt you had half a dozen pretenders like Shake City trying to make it.