Starz: In 1992 I Tracked Down Guitarist Richie Ranno To Talk About The Band's History & Possible Future

Originally published in American Music Press, 1992
By Devorah Ostrov

Starz publicity photo circa 1977

L-R: Richie Ranno, Joe X. Dube, Michael Lee Smith,

Brenden Harkin, and Peter Sweval

There's a brand new Starz CD at Tower Records! Honest, go look. It's called Requiem (as in a mass sung for the dead), and its thirteen tracks present an assortment of band members, musical styles, and oddities.

The first five songs on Requiem feature this year's lineup — vocalist Michael Lee Smith, guitarists Richie Ranno and Brenden Harkin (all three were with the original group), and drummer Doug Madick (who was in the post-Starz outfit Hellcats). And although it's been some fourteen years since the last official Starz album, the new songs prove that Smith and Ranno are still a hard-to-beat writing team.

"Vidi O.D." displays the duo's sense of sarcasm ("X-rays show there's nothing to see/His head is empty, empty MTV"), while "You Called His Name" and "Rough & Ready" attest to their continued fondness for melodrama and enduring ability to seriously rock.

Capitol Records advertisement for the

band's eponymous debut album

Other cool cuts include the rollicking "Texas" (featuring the classic Starz lineup with bassist Peter Sweval and drummer Joe X. Dube) and live versions of "Night Crawler," "Hold on to the Night," and "(She's Just a) Fallen Angel."

Although Ranno issued Requiem on his own Drastic CD label, the story behind it begins with Metal Blade Records founder Brian Slagel.

A few years ago, Slagel was browsing in a New York music memorabilia emporium when he chanced upon the rare Starz demo Do It with the Lights On.

Evidently, Slagel professed his love of the band to the store clerk, who exclaimed, "Well hey! Richie's a really good friend of mine!"

Ranno's address was handed over, and the man who first put Metallica on vinyl promptly wrote to his hero in the hope of reissuing the entire Starz catalog on CD.

Slagel learned that Capitol Records, the group's original label, still retained the rights to their four studio albums: Starz, Violation, Attention Shoppers! and Coliseum Rock. But Ranno owned the rights to an infamous (but never commercially released) live recording known to record collectors under the ponderous title Live at the Municipal Auditorium, Louisville, March 30, 1978.

Creem magazine - Star's Cars No. 23 featuring Starz!

Metal Blade combined those tracks with others taped at a 1977 show in Cleveland, and in 1989, the label released Live in Action — a terrific tribute to a band that was once within touching distance of being as big as Aerosmith and KISS before it inexplicably disappeared off the face of the earth. (Metal Blade later resolved an on-again/off-again agreement with Capitol to reissue the group's studio albums, and all four are now available on CD.)

The band was wrapping up work on Requiem when I contacted Ranno at a New York recording studio. Interestingly, they were in the very same room that 16 years ago to the month they'd used to record the first Starz album.

Starz at the Lost and Found Saloon in 

San Francisco with American Heartbreak  

December 2, 2005

Ranno was quick to cite Capitol's original mishandling of the live LP as a prime example of what they were up against throughout their career. Intended for "promotional use only," initially only a scant 2,000 copies were printed.

"Promotional meaning that they pressed them up and threw them away," fumes Ranno. "And I'm not kidding! I was in our manager's office... We were done as a band. I was trying to get released from my contract, and the records were piled up in a corner. I said, 'What are you doing with those?' He said, 'We're throwing them out.' So I said, 'I'll take 'em, thanks.' I sold them for $2, whatever. That album goes for $50-$100 now! It became this real rare collectible."

With Metal Blade's release of the live CD, Ranno and Smith — out of touch for a number of years — found themselves talking again.

"We never talked about the band," Ranno points out. "We just talked about our divorces. We'd call each other up about every two weeks and say, 'What's happening with you?' One day he said, 'You know, wherever I go people are going crazy over the Starz thing. Why don't we just make another album?'"

*  *  *

In 1973 Ranno, a Bronx native raised in Teaneck, New Jersey, was playing guitar with the Stories. Unfortunately, he joined the group after they'd had a #1 hit with the soulful "Brother Louie" and only months before they broke up.

Looking Glass - Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)
1998 Sony CD compilation featuring future
members of Starz on the cover.

Meanwhile, in another corner of New Jersey, Sweval and Dube (then-known as Jeff Grob) were recruiting new members for their band the Looking Glass, who's "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" had been a #1 hit in 1972. In early '74, Harkin was added on guitar, and Smith, who hailed from Georgia, replaced vocalist Elliot Lurie.

The Looking Glass changed its name to Fallen Angels and recorded two singles for Arista without scoring a hit before they hooked up with the powerful Rock Steady/Aucoin Management Agency (home of KISS).

According to Ranno, it was Sean Delaney, Aucoin's creative genius, who helped them achieve a harder rock sound. And it was Delaney who persuaded them to add a second guitarist. In September 1975, Ranno answered the Fallen Angels' ad in The Village Voice.

"They'd auditioned about 75 guys before I got there," he recalls, "but I was the only one who fit in. I'd been playing for about 30 seconds when I stopped and said, 'What's the matter?' They said, 'You're the first guy we didn't have to tell the chords to.'"

T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, David Bowie, KISS, and Alice Cooper were some of Ranno's favorite bands at the time. But most of all, he adored the British chart-topping glamsters, Slade. "Slade was the most incredible live show I ever saw!" he declares.

Starz and KISS 

It was Ranno's affinity for pop melodies and huge hooks, incorporated into the band's hard rock edge, that became Starz' trademark sound. And down the line, it influenced the likes of Mötley Crüe, Warrant, Bon Jovi, and Cinderella — all of which admit to being Starz fans.

The name Fallen Angels was short-lived. (Ranno mentions a poster advertising a KISS/Fallen Angels gig that's worth big bucks!) By the end of '75, they decided to ditch keyboardist Larry Gonsky (a holdover from the Looking Glass) and change the group's name — again.

Starz drummer Joe X. Dube and

heartthrob vocalist Michael Lee Smith

During our interview, Ranno understandably claimed to be a little fuzzy about who came up with the audacious, misspelled moniker — after all, it had been awhile. However, some reports give full credit to Sean Delaney.

"I think I had a star earring," reflects Ranno. "I always wore a star necklace, and I had stars on my guitar neck. Brenden wore a star around his neck too. The management company said, 'You guys have stars on everything. Let's go with that.'"

At first, the band rejected the proposal. Ranno remembers: "We said, 'Nah! We don't like the way that sounds.' But we started fooling around with different ideas. Stars with an 's' was unacceptable. Somebody said 'z,' and that was it."

Heartthrob vocalist Smith (brother of teen-dream Rex Smith), gave a more scandalous account of the group's name in the January 1977 issue of Creem magazine: "It was one of those things where we were all hanging around late one night, doing various things, substances, and the next morning we were Starz. It just dropped from out of the sky."

Recorded at the Record Plant with producer Jack Douglas, the band's self-titled, hard and heavy debut LP was released in August 1976. It easily contained at least three strong contenders for radio airplay: the power-packed "Detroit Girls," the melodic "(She's Just a) Fallen Angel," and the dramatic "Pull the Plug" (supposedly based on the story of Karen Ann Quinlan). Capitol decided to push — absolutely nothing!

Capitol Records ad for the Violation LP

"Creatively we knew what we were doing," emphasizes Ranno. "We knew when it was good and when it was bad. We knew that 'Detroit Girls' was a hit, and we knew that 'Fallen Angel' was a hit. But they [the collective mind of the record company] didn't know it. I said, 'Doesn't it have a great hook?' And they said, 'Nobody plays that kind of stuff.'"

The group got a second chance in 1977 with the equally hard-hitting Violation album — loosely based around the concept of a near-future world where rock 'n' roll is one of many violations. But again, the label told them there were no singles. Apparently, it was just a fluke that "Cherry Baby," the LP's catchy opening track, climbed to #33 on the Billboard national chart.

A decade later, Kerrang magazine would rank Starz at #74 and Violation at #82 in its list of the 100 greatest heavy metal albums of all time. But back then, no one could blame the guys if they were beginning to feel like a "tax write-off."

"Sometimes that's what we use to think," acknowledges Ranno. "Capitol put a lot of money into us, but not in the right places. The best advertisement you could have in the '70s was a hit single, but they didn't believe that a hard rock band could have a hit single."

Joe X. Dube endorses Tama Drums

The group's third offering, Attention Shoppers!, was issued in January 1978. Recorded at New York's Secret Sound Studios and self-produced by the band, Ranno considers the LP — which takes an almost power pop approach to some material — to be their weakest effort.

"They convinced us that we had to do an album like Attention Shoppers!" he asserts. "And even then, they said, 'These songs can't be hits.' We thought, 'Great, now we'll lose our hard rock audience.' People tell me that they love Attention Shoppers! but I can't believe it. I thought 'Hold on to the Night' was a good song; we kinda had a slight pop side there. I thought 'Third Time's a Charm' was good because it was like a ballad. And I liked 'Johnny All Alone' because it was kinda psychedelic, kinda 'Pull the Plug'-ish. Other than that... I don't know."

Ranno continues, "I really wanted to do another hard rock album, get that heavy guitar thing going — which was what Coliseum Rock [their fourth LP, with bassist Orville Davis and guitarist Bobby Messano replacing Sweval and Harkin] was a reaction to. Every album was just a reaction to the previous one."

Although they didn't always see eye to eye with their label, Capitol didn't skimp on the band's stage production and pyrotechnics. "Our logo would rise up in the air with fireworks going off underneath it," enthuses Ranno about one pricey gimmick. "It looked like a spaceship!"

And there was no question that Starz consistently excelled when it came to playing live. One press release observed that live performances were the group's "greatest asset."

"When everyone was wearing blue jeans, we dressed really wild," states Ranno, "like six-inch-high platform boots that went up to our knees. Not quite the glitter rock look, but real fancy. And our movements were always choreographed. We were the only band, other than KISS, who were doing that. The kids loved it!"

Comic book-style ad for Attention Shoppers! 

In 1979, fed up with their label's apathy and tired of disco saturated airwaves ("It was disco on TV, disco in the car..."), Starz pretty much called it quits.

Over the next couple of years, several comebacks were attempted with different combinations of band members. But nothing gelled until Ranno and Smith, along with drummer Doug Madick and bassist Peter Scance resurfaced as Hellcats.

A five-track Hellcats' EP was issued on Radio Records in 1982, which Kerrang! termed: "A gloriously rowdy selection of hard rock tunes."

But... "Four weeks later, the owner of the record company disappeared, never to be heard from again," laments Ranno. "Atlantic Records [distributor of the indie label] dumped all the Hellcats records, and that was the end of that band."

In 1987 Ranno took another stab at Hellcats, replacing Smith (who had moved to California) with the previously unknown Perry Jones on vocals. Kerrang! (usually a staunch supporter of all things Starz related) described this lineup's one LP as "genuinely innocuous."

Nothing more was heard from the guys until the fateful day when Brian Slagel came across that dusty demo. Regarding future plans for Starz, Ranno says, "anything's possible!"

He adds, "We have good memories. We felt great about Starz and each other. We only stopped playing because of the lack of success. That's really what it boiled down to. We just couldn't do it anymore. And actually, we weren't that unsuccessful."

Richie Ranno: "Our logo would rise up in the air with fireworks going off

underneath it. It looked like a spaceship."