Black N Blue was a band back in the 80s that should have made it to the next level, but for whatever reason the guys just never did. They had great songs and killer musicianship. They even opened for KISS on tour as well as had KISS founder and bassist Gene Simmons produce two of their albums. They were dropped by their label in 1988 and disbanded. Members went their separate ways, although the band reunited in 2011 (minus guitarist Tommy Thayer who had joined KISS in 2002) for an album entitled Hell Yeah. Forward to 2022, Thayer and Black N Blue both teased on their social media of something being released on June 3 entitled Thayer-St. James The Lost Tapes. Fans found out that it was a five song EP from 1988 that never saw the light of day. We were lucky enough to sit down with Black N Blue frontman Jaime St. James to get much more info on this release.
Man, I’ve got to be honest with you. Ever since Tommy (Thayer) dropped that teaser on social media, I have been so freaking excited! So, who was cleaning house or cleaning out the garage and found these?
Jaime St. James/Black N Blue:The deal is this. I remember we had done these recordings. I think I had a version of two of the songs on a cassette, but I don’t play cassettes anymore. They’re in a box somewhere but I’m not sure where. So, here’s what happened. Tommy moved and he contacted me and said ‘St., I’m moving and I’ve got all of this Black N Blue stuff in storage and I have to clear this stuff out. You want it?’ I told him sure; send me whatever Back N Blue stuff you have. Then, I get all of these boxes full of stuff and there are t-shirts and all sorts of Black N Blue things that he’s been saving. One of them was a box with an old two inch analog tape in it with these songs on it. There was a quarter inch mix of everything and I remembered that we did mix these. So, there was a quarter inch reel of the proper mix and that was all that was in there for that. I dug through my cassettes and I found one of the songs and half of another because somehow it got erased in the middle of it. So, I had two of the songs and I listened to them and I knew that they were good. I remember when we recorded them, I knew when they wrote them and I knew they were good. So I contacted Tommy and told him that we should release them. These should see the light of day. He checked them out and listened to them again and came straight back and said ‘yeah you were right, these are good.’ We just hadn’t paid attention to them in a while. So, they came from up in Tommy’s attic.
Wow, what a great find!
So we decided that we weren’t going to use a record label, to hell with it. We’re going to ship them out ourselves, we’ll sell them through our webpage and that’s how we’ll make it worth it. We’re going to have to put some money into this thing again. I ended up taking the quarter inch tape to a place that could transfer it into a usable wave file that I could send to a manufacturer to get this thing printed. It ends up it was destroyed, it was no good. There was nothing there. It had been in the attic for more than 30 years. I was getting kind of bummed so I called Tommy and he said ‘let me see what I’ve got.’ He found a DAT, a digital audio tape that had four of the five songs on it. I told him to send it to me and I’ll take it and try to transfer it. Four of the songs were on it, they held up and they sounded great. So, I had that transferred. Now, we were missing one song. I told Tommy that I thought I had a cassette of it and I would take that in and see if they could transfer it. It was dead! Tommy had a cassette and he had never really played it so we crossed our fingers. Tommy sent it to me and I took it in. It was in good shape but it ran slow. You could tell because of my voice. It was the strangest thing! I contacted our engineer Pat Regan, who engineered the original recording, and told him it was slow. So, we sped it up and remastered all of the stuff to make it sound the same. What you can do today is amazing because the remastering brought them to life. We took a DAT tape, transferred it to a wave file and he was able to pull my voice out of that and do something to it. I went in and overdubbed some cymbals on it, because I’m a drummer, to make it sound better. We really put a lot of time into it. It was ready, it was good, so I sent it to the manufacturer and cds were made.
Prince had his vault and you guys had the attic.
(laughs) You know, it’s crazy because they really could have just been gone forever but here they are. I’m excited about it because it’s great stuff and we wrote it back in 1988. Now, we’re bringing it back to life.
If they are from 1988, are they leftovers from the In Heat sessions or post In Heat?
There are several songs that we didn’t use on the In Heat sessions, three or four of them? Maybe more, but it’s not that. After In Heat, Geffen dropped Black N Blue. We didn’t have a record deal at the time, but Tommy and I started writing to take it to a new label to get another deal so we really put some effort into them and they’re great songs. They would have been the next Black N Blue record, just not on Geffen. We got these five done and Tommy quit because he just didn’t want to do this. He wanted to move on and do other things. We shelfed it and we both went on to do other things. I went on to Freight Train James and recorded a record for a Japan label. So, that’s what happened. It’s still cool to me that they’re going to come out 30 plus years later
It’s like time warping in a way.
It is and Tommy and I are really good when we get together and write songs. We have a great chemistry. We think the same way and we work well together. To go back and hear that and then to be working together with Tommy on getting things ready to get this CD out has been a blast.
How long did it take after discovering them to have everything done?
A couple of months? I went into the studio to overdub cymbals. We got an art director to get the artwork done, so maybe about two months from first getting the box from Tommy to getting the stuff to the manufacturers to start printing them up.
Wow! That sounds pretty quick to me especially with the problems. Thank goodness for technology
Yeah, technology is so cool. I mean, at a certain part I thought they were gone. We did it just in time. The tape was just gone and who knows how much longer the DAT tape was going to last as well as that one cassette.
Were the cymbals all that were touched up on the recordings?
Pretty much; he did pull my voice up and pull some reverb off of one song. A little bit of reverb was cooler back then but not so much now. We really didn’t do too much. No musical overdubs were needed, just me playing cymbals and some percussion stuff. That was pretty much it. Other than that, he remastered the whole thing to make it sound as good as it does.
So, is this just going to be a physical CD release?
Yeah, this is just for people who like the physical copies of their stuff. There are no plans on putting this on iTunes or other services. It’s not really for people who want to go download a song for 99 cents. These things like iTunes and Spotify don’t really pay the artists anything. If we didn’t do it this way, then we wouldn’t have done it. It won’t be on any of those services because they really don’t pay us and we have a decent amount of time tied up in this thing.
Dude, I totally get it. I mention it because I have seen and I am sure you have too, the keyboard warriors bitching about it. Social media so a lot of pros, but it also has its cons. People feel empowered to say things while behind a keyboard that they wouldn’t say face to face.
(laughs) This isn’t for everybody and if we did it those other ways, we wouldn’t make a dime. Plus, how do you get reimbursed for all of the years where you learned how to play music and write songs? I learned how to play guitar when I was 13 and I’m 62 now. There’s a lot that goes into these things. This is a very good sounding recording. It’s analog two inch tape which doesn’t happen anymore. Plus, every disc is personally autographed by Tommy and me.
That fact right there makes even more of a collector’s item.
That’s right! The first thing that I told Tommy was let’s release it on a CD and he asked if people still bought CDs anymore. I told him you’re damn right they do, not everybody but they do. It’s a limited market but I support it.
I interviewed Tommy a few years and told him so many people were asking when KISS was going to release a new album. He responded, ‘why should we? We got way more exposure with the Scooby Doo DVD that we did than any new album would ever get us.’
(laughs) I understand and if I ever did that again, I wouldn’t use a record label again. I found a business model that works for this kind of thing. I’m shipping these things out, every one of them. I’m doing all the work; I’m the record company and that’s just fine.
It’s funny how it’s come full circle to the old blues musicians who used to sell their recordings out of the trunk of their cars.
Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that.
What’s the reaction been like since this CD was announced?
The real fans are jumping on this and can’t wait to hear it. It’s not on iTunes where you can go sample it before you spend 99 cents on it. I think that people are anxious to hear it and as we ship more out and people get it, then word will start getting around how good it is. I think there were some early buyers who figured out you can go to thayerstjames.com before we even announced it. I guess it wasn’t too hard to figure that one out (laughs). I wasn’t even ready for people to start yet. I was still waiting on Tommy to finish autographing them and send them back to me from Vegas (laughs).
Oh yeah, I read an early review of a guy who said he received a copy. He wrote a sentence or two about each track and talked about how great it was.
Oh really? That’s great to hear. You know what’s cool to me? As I’m thinking about the whole thing, there’s an excitement there like there used to be when you bought a new record before the internet. I bought the first KISS record in 74 and I didn’t even know what it sounded like or who played what. As far as I knew, Gene Simmons was the guitarist. I had no idea and it didn’t matter. There was this excitement of taking it home, opening it up and putting it on. I think we have a little bit of that factored into this new CD.
As far as Black N Blue goes, can we mention what you guys are doing?
We’re still together and we still play but not as much. We’re active and we have shows booked but we just can’t announce them yet. We’re not in a van touring across the US playing little clubs anymore but we do play.
It’s been 11 years since your last album Hell Yeah! was released and that was through Frontiers. You seem to have found a new model of releasing music that works for you. Does that increase the possibilities of new Black N Blue music?
Oddly enough, when I got this stuff from Tommy, one of the first things that I did was I contacted one of the reps that I know at Frontiers and asked them if they’d be interested in an EP and they said ‘nope, not interested.’ I said you know it would be me and Tommy Thayer. They said ‘no, but if you do a new records let us know. Ok? Bye.’ I’m glad they said that because that’s how I figured out how to do this myself. Now that I’ve done it, it’s the only way to go and everybody should do it this way.
Fingers crossed on new music
You know, it is a possibility. The old way doesn’t work anymore. The internet is there at your disposal to promote whatever you need to and that’s the good thing. The bad thing is that there are no record labels and there are no record stores anymore. You do have the internet to promote and so far it’s working like a charm.
So, was there more music in any of those boxes?
Here’s the deal; this is stuff that we own outright. I know there’s a fully recorded song from the first album in 1983 that didn’t get put on the record. All of that stuff now is owned by Universal. It’s all at Universal on big two inch tapes, if it didn’t get burned up in the fire. There are extra songs for sure from In Heat and Nasty Nasty. There may have been something from Without Love. Bruce Fairburn was really good with managing time, so I am not certain if there was or not. This whole experience has taught me that this is the way to release it, so new music or more music in boxes? Who knows?
It’s almost impossible to find physical copies of the old Black N Blue stuff from the 80s anymore without paying an arm and half a leg for it. I was surprised when I saw it on Spotify.
Universal owns the rights to everything that was on Geffen. Universal released The Ultimate Collection in 2002 or something like that. There are some things in the works where Tommy and I are trying to see if we can get the rights back to some of our music after all of these years.
Again, fingers are crossed on that! There are some of us from the 80s who didn’t replace our Black N Blue cassettes with CDs and now we’re paying the price. Owning a physical copy of those albums again would be awesome!
It’s awesome how vinyl has made a comeback and CD sales are starting to increase. There’s nothing quite like having a physical copy in front of you where you can feel it, see it, read it and the sound is so much better. Wait until you hear this CD. You’re going to put it on and it’s going to blow your underwear off.
Jaime, talking to you has been a treat, but I know we need to wrap this up. We end all of our interviews with something we call 3 For The Road. It’s three fun questions to learn a little more about the artist. Who was your first celebrity crush?
Oh my god! Let me think; I have to go back. That’s a long way you know (laughs) I’m going to say Ann Margaret.
If you could have anyone, celebrity, cartoon character, actor, whoever, be your inner voice, who would you choose?
I guess it would be John Lennon because he would be funny.
Last one, if music was over today and you went into professional wrestling, what would your wrestling name be?
The St.-tenator.
That also sounds like a great finishing move
I’m going to put him in the St.-tenator; he’s done!
Interview by I’m Music Magazine Owner/Editor Johnny Price
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