The legendary metal band, BulletBoys, originally formed in 1986 in Los Angeles, CA, have released nine studio albums. They are best known for their mega-hits “Smooth Up In Ya,” “For The Love Of Money,” “Kissin Kitty,” and “Hard As A Rock,” which debuted and became number one in rotation on MTV between 1988 and 1991. The band was featured on the certified double-platinum soundtrack for Wayne’s World in 1992, Beerfest in 2006, and Hot Tub Time Machine in 2010. They released their eighth album Elefante’ in 2015, which featured the hit “Symphony,” and their ninth album From Out Of The Skies in 2018. Most recently the current line-up debuted their first single “Holy F*ck” in 2022. The band’s current lineup features founding member vocalist Marq Torien along with guitarist Ira Black (former Lizzy Borden, Metal Church, Dokken), bassist Brad Lang (former Y&T), and drummer Fred Aching (Powerflo).
I’m Music Magazine Associate Editor/Writer Meesha Walden had an inspiring and fun talk with Marq and Ira about the new BulletBoys record and their recording process.
BulletBoys are back in the studio recording the new album. What has inspired you while recording the new songs and what’s your creative process like?
Marq Torien: It’s ridiculous what we’re doing here and what Ira is doing in the studio these days. We don’t sound like anybody else. And we’re looking forward to when we do drop our album next year. Not to throw shade on people’s music, but BulletBoys has a different feel. It’s sexy and funky—it’s like our Physical Graffiti. It has twists and turns and a pop sensibility. I’m calling this album a Throwback Forward album. We’re walking back to our original sound, like a slingshot. We’re throwing it forward to right now, and the tones of right now and the bigness of the productions. A lot of people as of late, are not mixing. Like they’re in an arena setting. And this is what this album sounds like. It sounds like when our first record came out or Van Halen’s, The Who, or Aerosmith’s. The minute you hear it, it sounds like it’s in an arena already.
Ira Black: Our writing is seasoned from years and years of writing but using modern technology and modern production. It marries the two. We are still hungry. We have a lot to prove and that’s the way we’re approaching this.
Marq: Like we’re starving and dying to eat. <Laugh>
Ira: We haven’t said the name of the album yet, have we?
Marq: No, we haven’t!
Ira: The new album is called… Jesus, Fireworks and
Marq: Porn.
Ira: So, the new album title is Jesus, Fireworks and Porn!
I love it!
Ira: We’re putting our best efforts forward on it. We put together a timeline to plan for it. The writing process can be crazy and all over the place because the creative process is just like that. We ended up with about thirty-three songs. We’re now taking the best 50%. We’re looking at releasing it in the spring of next year, so we have time to make this exactly how we want it. We are working with Kerry Gordy from Motown Fame, Berry Gordy’s son. Kerry also was Vice President of Motown and went on to work with Prince at Paisley Park Records. If you look him up, you’d be surprised. I didn’t even know all the stuff when I looked at him. He’s lived ten lifetimes and it’s mind-blowing that he’s executive producing and co-producing the new BulletBoys album. We have the right team behind it.
Marq: Shout out to our brothers, Brad Lang, and Fred Aching. We love them dearly. The four of us are brothers and we’re ecstatic about the band that we have right now and the possibilities of the future for our new music. We’ve been testing the waters with some of this new music with certain people and they’re saying, “This needs to be released right now. We need this so bad on the radio. This is bringing light, radness, and fun back to rock again.”
Ira: Kerry has his team too. Riley, Andre, Julian. and Lenny Green. They’re all putting their positive efforts and energy into this with us too.
I was so excited when I saw you covering Frida’s song, “I Know There’s Something Going On” because that’s one of my favorites. And I listened to the teaser of your version, and it sounds awesome!
Marq: Thank you! I’ve been talking about it for a long time, and then Ira goes, let’s just cut it. Let’s just do it. And it came out just bloody amazing. We played it live in the UK and it was killing it. Phil Collins was the producer and if you notice the drums on the original are something. I mean if he was involved, of course, it was going to have that aspect to it. So, we wanted to make sure that we kept that and have it be a big part of it. The drums have to slam.
It’s all-around such a good song. I hadn’t heard it for a long time, and I forgot how much I loved it.
Ira: It’s one of those songs that might not necessarily be on the radio all the time. But then you hear it and it’s a really catchy. I mean, who doesn’t like ABBA? That was her solo project and of course, she had to do something really cool because she had…
Marq: She stepped out.
Ira: She stepped out from ABBA, so it had to be something cool.
Marq: If it’s true or not, but I was studying the song for a minute and I heard that it was going to be an ABBA song, and it ended up not being it. And Frida said I’m going to do this on my solo. And that’s what happened. She cut it and…
Ira: They got in a big fight. She’s like, F-you, I’m going to do this on my own. I got Phil Collins. Let’s go!
I wanted to talk about your collaboration with SongVest. Can you talk more about that?
Ira: Absolutely. It’s a cool thing because if you look at how the music industry has changed so much, especially Marq knows even more than me. Back in the day, the industry was a certain way. They had these record companies, they gave you record deals, and the deals weren’t always the best. When you looked at the details behind it, they hung the carrot up. The Internet’s opened things up in a way that I think in the beginning, companies like Napster, made it easier to steal music and now it’s even worse. People can just steal music and not have to pay for it. It’s taken a minute for the internet and the music business to figure out how to get their hands back around it. What’s cool about SongVest is it’s a new system, and they’ve applied the music business to the stock market system. The SEC, Secure Exchange Commission in 2021, right as the pandemic was going down, qualified SongVest as the first company ever to turn your mechanical royalties of a song into a security or a stock. Fans can now purchase this in an auction format that can be auctioned off. And this music goes directly to the artist. Of course, SongVest takes their cut by padding the stock price a little bit, so that they’re not taking the money from the artist.
Ira: It’s cool the way they’re doing this. The founder of SongVest, previously owned Royalty Exchange, which was helping artists in this post-internet world, to get their monies from performance royalties and mechanicals and he sold that off and started SongVest. So, it’s a cool thing. They already tested the waters, it’s beyond tested. TLC did a campaign with them; it was their first major artist launch. A friend of mine works with the company, Paul Majors, and he reached out to me and said, hey, you guys want to be the first rock band? And they were talking to a few bands, but everyone dragged their feet. Don’t bring opportunity to us because we are hungry. We’re working 24/7 over here and we saw this opportunity and jumped on it and just completed our first campaign. We appreciate all the fans who have invested in this. We completed the campaign for the two songs, and we’re blown away by it. We’re trying to go onto the next one as quickly as possible before everyone catches on. We know a lot of people, as soon as they hear about it will say, is this Marq and Ira? They’re killing it. We better get in.
Marq: They looked at it and poo-pooed it and then suddenly, they see what we’re doing and say, well wait a minute. The BulletBoys are on some cutting-edge thing right now. It’s really at a high level. We re-recorded “Smooth up in Ya” from the first record exactly to the original format of the song. I’m singing the original key. We had a V6 engine and put in a V8 on this song to take it to another level for 2024. Ira is such an amazing, accomplished producer and engineer. And through the pandemic, he shut himself down for two, or three years and just worked diligently in the studio. It’s a blessing for us because we’re all in-house.
Ira: Thank you. I appreciate that.
That’s awesome that you are doing everything in-house! The band is playing a lot of shows currently. What’s your favorite song to play live?
Marq: I think one of my favorites is a song called “Holy F*ck,” which we put out a couple of months back as a single. It just rocks. The song is so fun to play. Of course, the older tunes too.
Ira: “Hard As A Rock.” I always loved that song. It was the first record I ever bought. I always loved that song. It has the classic rock riff. It’s blues rock at the pinnacle, like Van Halen’s level. When we hit that first note, everyone’s like, “Wow!”
Marq: We play three songs in a row; there’s no stopping for us, no dead time. After the third song, we go into “Hell On My Heels,” and we do a jam in the middle of it, so there’s hardly ever dead time. The band is in constant motion throughout the whole show.
Ira: The show moves the whole time. We keep the energy up, even if we’re going to do “Symphony,” which is a little bit of a slower song, we don’t ever drop the ball. We always keep it going.
Marq: There’s always a pulse, always excitement going on. And to be quite honest with you, it’s all real; real background vocals, real lights. There are no tracks, nothing like that. We’re very much punk rock in our philosophy of playing. We don’t have big crews. We don’t have guitar techs. Ira and I set up our own gear. We go in there, plug it in, and we play. And way back in the day when I was checking out all my favorite punk rock bands when I was a kid, that’s what they did. They didn’t hire anybody to set up anything. People always go, wow, you guys set up your own gear?
Ira: It feels strange when someone else sets up your guitar and you’re like, I hope it works. So, if I set it up, I know it’s going to work.
Marq: We always go out there, I’ll play a little something, and then Ira will play a little something, to get our tone. And people ask, is the show starting? No, we just are testing our stuff, and people get excited about it. Then we roll our intro tape and we come out and do our thing. We’re hardworking musicians. We all have lunch pails. We all have hard hats. We put those on, and we go out and play our music. No ego, ego is not our amigo.
That is a great motto! Who are your musical heroes?
Marq: I would say at the top of my list would be Stevie Wonder. I learned so much from Songs In The Key of Life. I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to that album. I would say John Fogerty. Steve Perry, Dave Roth, Steven Tyler, and cats like that, that sang great. I’m a big Roger Daltrey fan too. Not a lot of people know that, but I always thought Daltrey was an unsung hero of mine because of his vocal abilities that no one really talked about. I mean his voice was amazing.
Ira: Big, big voice. His voice is going to fill up the room.
Marq: We all listen to eclectic music. But I am a big fan of Liam Gallagher from Oasis. I feel that Liam’s one of the only snarky rock stars around that doesn’t give a hoot about what you think about him, or what you think about his music. He’s there for his fans and his people, who are his family. And that goes a long way with me. Plus, he’s very loving off-stage and carries himself properly. I just love his music and what he’s doing. I think he’s doing a project with the guitar player from Rose Tattoo. Lenny Kravitz, he’s just amazing. The heavier bands that are doing it right now, Metallica, they’re probably the greatest heavy metal band ever. They just continue to baffle minds and continue to throw it down so hard.
Ira: The bands we grew up listening to like Aerosmith and Metallica, came from the eighties. And they’ve been able to somehow take this strange path to get to that place because of their early music. They were against all the mainstream in the beginning. Somehow, they’ve made this maze of a path to now they’re the heavy metal Rolling Stones.
Marq: David Bowie was a big influence on me when I was very young, Bowie, all of his music, and everything that he did up until his passing was just incredible. He was one of my big idols when I was very young.
Ira: If you want to go to guitar players, you got Jeff Beck. That’s literally the only guitar player that’s ever made me cry when I see him live. And more than once. How he could make his guitar sing. He is just incredible!
Marq: And of course, Eddie Van Halen.
Ira: Halen. That was the next one!
Marq: Ed, he just changed everything for guitar. We’re big Randy Rhoads fans. Randy was incredible. I know this one cat, and no one ever really talks about him, but he was a big influence on me when I was a kid, a guy by the name of Snuffy Walden.
I’ve heard of Snuffy!
Marq: I got to hang out with him when I was young. He was one of Billy Gibbons’ favorite guitar players. He had a song called “Chevrolet” back in the day. I think he ended up recutting it or something. Walden was the king of the barbeque tone. He could squall that guitar for days, just amazing. And then I’m going to go to another cat because he never gets any credit. I’m going to give him credit because he deserves it. A local hero of mine was a guy by the name of Terry Kilgore. Terry Kilgore was in a band called Reddi Killowatt. They came out of Pasadena, the Altadena area. And a lot of that playing that we see now, Terry was doing that years ago in the early eighties.
Ira: Eddie got a bunch of stuff from them. They used to hang out and he was around doing it too back then. The tone, he was known for his tone.
Marq: The tone. The humbucker in the strat. Ed was good friends with Terry, so I’m sure he learned a lot from him. I used to see Terry play when I was a kid, and he would just baffle me. He was just amazing. I never say his name in an article, but the way I play, I got a lot from him.
Wow. That is so cool! I first heard of Terry Kilgore because my friend Kevin Estrada, who is a photographer and a contributor to the magazine, created a photo book and LP of the underground music scene on the Sunset Strip called Bound For Hell: Glam on the Sunset Strip and one of Reddi Killowatt’s songs was on there, “Liquid Lady.” That song is incredible!
Marq: Man, that’s so rad! I’m so glad you know those names, that’s epic.
Ira: Two bands for me, many people would say Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, but those bands meant something to me. The first metal song I ever heard was when I was 11. I started playing guitar when I was 10. So now I’m playing guitar a year later and I smoked a joint with my friend, yeah, at age 11 and my friend gave me a Walkman. I was listening with headphones and the song was “Ironman.” The tone and the vibe of Sabbath and then the songwriting of Led Zeppelin, wow. That’s the foundation right there. If anyone wants to start up in music, start with Sabbath and Zeppelin. They wrote a lot of the book on it.
What advice do you have for people now starting a musical career?
Ira: Become a lawyer <laugh>
Marq: Go to school. Go to college. But don’t do weird things in college. If you’re going to get into the music business right now, you need to have a really hard heart and you have to be diligent with your work ethic. There are so many amazing artists right now out there that you must beat them to the finish line. And some people don’t have the work ethic. I don’t know how many of my friends that go, I don’t know how I would do it. We hear it all the time, how do you do it? We just don’t take no for an answer. And we support each other. Sometimes you wake up and you just go, man, you have this defeated mindset because you’re trying to get to the apex of the top of the mountain. We have this huge mountain in front of us and going, well, how are we going to get up there? First, we gotta walk up the trails and then we gotta do this.
Ira: Gotta fight the bears!
Marq: Gotta fight the weather!
Ira: And you’re hungry then.
Marq: All those things come into play when you’re in a band. We’ve been together for the new incarnation of the BulletBoys for almost two and a half years now. We’ve been everywhere, including overseas in the UK recently. We’re just really blessed that we have a great band and that we’re hitting on all cylinders. We go out there and just blow up stages. That’s what we do.
Ira: I would say a couple of things. I think sobriety is very important. A hundred percent. I think people don’t handle their inner communications and their inner relationships and nurture them as well when they’re partying. If it’s one person, that’s one thing. If it’s a band, my advice would be, to find some people that you get along with and that you like and nurture those relationships and stick to it. I’ve been in a lot of bands in my life, and it is really hard to get along with people. I’m not saying I’m perfect, but you have to compromise.
Ira: You must bend a lot to the situation and talk stuff out. But you have to keep going. I always used to joke around and say when a band first gets together, they can totally suck. That doesn’t matter if they grow together and stick to it, any band can make it 5, 10, 15 years. That’s what it takes. If you have an overnight success, be careful because it’ll be gone just as quickly. And guess what? You won’t know how to get it back if it comes that quickly. Most people who have the quick start are trying to figure it out 15 years later, how’d that happen? How can I recreate that? Because it’s not easy and you only get one shot unless you’re going to reinvent yourself.
Ira: Reinventing yourself is very important. You must learn to grow within what you’re doing. You can’t just keep churning out the same stuff. I mean unless you’re AC/DC or something. Just kidding. One of the biggest bands in the world and they figured out they were, but even they changed up a little bit. They’re a little more blues rock then they started adding pop to it. If you listen to “Back In Black” or before that listen to “TNT” and how raw that was. And then listen to “Thunderstruck,” that’s a big reinvention. So interpersonal relationships work on those and you gotta work on yourself and work on your relationships with your bandmates.
Marq: And don’t let ego be your amigo because ego comes into play. And I’m telling you right now there are so many musicians that I’ve worked with that have this air about them and have a huge ego. That’s when you can’t move forward. I look at everybody to help with a song and to have the sound of it. It’s not like there’s a lot of guys and it’s only my way and that’s the only way I’m going to do it. I’ve never been like that. I’m always like a sponge soaking up knowledge and soaking up music to be able to add my part into this. If people have advice on something, I’ll always take it and I’ll try it. And sometimes it’ll be like, yes! Other times it’ll be like, ah, I think I like the other thing. But if you don’t try that, you’re not seeing the whole thing, the whole swirl, the whole picture. The music business is very egotistical, I get it. But if you can let that ego go, and just open up to other people that you trust, that’s where the magic’s at.
Ira: Absolutely!
Marq: Don’t drink, don’t do coke, don’t do brown. Don’t do any of that. Focus on yourself, your family, your higher power. I’ve been sober for 28 years. All of us are sober in this band, none of us drink. When we get together, it’s a party, but a real party! It’s just different for us and we’ve lost so many people to drugs and alcohol, so Ira and I, made a stand and said, you know what? We’re going to let people know that we don’t do these things. And I’m not trying to push our agenda, but hey, try it. See if you like it.
Congratulations and that is such important and inspiring advice for other musicians and people struggling with addiction. I appreciate both of you for taking the time to chat with me. I’m looking forward to hearing the new album!
I’m Music Magazine Associate Editor/Writer Meesha Walden
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