Who wants to hear Kick Axe on the road to rock in Vancouver in 1988?

By Steve Newton

There’s been a lot of renewed interest in Canadian metal band Kick Axe since the recent announcement that founding guitarist Larry Gillstrom had passed away from cancer on August 4.

One of the music-industry vets hit hard by the sad news was White Rock-based producer/engineer Larry Anschell, head of Turtle Recording Studios, whose history with Gillstrom and Kick Axe goes back to 1988.

That was when Anschell had his first professional gig using the mobile recording van he’d built the year before out of junkyard parts and used recording equipment. He was up from his home city of Seattle, attending a Vancouver recording school and trying to get Turtle Mobile Recording launched here, when he sent out a leaflet to local music-related offices offering a free recording.

Lo and behold, Gillstrom responded and offered to have Anschell record the Kick Axe reunion taking place at the Commodore Ballroom on November 17.

“He was genuinely nice and took me seriously,” Anschell tells Ear of Newt, “even though I was pretty green at that point.”

Green or not, Anschell’s recording of that show–24 minutes of which he salvaged from an old DAT tape–sounds pretty fine these 37 years later. There are a few glitches when the audio gets momentarily lost, but it includes some wild guitar and drum solos, and performances of Kick Axe tunes from their mid-’80s albums Vices (“On the Road to Rock”) and Welcome to the Club (“Hellraisers”, “Welcome to the Club”), and the soundtrack to The Transformers: The Movie (“Hunger”).

At the time of the reunion concert, Kick Axe coguitarist Ray Harvey and bassist Victor Langen were off with their respective bands, Kirsten Nash and Giant, so the only real Kick Axers were Gillstrom, vocalist George Criston, and Larry’s bro Brian Gillstrom on drums. To supplement the lineup they brought in bassist Marco Tambasco (formerly with Guy Jones), keyboardist Jim Chabros (ex-Boy’s Room), and guitarist Scot Buchanan from Alberta’s Blade Runner.

Many thanks to Larry Anschell for offering Ear of Newt this exclusive blast from the past.

Have a listen: