We built this rock 'n' roll on the city

It’s been said that the greatest albums are made of strangely life-altering, intense experiences. That being so, LA’s newest young bucks The Bronx should have a veritable opus on their hands.

The band claim that their eponymous debut album was born out of pure frustration. Many of these frustrations are the sort encountered by burgeoning groups – the world of eviction notices, court orders over parking tickets, lack of car insurance… Some of the frustrations that arose in The Bronx’s camp, however, were not exactly garden variety.
“While we were on tour, our van got wrecked by a drunk driver, who was going at 100 miles an hour,” recalls bassist James Tweedy. “I was sleeping inside, so it was kind of like near-death experience number one. We were on the road with The Distillers, and we called them to say, ‘tour’s over for us, the van is totalled’, and they turned their bus around, picked us up and let us crash on the couches in their bus for the rest of the tour. It’s pretty indicative of how they are as a band, they’re really good people.”
If the crash wasn’t harrowing enough, the quartet fell upon another even more chillingly intense scenario during the making of the record.
“We were all hanging out at the Three Clubs,” says Tweedy. “Apparently it’s located right where two gang territories meet, in the 666 block of Hollywood. There was a confrontation between three people, and one of them didn’t have a gun, so he got shot about 20 feet in front of us. You know, people hear about LA and what it’s like to live there, and there’s always a chance that something like that will happen.”
It must be said that these experiences could only really happen to an LA band; when you grow up against a backdrop of glamour, excess, decadence and tragedy, great musical inspiration is sure to follow. The only thing left to do, then, is collar a member of another, more legendary LA rock band to handle production on the album.
“Gilby (Clarke, ex-Guns N’ Roses) came out to a practice, saw what we were all about and decided that it was a good idea to record the album live,” explains Tweedy. “The idea was based on budget mainly, but we also wanted to capture the essence of what we’re about.”
The Bronx decided to adhere to the ‘three-take rule’, which was limiting and workable in equal measures.
“There are mistakes all over the record, but there’s a feeling that we might not have captured the energy if we’d done a standard production job,” observes James. “We would play a guitar part wrong or sing a wrong word and Gilby would be like ‘that’s awesome, man! The performance is just right!’. After the third or fourth take, we saw the performances weren’t getting any better. The first or second performances were really the ones that did the songs justice. I guess we had to rely on studio trickery to cover up the inability.”
Needless to say, having Clarke on the production desk had its fringe benefits.
“We’re all huge Guns N’ Roses fans, like any kids that grew up in LA in the late ’80s,” notes Tweedy. “We spent most of our time bugging him for stories about Axl and Slash.
“Most of the stories were about Axl’s insane genius. He regularly wouldn’t turn up for shows, he’d be in front of 60,000 people and he’d freak out and leave. Once in Australia he acquired a wallaby and insisted he took it out on stage. After a week it fell over dead during a show. A vet told him that the amps were so loud on stage and the animal wasn’t built to withstand such noise, so the performance killed it. It’s quite a claim to think that your stage volume could actually kill creatures.”

The Bronx and special guests House Of Mexico play Whelan’s, Dublin on May 14