L.A. GUNS Singer PHIL LEWIS On STEVE RILEY’s Death: ‘It Was Awful. I Didn’t Wanna See That.’

L.A. GUNS singer Phil Lewis says that “it was awful” to hear about the passing of the band’s former drummer Steve Riley.

Steve died on October 24 after “battling a severe case of pneumonia for several weeks,” his family confirmed in a statement. He was 67 years old.

In a new interview with  Radioactive MikeZ, host of the  96.7 KCAL-FM program  “Wired In The Empire”,  Phil stated about Steve (as transcribed by  BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “ Riley and I, we had adventures. We had some good times and I’ll always remember him fondly. But no, he wasn’t involved in the band in the beginning. He came along.  Nickey [ Alexander], our drummer at the time, [he was] a strange fellow. He was Mr. Melrose.  Nickey knew every hot chick, he knew where every great party was gonna be that night. He knew where to get the clothes. He just knew everything. Mr. Melrose or the mayor of Melrose. And when the reality hit, that, ‘Well, guys, we’ve got an album. It’s selling, and we’re gonna have to go on tour.’ And it’s, like, ‘Go on tour? For how long?’ ‘Indefinitely.’  Nickey didn’t like the sound of that. He didn’t wanna give up his turf. He still wanted to play drums and he still wanted to be involved in music, but getting on that tour bus and not knowing when he was coming home didn’t appeal to him. So, it was up to us to find a drummer. And  Tracii [ Guns,  L.A. GUNS guitarist] knew  Steve briefly. And  Steve happened to be in the rehearsal complex at the same time we were. And it was just, ‘Do you wanna come over and play?’ And I’ve gotta say the difference between  Steve Riley and  Nickey‘s drumming. I mean,  Steve Riley back then really was an animal. His playing, it was a freight train. His timing was perfect. He was strong as an ox. And I liked it. I really did. I liked the direction it was going in. And, yeah, it must’ve been good because we ended up doing countless records together.”

Speaking specifically about  Riley‘s passing,  Lewis said: “It’s really weird. He’s the first one to go, of all the band. And we’ve had, like… We’re kind of notorious for the amount of members we’ve had in this band. I think the last count was, like, 53. But, yeah, he’s the first one that fell off his perch, and, yeah, wow, it was awful. I didn’t wanna see that.”

He continued: “We had been through a legal issue, and that probably didn’t help his health, but that wasn’t something we started. It was just something we had to do. We were into our third album from the reunion and he wanted to come to get together with a couple of the old guys and call it  L.A. GUNS, and we just simply couldn’t allow that. We’d made so much traction and that would have knocked us right off the rails. So it got ugly. It got expensive. It got ugly.”

Phil added: “But I’ll tell you something. I’ll tell you something. I reckon, had had we got past it… I think if I’d been in a room with  Steve for anything more than five or ten minutes, we’d be slapping each other’s backs and high-fiving and laughing. So there were no real ill feelings. It was just business.”

The day that  Steve ‘s death was announced, Phil released the following statement via his personal Facebook page: “Very shocked to hear about Steve Riley‘s passing today. He was a good guy and an excellent drummer. We toured the world together many times and countless adventures both good and bad. Unfortunately we were never truly friends in 30 years I never once visited his house and apart from band stuff we never hung out or went to dinner together. I think he valued his privacy and kept work and family very much separate.

“My condolences to his wife of over 40 years Mary Louise and son Cole.

“Journey on mate.”

Steve is survived by his wife and son, as well as his brothers Michael and Daniel.

Riley was the drummer for W.A.S.P. on the band’s second and third albums — 1985’s “The Last Command” and 1986’s “Inside The Electric Circus” — and world tours from 1984 to 1987. After leaving W.A.S.P., Riley joined L.A. GUNS and played on that group’s most commercially successful LPs.

In 2016, Lewis and guitarist Tracii Guns reunited in a new version of L.A. GUNS that didn’t include Riley. Steve later launched his own version of L.A. GUNS, which played its debut concert at the M3 Rock Festival in Maryland in May 2019.

In April 2021, an out-of-court resolution was reached between Riley and Guns and Lewis over the rights to the band’s name. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, Tracii and Phil continued to operate under the L.A. GUNS trademark, while Riley and his bandmates from the other version of L.A. GUNS carried on under the new name RILEY’S L.A. GUNS.

In November 2021, Riley told Waste Some Time With Jason Green that Tracii and Phil “do not like each other. I don’t care what anybody says; I know what I know. I was the only one constant factor in L.A. GUNS through all the changes. I know how they talked about each other. I know how they got along when they were together, and they do not like each other.”

Steve went on to say that he knew from the get-go that Phil “was making a bad call” be reuniting with Tracii. He added: “To call that an L.A. GUNS reunion with just the two of them… First of all, it’s not a reunion. And then second of all, to do it with him and know their past relationship, know how they tore each other up in interviews and in the press and just said the worst things about each other, I just couldn’t understand it; it wasn’t registering to me. Why would you wanna do this when you could, at this age, at this point in your career, don’t you wanna be comfortable and do it around people that you really dig? So it wasn’t really registering why he would wanna do it. I guess they saw big dollar signs, and that didn’t happen.

“The thing is you’ve gotta build a machine,” he continued. “I know that the machine that they have around them right now is not good. I know that they have some people working for them that probably don’t know how to direct them, how to get the most out of what they have. So the thing is gonna stall, and it has stalled.”

Photo courtesy of Frontiers Music Srl