It goes without saying that a lot can change in 17 years. Seventeen years ago, Skid Row came to Taiwan for the first time and played to a rabid crowd of approximately 5,000 at a concert hall in Taipei County, according to die hard local fans. The members of the band certainly didn’t know then that it would be nearly two decades before those who would actually stick it out with Skid Row would return, nor could they have known that, just a few years after they first graced Taiwan’s shores, their original front man and fan focal point, one Sebastian Bach, would be gone, to be followed later by drummer Rob Affuso. And they definitely couldn’t have been aware that their second sojourn to Taiwan would see the show location shift to a much smaller venue in Taipei City, and the crowd shrink to a size of three hundred-plus. After all, back then Skid Row were riding high on the strength of their second album, Slave to the Grind, which went double platinum and made it all the way to the top of the Billboard Top 200 Chart. Why think about the descent when the climb to the top has just begun? But such is the nature of the music business that though the ascent may be long and arduous, the descent will likely be quick and unheralded.
Fast forward to the present decade, when Skid Row’s albums don’t tend to make the charts, and nostalgia festivals and stadium concerts where the band plays to thousands are interspersed with club shows in front of hundreds. Following Slave to the Grind, 1995’s Subhuman Race, their last album with Bach, topped out respectably at number 35, and achieved a gold sales certification, but albums released in 2003 and 2006 with new vocalist Johnny Solinger, entitled Thickskin and Revolutions per Minute respectively, failed to make an impact in terms of chart position. Time changes the musical landscape, and bands that once leapt to the forefront of the collective musical mind get relegated to second-tier status. Regardless of a band’s place in the world at any given time, there’s just no way that something like that can be foreseen.


But if bassist Rachel Bolan, who like guitarist Dave “Snake” Sabo has been around since the founding of Skid Row through all the highs and lows and even a brief hiatus, can serve as a barometer for the band’s overall attitude, one thing that they did foresee back in 1992 was that, whether it was 17 months or seventeen years until they would return to Taiwan, whether they were playing to thousands or hundreds of spectators, and no matter what the musical landscape looked like, Skid Row would have the same passion and dedication to rock n’ roll that they have always managed to hold on to. Their albums might not sell nearly as well today as they did in the heady days of their eponymous debut and Slave to the Grind, but a rocker will always be a rocker whether he sells one album, a thousand or a million, and for Bolan and the rest of the band, rock n’ roll has no expiry date, no desire for meaningless awards, and its ears are forever deafened to the ultimately irrelevant words of the critics.
Give Skid Row a stadium gig or a club date, and they’ll rock it just the same because, in the year of the twentieth anniversary of the release of the band’s first album, Skid Row are still around, they’re just as hungry as ever, and they can still put on a raucous, unabashed, brash rock n’ roll show. Bolan took time to answer Fight’s questions about the band’s embrace of their past, their mindset in the present, and their vision for the future when Skid Row returned to Taipei this past October.
Fight: The last album you did, Revolutions per Minute, received mixed reviews. Will that affect what you do on the next record?
Rachel Bolan: When we do a record we actually don’t know what’s going to happen until we do it. Just a few minutes ago we were working on a riff that just came into my head, so we recorded it and we’ll take that home and mess around with it. So we never really know what direction the record’s going to go in until we get into the studio, and then it just evolves from there. But yeah, we got some flak from some fans for going in so many different directions. But hey man, that’s music. That’s the beauty of it. You just create what you want to create. There’s no boundaries as far as I’m concerned.


F: So you were even writing during sound check?
RB: Yeah, someone will have a riff and everyone else will be like, ‘Cool, throw that on tape.’ So, you know, do the voice note on the phone, and we all carry Dictaphones. So this way when we all do get together, we start listening to the riffs and just go through them and see what lights us up.
F: Is everyone writing songs these days?
RB: Snake and I have always been the primary songwriters but that’s not to say that one else writes songs. Scotti and I have written a couple together and Snake and Scotti. So if someone comes up with a song that everybody likes then we’ll do it.
F: How are the songs for the next album shaping up?
RB: They seem to have a certain heaviness going on. I don’t know why. Most bands, the older they get the poppier they get. We keep going in a heavier direction, which is cool. As of right now there’s some pretty heavy riffs going on.
F: Do you think it will be another record like RPM where you’ll explore a lot of different directions?
RB: I don’t think we’ll go as far left as we did with Revolutions, because we did it already. We were just like, ‘Let’s try a country song,’ and I just wrote it for fun and it just came out one day when I was playing guitar. Then I played it for the guys and they were like, ‘Let’s do it, what the hell, man. Let’s just try it and see what happens.’ So we don’t know what direction we’re going to go. We don’t plan stuff out too far in advance.
F: In a previous interview Scotti Hill said that a lot of RPM was written “on a severe hangover.”
RB: Well, he was probably joking a little bit but there was one night, well one day I should say, that him and Johnny recorded and they were both pretty hung over from a very, very late night before. But first and foremost we want to get in and make good music. We’re not going to get in there and just fall down on top of each other. 

F: What do you feel that you have left to prove?
RB: We try to prove ourselves every day as just being a good hard rock band. We just want to keep on playing. We never rest on what we’ve done in the past or what the future holds so we really don’t know how big of a legacy we’re going to leave behind until the very last day and the very last note that Skid Row has played.  
F: When you guys returned from hiatus ten years ago, were there any concerns about damaging your past legacy?
RB: Not at all. We knew what we had and we knew what we built. When we disbanded we thought it was done at that point, I guess that as ’97. It was pretty much fan demand and the want to get out and play in front of people again and write more songs. Snake and I just talked and we were like, ‘We did too much just to let that disappear.’ But we knew when we were getting back together that we were going to do it differently with a new singer and whatnot. We lucked out and we found Johnny pretty quick into the auditions and here we are.
F: Has it been a conscious decision to stay away from the ballad-like material of the early days?
RB: Just for Revolutions. We said, ‘Let’s not do any ballads.’ I think our whole mindset was like if we do one then we’re really not going to be going so far outside the box as we want to go, because we just wanted to go in a million different directions. That was the only pre-conceived thing we had; no ballads.
F: Do you guys still like playing the old hits live?
RB: Absolutely. We could play them a million times and it’s still just as exciting. We do more old stuff than new stuff, obviously, because there is more of it. But we do represent every record, pretty much. We don’t hide from our past and we’re not going to be worried about our future.
F: How have you maintained your hunger after all these years in the music business?
RB: I think it’s honestly just for the undying love of the making music, playing music, and people that come to see us; all our fans and friends that want to hear Skid Row. Every night we go out, whether it’s a festival that we’re playing 20,000 or a show like this tonight will be a few hundred, we’re on the other side of the world to play a show. That’s the way I look at it. We’re here to do what we love to do. We’re always hungry to get out there and play.


F: That’s one thing about Skid Row; you can go play a stadium gig or you can play a club show. Which do you prefer?
RB: It’s both; the festivals and stadiums have that rock god element to it which is awesome, and that seems to be the big payoff, the peak. When you’re a little kid dreaming about doing what you do that’s what you picture. But playing smaller places also has that in-your-face vibe where you can actually see emotion in people’s eyes. Like the other night, in Beijing, there were a few, we were told, Chinese celebrities. And I saw these people weeping during “I Remember You,” and I asked the promoter, ‘Who is that?’ and he’s like, ‘He’s a really famous actor over here. He grew up listening to you guys.’ That’s the type of stuff about doing smaller venues that I love, but, like I said, we will play wherever, whenever because that’s what we do.


F: Does being overlooked bother you?
RB: It used to when I was younger. Now I think it’s kind of cool. Brian Johnson from AC/DC is a really good friend of ours, and I happened to be in L.A. and I went to see them and we had lunch the next day and he goes, ‘We got nominated for a Grammy.’ And I was like, ‘Really?’ And he goes ‘Yeah, we told them to fuсk themselves. Did Elvis ever get nominated for a Grammy? No. So AC/DC doesn’t want a Grammy.’ That’s awesome man. That’s just too fuсkin’ cool.
F: How many albums do you think you have left in you?
RB: Only time will tell. I know we’ve got at least one because we’re starting on songwriting. But I think we’ll just keep making it until we can’t play anymore. You get a lot of non-believers and people who want to be douche bags who are like, ‘You guys ought to hang it up. You’ve been around too long. You’ve made member changes. You’re albums aren’t selling like they used to.’ And that’s like telling an artist that paints to stop because he’s been doing it for 20 years. You want to tell me to change the color of my house or rearrange the furniture? This is what we do. You don’t get into music; music gets into you from an early age. It wasn’t one day where you said, ‘I don’t know if I want to be a chef or a musician.’ Music is in you and it’s part of your soul. For people to sit there and say, ‘You guys should hang it up,’ fuсk ‘em because we’re just going to keep playing until we can’t play; until arthritis sets in.
F: What would you like to be remembered for as a band?
RB: A fuсkin’ kick ass American rock n’ roll band, plain and simple.
By Joe Henley