biLLy bOy on poiSon
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For some time a close friend had been telling me about this band he’d been working with called “Billy Boy on Poison” (a variation on a Malcolm McDowell line cleverly chosen from “A Clockwork Orange”). He explained to me that most of the band was between 15 and 16 years old and they had to be seen to be believed. I caught one of their Whiskey shows in January and got what he meant right away. They weren’t just kids but a genuine “we’re here to take over the room and have a good time” rock n’ roll band with a solid repertoire strapped to their hip. Singer Davis LeDuke had the (mostly under 18) crowd gleefully swallowing mouthfuls from the palm of his hand that night.
On this one, the adolescent juices of the expanded audience have been warmed up and are ready to run wild. The buzz among the grown-ups is that the A and R guys have caught on and are here to maybe do talk some business. Here’s the good news: “Billy Boy on Poison” doesn’t seem to give a fuck. Their apparent mission tonight (and on any other) is to make some mischief and put on a rock show for their peers that rivals the last one.
Davis LeDuke is a teenage runaway marionette in the spiritual mold of Bowie or Iggy. Like the best of them, he believes he’s real and so do we. His manic joy is truly infectious to all. He’s flanked once again by Greg and Ryan, who reliably hammer out relentless guitar riffs as if they could go all night. Julian’s the new bass player who fits this front line like a well oiled glove and Jessi, the drummer and only girl in the band (though, like her cousin LeDuke, she appears to flirt with the idea of gender bending) commandingly drives each song from the back riser.
Billy Boy on Poison produces some edgy pop nuggets dripping with British sounding hooks and delivers each one with the same jubilant New York Dolls attitude that has eluded too many bands until recently. (Best exemplified here in the platform heeled strut of “Saturday’s Child.”) But these guys are too young to show any signs of excess baggage (even though on this night they cheekily introduce a new song they call “Falling in Love with A Higher Power and Other Twelve Step Programs”). They’re not angry but they handily get inside the angst and theatrics of “Angry Young Man” (as in “every nice young girl needs one . . .”) This band just seriously plays rock n’ roll because it’s fun. (And they’d probably have a ball accompanying the party that destroys your house when your parents have left town for the weekend.)
- By Cameron Dye (SugarBuzz Magazine)
"Angry Young Man": Billy Boy on Poison
Instead of taking a sweet young thing to the high school prom, Davis LeDuke, lead singer of Billy Boy on Poison, hijacks her, dragging her along to a gig. Mom and Dad haven't a clue. Great fun for all. They may still be teenagers, but the members of Billy Boy on Poison have absorbed enough of the mascara and bourbon quality of glam and slam-bam-boom of Brit pop to compete against bands many years their senior. The refrain, "Every nice young girl needs an angry young man," is as catchy as it gets.
- Los Angeles Times
Discography
Sweet Mess - EP
drama junkie queen - LP
Photos
Bio
BILLY BOY ON POISON
Davis Leduke rolls up his left sleeve. Like so many teenage American rock gods in waiting, he has a tattoo. But this is no fake sleeve of random colour-splurge than marks out the common or garden emo, this is ornate script curling around his
forearm from elbow to wrist, reading thus: 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked'.
“This is a Ginsberg quote, the first lines of 'Howl',” he explains. “He's definitely my favourite poet but I read Burroughs, I read Robert Frost, I read a lot of philosophy, I just read the Communist Manifesto just because I felt like it. I got to the end of the book and thought 'Wow, if only people could be perfect'.”
Billy Boy On Poison's erudite and literate singer isn't your average LA rock freak, but then BBoP aren't your average LA rock band. Their glam sparkle is gleaned from Bowie, not Motley Crüe. Their garage punk crunch is Hendrix, New York Dolls, The Strokes and The Stooges, not 70s Aerosmith and Dogstar. Their lyrical inspiration is beat poetry, not breast enhancement. And unlike the Sunset Snort Set, Davis did his sex and drug years already; as a moody and reflective seventeen-year-old he's doing his teens entirely the wrong way round.
“I matured very quickly,” he says, a fallen product of the Lutheran US school system. “I had an old soul from an early age so I grew up quick. I started to get in trouble at twelve years old, smoking pot, doing drugs, having sex.”
You were, to quote your debut album title, a 'Drama Junkie Queen'?
Davis laughs. “Maybe not the drama, but a junkie queen, yeah. At that young an age I didn't get that bad but I'd fuck around in school, I'd piss my parents off, not things where I'd get arrested, I just felt rebellious towards everything from a
young age, I cut God out of my life and do to this day. I chose the completely opposite side of life.”
So, having been brought up on John Griffin, Glen Miller, Miles Davis (after whom he was named) and classic rock (his abiding childhood memory is of his father sitting him and his brother down and air-guitaring along to Led Zeppelin's 'Immigrant Song') at the age of thirteen, already drug-battered and sex-ravaged, Davis sold his old soul to rock'n'roll. With
three songs written with mentors Michael Gurley, Chris Sorenson and Stu Branley, Davis started Billy Boy On Poison at the start of 2006 on a mission to meld his childhood influences with his favourite bands - The Velvet Underground and
The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Psychedelic glam rock, it transpired, would never sound so modern.
Shunning the original idea of a solo project because “I didn't want the focus all to be on me”, he roped in guitarist Ryan Wallengren (a true child of Aerosmith) through a musician friend and saved his cousin Jessi Calcaterra from the milelong
mountain town of Middle Park, Colorado (they'd play baseball against South Park) by recruiting her on drums.
As Davis gradually developed the skills to write songs without his svengali trio, in Hard Drive Studios in North Hollywood the threesome and a revolving cast of guitarists and bassists pieced together a debut album, 'Drama Junkie Queen',
through 2006. They wrote songs about girls('Saturday's Child'), sex ('On My Way') and being attracted to people
who'd had the fucked up childhoods they never had themselves (the staggering Weezer-esque epic 'Four Leaf
Clover'). Davis was a lusty, druggy, precociously talented 14-year-old melodic virtuoso singing unreconstructed rock
hog lyrics like “I'll make it to your bedroom honey/I can make you wet” to songs that took in The Hives, The White Stripes, 'Last Nite', The (International) Noise Conspiracy and 'Pinkerton'. He was almost illegally hot.
“I'll be turning eighteen in May,” Davis says of the album, “so the best way I can put it is it's us as youth, our younger years. There's a lot of sexual tension.” “What was going on in America when we were writing the songs, we were pissed,” Jessi adds. “We're the future, the next generation and no-one's listening to us, nobody's taking us seriously. We want people to listen to us so what better way than to play rowdy cussing rock'n'roll music?” And playing the record live over the following year, BBoP dazzled. Decked out in full make-up, bleach blonde locks and spandex and covering 'Suffragette City', Descanso's 'Heart Is A Whore' and 'Speaking In Tongues' by Eagles Of Death
Metal,
Things have changed in all but Clockwork Orange-inspired name. Guitarist
Greg West was lured away from a course at the Berklee School Of Music to join the band, hooked by the Myspace page that described BBoP as sounding like 'hot, wild, abusive, dirty, hair pullin, ass spankin, pillow bitin, moanin, groanin,
howling sex!'. Bassists came and went like Spinal Tap drummers, delaying the release of the album for eighteen months and casting the band into a “really rough two years” (they finally decided to remain a four-piece a
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