The Sold! and Bones

By DONNA BALANCIA – The Sold And Bones is a good-time punk band, with Billy Bones having a career that has been going strong since the late 1970s.

If you’re a punk fan you won’t want to miss this dynamic group that plays tonight at the Maui Sugar Mill with Prima Donna.

“It’s awesome to get together with Prima Donna and those guys, I call them the Velvet Boys, cause they really get it,” said Billy Bones.

The bands have been collaborating for a while, Billy Bones said. “They’re stylish, they got the music; and there’s a gang of them, they know who they are.”

Veteran punker Billy Bones knows what he’s talking about. He was the lead singer the 1977 L.A. punk band The Skulls, as well as the band Forbidden Colors between 1979 and 1980, he formed The BillyBones in 2006, and Sold and Bones came together six shows ago.

Billy Bones’ various bands and Prima Donna have been intertwined as friends going back some years. Sold And Bones is Easy Lou Jones on vocals and guitar; Charles La Ferrera on bass and backing vocals and Justin McGrath on drums and backing vocals.

The Sold And Bones is putting out a cool single, “All Night Rocker” written by Kevin Preston from Prima Donna, Billy Bones and Drew Milford, the original bass player from Billy Bones’ band.

It came about because of the documentary film based on Billy Bones’ life. “All Night Rocker” was the closing track for the film Who is Billy Bones, a documentary by Kathy Kolla released last year. It’s about how Billy Bones came out to L.A., put his band The Skulls together and ripped up the L.A. punk scene.

“It’s going to be released at some point maybe within the next year,” Billy Bones said. “Who Is Billy Bones is about family and the struggles, and love. I get to take people down to The Masque, where we played 30 years ago, it’s really an interesting film. It’s humbling to me, how people have reacted to it; my mom’s in it, my dear friends are in it.”

So Billy Bones was looking for the B side to the single “All Night Rocker.” Easy, who came to work as the bass player in Billy Bones band, came up with “You Just Don’t Get It,” for the B side and voila! The single was planned.

“Easy did it all,” said Billy Bones. “He came up with so many songs and before you knew it we had 10 songs. We already recorded a live CD, now we’re going into the studio and do proper album.”

Stay tuned. - California Rocker

Legendary punk rock singer Billy Bones' 40-year rampage through American music has been consistently vibrant and refreshingly creative. As vocalist for first-wave 1977 trailblazers the Skulls, Bones kicked a gaping hole through Southern California's mellow, leafy rock 'n' roll convention and when he appears Saturday at Jimmy's Place in Burbank, Bones will continue his remarkable evolution via a supercharged collaboration with youthful punk-blues band the Sold.

A performer renowned for his cheerfully aggressive, kinetic bandstand presentation, Bones' history brims with wildly colorful tales dating back to his earliest musical iterations in Aberdeen, Maryland. "My high school band was called Purple Reaction. I drove a yellow hearse, with no muffler, because I got it cheap and it was easy to get equipment in and out of it," Bones said. "When we played at school, I was singing Steppenwolf's 'The Pusher' and as soon as I got to 'God damn the Pusher man,' the lights came up and I was suspended."

"And I had a good, really cool black friend, Mike Briggs who was in a popular band called Soul Inspiration — they wore all these capes with fur collars, great Watts-Stax-type stuff and I went on the road as their emcee. They called me 'Little Stevie, the White Wonder.' It was a big musical revue: I introduce each player individually, bring 'em up one by one. We went all over the South, opened for everybody, Clarence Carter, the Ohio Players, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. It was great."

Born in England to a U.S. military serviceman and English mother, he spent his childhood in Northamptonshire. "But, in Maryland, I just didn't fit in. I still had an accent and my uncle was a fashion designer in New York and he'd send me all these great clothes, leather pants, shirts with giant stars printed on them, and I got beat up all the time. I didn't like it there."

After hitchhiking to Los Angeles, Bones became a fixture at Rodney's English Disco, infamous hub of the city's slamming glam rock culture, and the Rainbow Bar & Grill, where he met his future bandmates, brothers Marc and Bruce Moreland. "Marc was a really great guitar player," Bones said. "They had a band called Sky People at the time, they'd all dress in bright red spandex."

Bones' musical diet — Slade, Roxy Music, T Rex — provided an easy transition to the just-erupting punk scene. In 1977, Bones' pal Sten Gun Mick Wallace drafted him as singer for the recently formed Skulls, and the group became a regular attraction at infamous subterranean Hollywood club and rehearsal studio the Masque.

"We went in there one day, and I heard this amazing guitar from one of the rooms — it was Marc," Bones said. "He was auditioning for the Mau Maus but they went on a beer run and never came back. So we got him, and then we had Bruce on bass."

"The shows were crazy. We could hardly ever get through two or three songs. The girls would tear Marc's clothes off. There are tons of photos of him playing in his underwear because they'd just rip his pants apart. Alice Bag loved doing that. And he'd get pulled offstage — that happened one night at the Whisky and his Flying V [guitar] just snapped in two. It was like spontaneous combustion, everything would just explode."

The Skulls themselves exploded within a year, leaving behind a scant legacy. "We only made one record, with Chris Ashford's What? Records, 'Victims' and 'On Target.' I always wrote topical stuff and 'Victims' was about the Hillside Stranglers — I wrote it after they abducted and killed [Mau Mau's singer] Rick Wilder's girlfriend," Bones said. "The entire city was terrified. I used to always start the shows by saying 'Oh, the Hillside Stranglers are here tonight but the guy at the door wouldn't let them in.' And one night the FBI came around to investigate — they thought I was serious, that I actually knew them!"

When the Moreland brothers moved on to form Wall of Voodoo, Bones turned his attention to his post-punk venture Martini Ranch, but after landing a development deal with Geffen Records, the project turned sour and he walked away, taking an extended hiatus and concentrating on family life. The Skulls would occasionally burst in and out of remission and recently the singer started his own group, the Billybones, playing all new songs written in collaboration with a talented gaggle of 20-somethings, and releasing the splendid "Complexity of Stupidity" album, a set of high-velocity punk and roll that showcases Bones' unflagging creative zeal.

"These kids just find me, and they are all so good. Like Kevin Preston, who went to high school with my daughter," said Bones, whose day job the last 20 years has been in sales at Ace Industrial Supply in Burbank. "He just showed up at the door one day asking if I wanted to start the Skulls back up, and now he is doing great with Prima Donna. Alex Mack just came out of nowhere and wrote that brilliant Billybones album with me, and my bass player Easy Lou Jones is a great player."

"I had no idea, but he is also a phenomenal guitarist. I'd written a new song 'All Night Rocker,' and Lou said 'Hey, I have the perfect B-side for that.' We went into the studio, it all started clicking, one song led to another. It just happened. In a week we had 10 songs. So I jumped on it, and now we are doing the Sold! and Bones."

This feverish modus operandi is Bones' characteristic approach and the Sold! and Bones collaboration should be a particularly satisfying, blues-informed blitzkrieg. His unusual knack for mentoring younger musicians may be a role thrust upon him by fate, but Bones wouldn't have it any other way.

"I enjoy teaching them, and there are important things to know — like how not to get ripped off, how to treat a soundman. I am just fascinated by everything to do with music, and I want to keep on doing it. I have ideas for lots of other projects and I really like where I am at and what I have to navigate through. The Skulls are playing soon, I have the Billybones and now this project with the Sold. I mean, I'm 62 now and just look at all the stuff that's going on. I love it." - Los Angeles Times

Legendary LA punk vocalist Billy Bones (of The Skulls) has teamed up with The Sold! to form The Sold! and Bones, a new punk-blues band. Consisting of Easy Lou Jones on guitar, Charles La Ferrera on bass, and Justin McGrath on drums, The Sold! provide an excellent companion to Bones. Bones takes his 40 years of experience and pours them into "Bored in L.A." along with the rest of the band. They are releasing their debut album, Full Circle Suicide, in early 2017. I'm excited to hear more from this band as they keep the music coming. - Rock-Metal-Punk Magazine