"Tears were shed, walls were smashed, knuckles were bloodied -- it was not pretty and it was not amicable," says wayward Skid Row hunk Sebastian Bach about the day two years ago when his bandmates left him at the sacrificial altar, ending the ephemeral career of the razor-edged, leather-clad glam metal band. |

Though, as Poison's Bret Michaels once sang, the wounds have healed, the scars still remain. In fact, it took the embittered and embattled frontman nearly a year before he was ready to return to the road and, once he did, the singer launched into a veritable Skid Row nostalgia campaign. Since last November, Bach has performed more than 100 club shows across North America and Asia, songs from which will pop up on a record some time next year on his own Get Off My Bach Records. The album will be distributed by Sony.

Titled -- cue laughter -- Bring 'Em Bach Alive, the album will feature cover art by Bach's father, David Bierk, who designed the torture mural on the cover of Skid Row's Slave to the Grind. Bach says the album will contain a half dozen "Skid Row classics, if that's not an oxymoron" recorded in Toyko this August, as well as covers of Ace Frehley and Jeff Buckley songs and four new studio tracks.

"One of the tunes is just straight up heavy, heavy, heavy monster riffs," says Bach. Another is the punk-inspired "Blasphemer." The remaining two rebel waltzes, featuring drummer Anton Fig (session maestro who's worked with the likes of Ace Frehley and Mick Jagger), hearken back to the make-out power ballad "I Remember You," he says.

"It's laughable to me," says former Skid Row guitarist Dave "The Snake" Sabo about Bach's Skid Row-laden live set and album. "I appreciate that he loves those songs, but ... ninety percent of them were written by me and [bassist] Rachel [Bolan]. Basically, he is in a Skid Row cover band."

Besides ducking stones inside his glass chateau, Sabo has been assembling Ozone Monday, a band featuring former Skids Bolan, guitarist Scotti Hill and drummer Rob Affuso as well as one-time Mars Needs Women vocalist Shawn McCabe. Without the name recognition of Bach, the reformed rockers are without a label, but are busy searching for one. Curiously, Atlantic Records, which signed a new deal with Bach earlier this summer, are considering inking Ozone Monday. With twenty-five songs already written, the band plans to lay down the tracks in January with producer Michael Wagener, who worked on 1989's Skid Row and may mix Bring 'Em Bach Alive.

"We're not the 'mean band of the week' anymore," says Sabo, who has trimmed his hair and his guitar solos for Ozone Monday. "We're concentrating more on songwriting and the melodies. It's more about textures and ambience. It's a different vibe."

And so the arm wrestling match begins. Poised to one-up his old bandmates, Bach has announced plans to record a new solo studio album as well for Atlantic. Dates remain vague, but Bach says he will record original material with his live band guitarist Richie Scarlet, former Frogs guitarist Jimmy Flemion, a bassist who goes by the mononym Larry, and drummer Bam Bam, in place of Fig.

Though he and Sabo disagree with respect to what transpired on that day of truculence back in December 1996 when Skid Row imploded, Bach still says he did not quit the band, and he never would. Like a wife ready to return to her abusive husband, the former poster boy says he would embrace a Skid Row reunion right here, right now.

"If they come over with some beer, a pizza and a Frisbee, and we goof off in the backyard and talk about the old times and what we can do in the future, I'm there," Bach says. "There are more than enough hard feelings, but you only have one life, one go 'round, and I don't turn my back on twenty-two million fans." Somebody call the decimal-point police.

ANNI LAYNE(Sept. 25, 1998)