Recommendations of the Editorial team
David Roach, singer and founding member of the hard rock band Junkyard from the late eighties, died on Friday after a cancer. The band announced Roach’s death on Saturday in a contribution on social media. He was 59 years old.
Junkyard: Outsider with a bite on the Sunset Strip
“After a brave fight against cancer, David fell asleep peacefully at home last night in his wife’s loving arms,” says the message. “He was a talented artist, performer, songwriter and singer – but above all a devoted father, husband and brother.”
Although she was only a niche band in the overcrowded Sunset Strip scene in Los Angeles in the 1980s, Junkyard noticed through her angular, blues-based sound and her biker look. Musically and stylistically, they were more in the tradition of early Guns n ‘Roses or the Black Crowes-which later even opened concerts for Junkyard-as groups shaped by make-up and hairspray such as Poison or Warrant. Roachs scratchy voice – a mixture of southern accent (it came from Dallas, Texas), cigarette smoke and a lot of attitude – was the driving force.
Junkyard was founded in Los Angeles in 1987, with Roach as a front man, Chris Gates on the guitar and briefly skateboard pioneer Tony Alva on the bass. Guitarist Brian Baker, who later played at Bad Religion, joined the band in 1989. In the same year, the group released its self -titled debut album near Geffen, the label of like -minded bands as Guns N ‘Roses.
MTV success and Southern rock root
Although they could be assigned to the blues rock more musically than the heavy metal, the group achieved their first successes at MTVS Headbangers Ball early on with the video for “Hollywood”, a story about despair and struggle for survival in one of America’s most mythical districts. “Look at the boy at the corner/he is only twelve years old/every night he is out there and gives his best/so that he can sell his things,” grows Roach at the start of the song. “What Hollywood was for us when we all lived there,” Roach described the song in the press materials to the album. “Prostitute, crack dealer on the veranda. It was not a cultural shock, but it was a learning process.”
The power ballad “Simple Man” followed as the next single and emphasized the group’s Southern Rock influences: in 1991 Junkyard opened for Lynyrd Skynyrd on their headliner tour.
Studio work, style change and resolution
Roach and the band returned to the studio, this time with Ed Stasium, producer of Ramones and Living Color to record the 1991 album “Sixes, Sevens & Nines”. Singles like “All The Time in the World” deepened junkyards blues rock and added a pinch of punk, while the acoustic lament “Slippin ‘Away” showed country influences and presented songwriter Steve Earle as a harmony voice.
But in 1991 the year of Nevermind from Nirvana – which was only published a few months after “Sixes, Sevens & Nines” – and Hard Rock from La quickly got out of fashion. Junkyard was the victim of this upheaval, and Gefs separated from the band, which dissolved in 1992.
Comeback, live albums and late recognition
In 2000 Junkyard came together again and published the live album “Shut Up – We’re Tryin ‘To Practice!”, A picture of the band in top form from 1989 in Hollywood Palace. Live tours followed, and in 2017 the comeback album was released with High Water-the first studio album in over 25 years. An independent single with the title “Lifer” was published in 2021. In addition to blues rock groups such as the Four Horsemen, Junkyard is considered to be an underestimated alternative to the hair metal of that era.
Riki Rachtman, former moderator of Headbangers Ball, remembered Instagram of Roach: “We lost a singer of a real skirt & roll band,” he wrote. “If you want to listen to good skirt & crown, put on Junkyard now.”