30 Years Ago: RAZOR release Shotgun Justice

Daily Noise - / 2020

30 Years Ago: RAZOR release Shotgun Justice

Canadian speed legends RAZOR released their sixth album, Shotgun Justice, on this day in 1990.

Shotgun Justice is the first RAZOR album with Bob Reid on vocals.

...he had SFH, his other band, he'd done demos -- he sent me his demos, and in fact, he opened for Razor for a bunch of shows. In fact, the show that I'd told you I'd told Stace he was gonna be gone after the show? Bob Reid's band opened for us at that show. Thing was, I knew from Bob's vocal style that this guy resembled more where I wanted to take the band. I figured if I had this guy singing, I could heavy the band up a bit, and make it even more intense, possibly as intense as people are ever going to hear a band play. You'll notice, with Shotgun Justice, the music was written for Bob. It wasn't a case of me writing songs and he was just the singer. This was an album that I wrote for this man to sing, and everything we've done with Bob was written for Bob.

I did change my musical approach to suit Bob, but I changed it the way I wanted it to be anyway. At the time, that's what I wanted to do, and when you hear the new album, you're going to be really surprised at what a great singer Bob is because Bob never really got a chance to demonstrate that on Shotgun Justice. I mean, he just came in as intense as he could be and as fast as he could, but having worked with Bob, who's had a longer association with me musically than Stace or any of those other guys, now. Bob and I have been working together on and off for ten years, and even though Razor's done nothing for four or five, Bob and I have gotten together over those four or five years and worked together on stuff. Bob and I know each other really well and I can assure everybody that when they hear the new recording, they'll be very impressed and very surprised at what Bob's capable of.

Dave Carlo / Razor interview, Chronicles of Chaos, 1997

It is also the last RAZOR album with bassist Adam Carlo and drummer Rob Mills.

Rob was a great drummer, but in 1990, just before we did Shotgun Justice, Rob had an accident where he got one of his knees, I think it was his right knee, sandwiched between two cars, a terrible accident, and he had a leg brace on for eight weeks, and he couldn't walk for about four weeks after he got the brace off. So he had three or four months where he couldn't do anything.

...when we played live, Rob did all those tunes. When we played live on that tour, we didn't do "Road Gunner". In Rob's defense, Rob did play "In Protest", so it wasn't like he couldn't do that one on the tour. He did it, but he struggled with it and he hated doing it, he hated me putting it in the set. If you take a song like "The Pugilist" off Shotgun Justice, we had to do that one quite a few times in the studio to get Rob to play it right because that was a tough one for his feet as well, and it was a challenge for him because of the accident.

Dave Carlo / Razor interview, Chronicles of Chaos, 1997