“To scare Randy, I pulled the gun and fired it into the ceiling”: How a drunken fight led to Kelly Garni being booted out of Quiet Riot
From featuring on Ozzy Osbourne‘s first two solo albums as co-songwriter and founding Quiet Riot, the late Randy Rhoads was truly in the eye of the heavy metal storm – and that came with plenty of chaos.
In a recent interview with Guitar World, Quiet Riot co-founder Kelly Garni has reflected on the drunken altercation with Rhoads that led to him being booted from the band in 1978. Essentially, he pulled out a gun during an argument over vocalist Kevin DuBrow. “I was unhappy for quite a while…” Garni explains. “This all finally came to a very drunken conclusion.”
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As Garni puts it, the unhappiness stemmed from a dislike of DuBrox, as well as a feeling that Quiet Riot had hid a brick wall. “We were stalled,” he says. “We weren’t going anywhere, and weren’t doing anything.”
“It just seemed like rinse and repeat,” he continued. “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.”
Garni decided to voice his concerns the day after a fateful fire at LA club, Cabaret. It seemed to spark something reckless within Garni’s mind; as everyone panicked, distracted by the fire, the bassist would go and steal “about 25 bottles of liquor”. The next day, he’d invite Rhoads over for a booze up.
“I called up Randy and said, ‘Hey, the Cabaret caught fire, and I robbed the bar,’” Garni recalls. “’I got all this booze over here. Come over and party.’ And he did.”
The pair would drink there way through the looted liquor, knocking back drinks for “four or five hours”. Inebriated, Garni’s loose lips would cause him to reveal his unhappiness – and it would also reveal his issues with DuBrow.
However, the discussion soon soured. “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.”
Of course, Garni didn’t actually want to shoot Rhoads – so he made sure it was quickly removed from the picture. “The gun was automatic, so it reloaded and cocked itself,” he remembers. “So, I chucked that aside to get it out of the mix, and the fight was on.”
After a tussle, Garni decided it was time to pay DuBrow a visit. “I was going to finish the job; I was going to go, well, I thought I’d kill Kevin,” Garni admits. “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.”
The police pulled Garni over and very quickly clocked he was not fit to drive. “They pulled me over in front of my house,” he says. “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.”
While the drunken evening would result in Garni being booted out of the band, he’s pretty content with how things ended up. The bassist went on to train up as a paramedic.
“I get told, ‘You’re the guy who tried to kill Randy Rhoads,’” he laughs. “I get all kinds of stuff, but 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?”
The post “To scare Randy, I pulled the gun and fired it into the ceiling”: How a drunken fight led to Kelly Garni being booted out of Quiet Riot appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
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