“I pulled the gun”: the near-deadly drunken fight that drew an end to Quiet Riot
It’s easy to forget just how much of a storied history there was to the Los Angeles hard rock outfit Quiet Riot.
For many metalheads, 1983’s Metal Health is where it all begins. Featuring their take on Slade’s ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ and the hit title track single, the third LP ushered in Quiet Riot’s fan-favourite classic era. With guitarist Carlos Cavazo and drummer Frankie Banali first entering the fold, the revised quartet would help propel hair metal to its eventual MTV domination, Metal Health knocking The Police’s mammoth Synchronicity off the top of the Billboard 200 in November that year.
Yet, this was a period of renewal in the Quiet Riot tapestry. The band had been slogging it for ten years before hitting serious chart success, originally founded by bassist Kelly Garni and future Ozzy Osbourne shredder Randy Rhoads, and reluctantly recruiting Kevin DuBrow as the singer. Despite regional success and even threatening LA’s Van Halen as the city’s premier hard rock act, internal differences with DuBrow’s frontman style and frustrations with CBS Sony’s Japan-only releases of their first two albums fomented fractures within the Quiet Riot unit.
“I was unhappy for quite a while,” Garni confessed to Guitar World. “We were stalled… we weren’t going anywhere, and weren’t doing anything. It just seemed like rinse and repeat. There was no progress. We weren’t making any money, and management gave us an allowance every week, which, in my case, was forty bucks a week to live on.”
Tensions reached a boiling point during the sessions for 1978’s Quiet Riot II. Drowning his sorrows in Wilshire Boulevard’s The Cabaret club, a fire accident presented Garni the opportune moment to nick as many liquor bottles as possible amid the panicked chaos. The next day, Garni invited Rhoades to his pad in Van Nuys’ Barrio to imbibe in the copious amounts of stolen alcohol. What started as a good-natured hangout soured after several hours of drinking, general ill feelings and resentment toward their difficult frontman exploding with volcanic rage.
“We started discussing the Kevin problem. It got out of hand,” Garni confessed. “I told Randy to leave. He refused.”
To show he wasn’t kidding, Garni retrieved a firearm he kept hidden in a sofa cushion. “So, to scare Randy, I pulled the gun and fired it into the ceiling, thinking that would make him leave. But Randy was fearless. He didn’t leave. He charged right at me. The gun was automatic, so it reloaded and cocked itself. So, I chucked that aside to get it out of the mix, and the fight was on.”
After a punch-up and in the drunken fug of anger, Garni staggered to his car, gun in a shoulder holster under his jacket, ready to drive over to the city’s Record Plant studio, where DuBrow was cutting vocals, to, at the very least, give him a piece of his mind, loaded gun in hand. With the LAPD already alerted, Garni was arrested after barely leaving the house. Once DuBrow and management were notified, Garni’s role in Quiet Riot was severed immediately.
A close call for all concerned. DuBrow would eventually find fame with Quiet Riot’s 1980s ‘Mk II’, Rhoades would kickstart Ozzy’s solo career in earnest with ‘Crazy Train’ and ‘Mr Crowley’s lightning riffs, and Garni would enrol in paramedic school and work in the back of an ambulance for years. In a weird moment of hot-headed fury, one gun and several bottles of alcohol accelerated DuBrow, Rhoades, and Garni’s paths toward their true callings in life.
