Growing up with an absolute electric guitar icon like Randy Rhoads inevitably results in an anecdote or two, especially if you also happened to be in a band with him – and Kelly Garni, the bassist who formed Quiet Riot with Rhoads, has his fair share of spicy stories.
The pair's longstanding collaboration, coupled with the drama associated with band life, as well as the infamous tension between Garni and vocalist Kevin DuBrow, ultimately spelled the end of the bassist's music career – at least for a couple of decades or so.
“I was unhappy for quite a while,” Garni ponders in a new interview with Guitar World as he looks back on that period of his life. “We [referring to the band] were stalled... we weren’t going anywhere, and weren’t doing anything. It just seemed like rinse and repeat. There was no progress. We weren’t making any money, and management gave us an allowance every week, which, in my case, was forty bucks a week to live on.
“This all finally came to a very drunken conclusion, where the night before it happened, I’d gone to a club called the Cabaret, and while I was there, it caught on fire.”
Long story short, as flames engulfed the L.A. club, Garni decided to make the most of the chaos and rob “about 25 bottles of liquor”.
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“The next day, I called up Randy and said, ‘Hey, the Cabaret caught fire, and I robbed the bar. I got all this booze over here. Come over and party.’ And he did.”
However, what started as a friendly meet-up soon turned into “a good four or five hours of drinking”, during which all of Garni's problems with the band came to a head.
“We started discussing the Kevin problem. It got out of hand,” he admits. “I told Randy to leave. He refused. And I lived in the Barrio in Van Nuys, a pretty dangerous place, and kept a gun hidden in the couch cushion.
“So, to scare Randy, I pulled the gun and fired it into the ceiling, thinking that would make him leave. But Randy was fearless. He didn’t leave. He charged right at me. The gun was automatic, so it reloaded and cocked itself. So, I chucked that aside to get it out of the mix, and the fight was on.”
Garni's drunken reverie had a target: DuBrow.
“I was going to finish this job. I was going to go, well, I thought I’d kill Kevin. I don’t think I actually would have; that’s just not in me. But I certainly would have scared him, and I probably would’ve gotten the cops called on me there.
“They pulled me over in front of my house, I had a gun in a shoulder holster under my jacket, and off to jail I went. Once Kevin and management heard about the whole episode, they said, ‘Okay, that’s it. He’s got to go. He’s too big of a problem.’ That was it.”
Leaving Quiet Riot would open up a very different chapter in Garni's life. While Rhoads ended up joining Ozzy's crew, the bassist did a “total 180”, cutting off his hair, enrolling in paramedic school, and working in the back of an ambulance for the next decade or so.
“I get my story convoluted. I get told, ‘You’re the guy who tried to kill Randy Rhoads.’ I get all kinds of stuff. I laugh it off and say, ‘You weren’t there. You don’t know.’ So, Randy needed to be with better people. It was never going to be pretty, but after nine years of playing together, how could it ever be a friendly thing?” he concludes.
Guitar World's full interview with Quiet Riot's Kelly Garni will be published in the coming weeks.
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