Mick's Jaguar Fame And Fortune

Rock and roll is dead in New York City. Long live New York City rock and roll. Mick’s Jaguar is bringing noisy, wild, unafraid big rock back to NYC. Crazy rents, corporatized venues, and kids listening to DJs: it’s hard being a band in this town.

This isn’t LA and Mick’s Jaguar is a product of their environment: a windowless dungeon practice space twenty feet below the trash covered sidewalk of the Lower East Side. Rats, grime, the sounds of the city; the band gleefully pillages the history of rock music to create thoroughly modern, but classic rock and roll. Not quite punk, but not metal either, this is hard rock and roll that’s been put through the brain blenders of six musicians who pair their Judas Priest shirts with Steely Dan hats. They claim no musical lineage to New York—they just live there. The night AC/DC played CBGB’s would be about as close a comparison as one can get.

The three guitarists—yes, three guitars—open the album with a riff of buzzsaw intensity that would make a Ramone proud. But then like Jim Morrison sashaying into a wine shop, it drunkenly careens into a big sounding rock and roll album somewhere in between Van Halen and Tres Hombres. Songs about life, death, cars, blood, murder, sex, drugs and booze are their world. Recorded in Brooklyn at Figure 8 Recording by engineering wizard Philip Weinrobe, and fueled by a steady diet of Allen’s Coffee Brandy, the Fame And Fortune sessions resulted in only one hospital visit and it just might be the favorite album of 1978, 1988, or 2018.